Out of the Country

Photo Credit Julie Moore

I'm taking an online writing class this summer with teachers Robin Rice and Emily McDowell at https://www.bewhoyouare.com/ The writing prompts are pictures and we are free to write whatever we'd like to as inspired by the photo. Over the next few weeks, I'll post some of my homework. 

Here's what I wrote to go with the photo above:

   My boss and the people in HR would tell everyone I had a family emergency. “She had to drop everything and will be out of the country for a week or so. Very sudden,” they would say while I sat on a plane already far above the Pacific. Eleven and a half hours later, I would take a cab from Narita to Shinagawa Station and board the Shinkansen. The bullet train would make the 227 mile ride in just two hours and twenty minutes, less expensive than a flight straight through.

   I would roll my suitcase behind me past the trees hung with banners and paper lanterns outside the temples. I would buy a pickle on a stick at Nishiki Market under the red, yellow, and green glass ceiling. I would pass the stalls with the taro and giant daikon roots, past the meat seller with the roasted sparrows that have made me sad since I was a little girl.

   I would cross the bridge over the Kamo River to Higashiyama-ku and hear the clattering of the rickshaws carrying tourists down cobblestone streets. Geishas and maiko, the apprentice geishas, would walk by talking into their cellphones.

   I would walk faster, down the narrow street in Gion, just past the Kentucky Fried Chicken with the life-size Colonel Sanders wearing a real kimono. I would turn the corner near her noodle shop. Opening the door, and parting the goren curtain with my hand, I would see her. She would look up from her place behind the low counter.

   “But what are you doing here, my granddaughter?”

   “I missed you. I just missed you,” I would say.