Revenge by Yōko Ogawa Read Free Book Online

apparently had psychological problems brought on by writer’s block. She thought her work was being plagiarized, or that someone was coming in and taking things when she was away from home. She made quite a fuss about it, and she apparently started carrying her manuscripts around tied up in a scarf.”
    Mama was not a particularly successful writer. About five or six years after the divorce, I happened to see a short piece in the newspaper saying that she had won a new writer’s prize. I bought the book and read it. It was a strange story about an old lady who owns an apartment building and grows carrots in the courtyard. She digs up one in the shape of a human hand, with five perfect fingers. In the end, they discover her husband’s body buried in the garden, minus the hands. That was the general idea.
    She had several books published after she won the prize, but no one took much notice. I would find them in the remainders bin; when I brought them home, I had to hide them from my father.
    *   *   *
    “Well then…” said the man, clearing his throat. The children stood up and formed two lines in the aisle, their legs apart and their hands behind their backs. The passengers sat watching them; the woman next to me closed her magazine and the college girls fell silent.
    “‘The Little Dustman’ by Johannes Brahms,” the man announced, holding up a pen for a conductor’s baton.
    The voices of the children reverberated above our heads, voices almost too beautiful to be human, rippling the surface of memory. I prayed for Mama as the snow continued to fall.
    *   *   *
    Later, someone sent me a small box of things she had left behind. A few trinkets, some clothing, fragments of manuscripts—and a faded picture clipped from a newspaper that had been tucked into the box. In the picture, an emaciated old woman in a headscarf stood smiling in the courtyard of an apartment building. She was holding a carrot in the shape of a hand. Mama was standing next to her, holding a carrot, too, and looking terribly uncomfortable. It had been a beautiful day and Mama was squinting in the sunlight.
    I have no idea why Mama left us. Toward the end, she talked to herself more and more, and she no longer bothered to stop even when she realized I was in the room. She muttered almost constantly, like a broken record. At some point I realized the pendant had disappeared from around her neck.
    On her last day with us, she held my cheeks in her hands. “You’ve been a good boy,” she said. “I wish that I was so good.” Her hands were as cold as they had been on that snowy day at the zoo.

LAB COATS
    “Nephrology, one short. Endocrinology, one long. Emergency Room, one short.”
    I take a lab coat from the mountain of dirty ones on the floor and I check the pockets. I read out the size and the name of the department written in magic marker on the back of the collar and then toss it in the cart. She sits next to me, writing down each coat in the register, so that next week, when they come back from the laundry, we can check them against the list to be sure nothing’s missing. Of all the jobs we secretaries at the hospital have to do, this is the one we hate the most. Partly because it’s nasty and boring, but also because the laundry room is next to the morgue.
    She and I take an old freight elevator to the basement—just a cold, rattling box, really—and then walk down this long hall that’s so tight I don’t see how they roll the gurneys through. The walls are scuffed up, and the fluorescent light flickers creepily. The floor of the hall slopes down from the elevator, so the laundry cart rolls forward on its own, as though pulled by an invisible hand. Like it’s going to race down the hall and crash through the door of the morgue. That’s creepy, too.
    To be honest, the morgue doesn’t scare me much. I don’t really understand why the other girls are so afraid of it. They see people dying all over the hospital, while