I could see Kana's head bobbing up and down as she paced outside my classroom. She's one of my students. She's always early. Occasionally she peeked above the horizon where the frosted glass becomes clear.

"Open the do-or, 1-2-3." Class ended, and Kana appeared in the doorway. I cocked my head to the side, questioningly.

She smiled. "Teacher. Blue marker, please."

I pointed to my basket in the corner, and she rushed to it and disappeared to the other classroom down the hall.

There are three girls in this class: Kana, Kanako, and Koko. They are all aspiring artists, specializing in the erasable marker medium. And since I like to consider myself a laid back teacher, I let them explore their art to its fullest.

The first three minutes of class are spent solely writing names on the board. The girls take full advantage. They each have their preferred color: Kana, blue; Kanako, orange; and Koko, green.

Koko almost always draws a palm tree with her name written on its leaves. Kanako prefers to draw a giant sunflower, the seeds spelling her name. And Kana's tends to change according to season: a Santa Clause in December; and most recently, a rat in lieu of 2008, the year of the rat.

And so it was no surprise when I walked into the classroom, I found Kana finalizing her furry friend. I explained to Kana that I was born in 1984--also the year of the rat--so 2008 should be a lucky year for me.

Kanako and Koko arrived shortly and drew their respective sunflower and palm tree. They sketched precisely six petals for the flower and six lines on the trunk of the tree for the six activities we would do in class.

I like to break up the monotony of class with games, partly for my own amusement in watching them play dirty and partly for their own benefit to learn while having fun. As an incentive, I give one point to the winner of each activity, who then has the privilege to add the point to her name.

The girls like to incorporate their points to their pictures, thus the strategically drawn petals and lines. Kana had spent so much time designing her picture that she had not premeditated a point system to her rat. So when she won the first game, she paused momentarily to consider precisely where the point should go.

She had written her name on its belly, which left the only blank space on the animal wedged between its head and her name. She promptly drew a 1 with the only marker left at the board, my red one.

Giggles spouted from Kanako and Koko. Now Kana's blue rat had red pouring from its mouth like blood. Kana looked at me confused, and I, too, couldn't help but laugh.

"Kana," I said. "It's a zombie rat."

A continued blank stare.

I smiled devilishly, raised my arms, and staggered toward her, licking my lips. I grabbed her arm and--"Ar rar raar ra arar!"--faked gnawing it.

She squealed and we all erupted with laughter. As the games progressed, Kana continued to win. With each additional point dripping blood from her rat's mouth, the class chanted, "Zombie rat! Zombie rat! Zombie rat!"

From then on, anything red was instantly zombified. Zombie boots. Zombie eraser. Zombie dice.

And then suddenly, Kanako jutted her finger at me. "Look!" They looked.

An exaggerated "Ehhhhhhhhhhhh!" that only the Japanese can pull off emitted from their tiny mouths.

"Zombie sensei!" yelled Kanako.

I had worn my red ribbon in my hair that day.

Nuchida Takara

Limbo

The inevitability of life generates on the pulsing mystery in which it is shrouded. I could elaborate on this issue. Tell you there is no God. No salvation. But then what is the point of that? Existence is a grain of sand churning in the belly of an oyster. And, like humans, it demands to be recognized as more than merely a grain of sand. We all view ourselves as pearls in the making.

Only sometimes, life intervenes with our plans. We are pried open and sucked into the sagging jowls of death, only to be spat out as nothing more than a slightly larger, and somewhat misshaped, grain of sand. And there we rest at the foot of the endless sea of death, nothing more than a spec of sand among infinite others. We glide this way and that in sync to the rhythmic ebb and flow of life continuing without us.

There is no remorse, though I’m not sure if there would be had I been able to hold on to lifely matters like emotion. Unfortunately, it drained out with every other conceivable liquid from the crevices of my body when I died. Perhaps Death itself soaked it up with bread and savored its volatile relish. I wouldn’t put it past the beast. It’s been known to do much worse, or so I’ve heard.

It’s interesting the things you hear when you die. I don’t know whether it was my body going into shock or massive loss of blood; but I heard many things. The secrets of life whispered to friends, priests, the night, were screaming into my ears. It was like the sudden gales of of a hurricane whipping through the canyons of my ear canal. A most horrible sound, it was nothing more than the pains of life in its unspoken purity.

The shrieks scratched at my eardrums until I’m pretty sure they burst. I lost all sense of equilibrium and fell into a vortex of voices. They spoke of the beast in many tones. Its fur matted with the sticky sweat beading on the brows the nearly still-living. A belly so swollen that not even the sun rises above its horizon. It walks in a permanent shadow bleeding from its heels.

Though it is most vicious, always victorious, Death should not be feared. It creeps slowly, silently, and it has no face. It’s the chilling darkness that curls around you tight, tight, tighter until you are helplessly paralyzed. It swallows you whole, wrapping its thick lips around you and devouring you sometimes more slowly than others.

Here is my limbo, my fear. I wait attoseconds, eons, in the vacuum of emptiness for my fate to unravel itself. Death could care less if you are Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Atheist. Not time, not gravity, not pi, and certainly not faith can survive Death. There is only myself and what I discern to be the heavy breathing of the beast now digesting what’s left of me.

