The Phone Box at the Edge of the World

by Laura Imai Messina

She was far from home, and her mother’s message saying that she and Yui’s daughter were nearly at their local shelter had been so reassuring that Yui had simply followed the people around her.

The tsunami rose much higher than predicted, so much so that, in some cases, the term ‘shelter’ became a broken formula, a misspelled word; an imprecise definition that creates an equivalence between two things that are, in reality,

nothing alike. That’s what happened to her daughter and her mother, who, when they got to the shelter, found only death awaiting them.

Eventually, the bodies were found and Yui stopped looking at the sea.

‘Time may pass, but the memory of the people we’ve loved doesn’t grow old. It is only we who age,’

smile with your heart, not just your mouth.

‘They were the things my wife said to our daughter. I heard them every day but I never said them myself. I left that to her, maybe because deep down I thought my role would always be marginal. But now I watch mothers in the street, in parks, at the supermarket, and I try to steal their secrets. I want to know how you make a child talk, how you make them feel happy to be alive.’