Diary of a Void

by Emi Yagi

He’s talking to the cups now. So weird. With my mouth shut to keep out his hot, dry breath, I just banged on the space bar over and over.

Down it went. Down into the void that was my belly.

Higashinakano always smelled like glue. The stuff I used when I was a kid. It wasn’t a bad smell or anything, but it wasn’t good, either. It was just the smell of glue. The funny thing is, I’d been sitting next to him for over a year, but I’d never actually seen him use glue—not even once.

With Yukino, when she says “Tell me about it,” it pretty much always means that she isn’t listening to what anyone else is saying.

People seemed to be under the impression, at least in my section, that if they made coffee for somebody else, it would signify some deep personal inadequacy.

Leaning against a scuffed red seat, I recalled the sight of the cores as they came off the roller. The hypnotic movement of those ribbons moving forward, only to be wound round and round.

“Hard to wrap your head around it?” I said. “Of course I have a life! You don’t know the first thing about me, and I don’t know anything about you, not that I want to. You wanna see me give birth? Is that what you’re saying? That’s the only way you’ll ever be able to wrap your head around me having a kid of my own, right?”

stopped by a gym. The woman behind the counter, long and thin like kanpyo

“Go slower or I can’t follow. Also . . .” “. . . Also?” “I ate grasshoppers yesterday,” the girl sitting next to me said, then carefully folded the sheet in her lap into a perfect triangle. Two badgers started to take shape.