I fade in and out of what I can only perceive to be reality.

A stray cat shrieking in the night, a coastline devoured by the persistence of the tide, the sands of time fed by our own rotting corpses as we are each claimed by the insatiate appetite of decay.

For reasons such as these, there rests Aguni Jima. Perched on the edge of the Pacific, the sprouting land bears the scars of its time. Neither the savagery of the sea nor the gnawing jaws of death of conquered the crags cutting defiantly into the winds above.

They whip sharply in and out of the rugged coastline, screaming tales of those who refuse to be forgotten. They are plagued with the knowledge of things unspoken--the secrets whispered by the reeds, sung by the crickets, and seen in the eyes of the beast called death. They sleep in warm blood, prisoners to the hearts of the living, until that singularly final croaking breath taken in vain hopes to seal one’s fate.

These secrets are the very fibers of the first apple eaten upon birth. They are parasites meant to carve holes into our hearts, and they plunge from our throats and eyes as they burst open in horrific recognition the moment we die--the moment when time stands still and we can no longer deny our destiny, sealed in eternity before our failing vision. It is then we stare into the face of the demons who haunted our dreams.

Its eyes watch us, bemused; its nostrils curled as it hungrily awaits our souls. Drool bleeds from its oozing mouth, baptizing us into our damnation.

We are, at this point, helpless. We watch with inanimate eyes as our yellowed limbs are engulfed into flames. Those we once loved before emotion drained away with every other fluid from the crevices of our bodies wail in despair of our passed lives, in knowledge of what was to come. The last beams of light we’d every feast upon fingered their way through the smoke of incense and the dust of bones we lie in, crippled.

Here, then, in these last fleeting moments of solitude, the hunger sets in.

Meditations

Are you feeling it?
I’m faking it.
A vision opaque
Buried in split ends.
Close your eyes
Do you see this red wall?
Can you look past your nose?
I think I just got a whiff
Of Abraham Lincoln
Forgotten souls of
Lost
Bodies.
A life progressing into
Static reality.
Don’t jump the gun
Choose wisely
Or Wait.
It’s your choice.
I’m overgrown
Shackled to these weeds
Whose roots penetrate to depths
Unknown even to me.
Open up and swallow.
Take a swig of this sweat
A tad pungent
A little rusted
And mostly perforated.
You bit off more than you could chew.
Please read the instruction manual before using
Warning: choking hazard.
I would have said something, but
I’m blue.
Inhale through the nose and
Om.
Unconscious of my consciousness.
So I sink.
And expand.
And slowly
Dissipate.
The thunder rolls away
Tucked under the black horizon.
The flashes of light
Suddenly subtle
Muddy
Minute
As I drown in a pool of my subconscious

Philosophics

I am my own God
Therefore I cannot offer answers

In a Meadow at Dusk

The wispy clouds seem to exhale slowly as they thin out in the dying of the light. The sun melts into the darkening sky, and the blended oranges, pinks, purples, and blues fade into the fainting of the light. For a moment, there is silence. As if paying tribute to their sky god, the birds cease their chatter, the frogs pause their gossip, even the wind waits for the encore to finish. The rays strain to maintain the sun’s stronghold in the sky, and are eventually defeated by the pursuing night. On the opposite horizon, the pastel moon dimly glows, maintaining its post. An army of stars dot across the sky as the darkness engulfs the last wave of light. As if on cue, the orchestra commences. The frogs begin with a pulsating bass. The grasshoppers tune in with the sigh of their strings. The night bird divas harmonize into a soprano choir. The undulating music lures the lightning bugs into the field where they initiate their waltz. The cool breeze kisses my cheeks with a gentle hum. My arms bubble up into tiny goosebumps, and I shiver. The blades of grass, moist from the thunderstorm that afternoon, lick my bare feet as I walk across the field. A sultry fog sneaks up behind me while I linger, not wanting to return home just yet. I watch the smoky air glide toward the house. It glistens as it pours onto the glowing windows. My meditation is split by my mother’s dry voice beckoning me to dinner. Like a deer paralyzed in the beam of headlights, I stare dreadfully wide-eyed at the looming shadow of light created by the opened door on the carpet of fog. Then instinctively, simply, I sit down, swallowed by the mist, and I escape into the night.

[Untitled]

A cement landscape lurches
Fading into the fog
Excuse me, smog
A complex phenomenon
This blue figment of my imagination conceals
Secrets lingering in the obscurity
Of a vast universe
My probing questions
Echo into my dreams
Always confined
Fueled by greed
A false sense of necessity
Plastered smirks
Glassy eyes
Mirror tricks
Infinite glittering pieces
Distract any certainty
Dreams dissolved to dust
Discarded thoughts
False words with false intentions
A Hallmarked generation
Denied to feel
A natural copyright
Inject the chord
Exhale slowly
Static reality
Censored intake
Money doesn’t grow on trees
It sprouts in our veins
A contaminated vision
Of a callous God
Hasty lemmings
Wedged beneath a glass ceiling
A vicious race with time to kill
Hunting for substance
Yet gathering material
Life is a savage sport
Survival of the richest
And the scent of your blood is steeping