Passage I

LITERARY NARRATIVE: Passage A is adapted from the short story “Leaving Memphis” by Lauren Birden (©2008 by Narrative Magazine, Inc.). Passage B is adapted from the short story “Mandarins” by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (© 2006 by Fiction, Inc.).

Passage A by Lauren Birden

You see her first in the Memphis bus station on a two-hour layover. You pretend you haven’t because she looks ready to talk. “Stonewashed jeans,” you think, watching her tap her platform sandals at the front of the boarding line. When she catches you staring, you pull your lips tight and stare at the floor in front of her. She starts toward you anyway. She plops down in the hard plastic seat next to you, moving her purse to her lap. You motion to your open novel and shrug as if to say, “Can’t stop now,” but she asks, “Where you from?” and now you can’t shake her.

You’re not a bad person. You just wish Greyhound assigned seating. It’s not the straw-blond hair teased up around her face, not even the sad, neglected teeth that make you want to turn off the overhead reading lamp and smile at her in the dark. “I have a sneaking suspicion that we’re the same person,” she says, and you say, “That’s funny,” because you know you’ve been inventing yourself this whole time. She smiles and waits for you to agree how similar the two of you are.

She tells you about the man she’s taking the bus to see. “Left for a construction job in Palm Beach. Says my eyes are as blue as the Atlantic Ocean, and he can’t bear to look at the thing but one more time if I’m not there with him. You can’t trust a man with a gun or a heart, but he swears he loves me.” She waits for you to tell her of a better love. You can’t think of a story to compare.

She says, “We’re the same person.” She’s waiting for you to tell her yes, that you both have had the same heartache and know about scars and love the same. But you’re thinking at the window again as a radio tower passes that reminds you of the Eiffel Tower.

Firefly porch lights are perched, fat and throbbing, outside every occasional home you pass. You say, “You know, you’re so very right,” and then, nothing more. The woman resigns herself to turning away in the quiet. You’re telling the truth for once.

Passage B by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Evening was falling one cloud-covered winter’s day, as I boarded a Tokyo-bound train departing from Yokosuka. I found a seat in the corner, sat down, and leaned my head back against the window frame, halfconsciously watching for the station to recede slowly into the distance. But then I heard coming from the ticket-gate the clattering of dry-weather clogs, followed immediately by the cursing of the conductor. The door of the second-class carriage was flung open, and a 13- or 14-year-old girl came bursting in.

At that moment, with a shudder, the train began to lumber slowly forward. I raised my eyes to look for the first time at the girl seated now on the opposite side. She wore her lusterless hair drawn up into a bun, in the traditional shape of a gingko leaf. Apparently from constant rubbing of her nose and mouth with the back of her hand, her cheeks were chapped and red. A grimy woolen scarf of yellowish green hung loosely down to her knees, on which she held a large bundle wrapped in cloth. To blot her existence, I took out my newspaper, and began to read.

The girl feverishly endeavored to open the window, the glass apparently proving to be too heavy for her. Gazing coldly at her desperate struggle as she fought with chilled hands, I hoped that she would fail, and at that very moment, the window at last came down with a thud. I would surely have barked at this unknown girl to reclose the window, had it not been for the out-side view, which was now growing ever brighter, and for the smell, borne in on the cold air, of earth, dry grass, and water.

Just then I saw standing behind the barrier of a desolate crossing three red-cheeked boys. Looking up to see the train as it passed, they raised their hands as one and let out with all the strength of their young voices a high pitched cheer. And at that instant the girl, the full upper half of her body leaning out of the window, abruptly extended her hands and began moving them briskly left and right. Five or six mandarin oranges, radiating the color of the warm sun and filling my heart with sudden joy, descended on the children standing there to greet the passing train.

I knew immediately the meaning of it all. This girl, perhaps leaving home now to go into service as a maid or an apprentice, had been carrying in her bundle these oranges and tossed them to her younger brothers as a token of gratitude for coming to see her off.

Elated, I raised my head and gazed at the girl with very different eyes. For the first time I was able to forget, at least for a moment, my unspeakable fatigue and this tedious life.