Dry Heat

The Goddess of Compassion

a short story

by Raquel Fontanilla

     Masaya Miyamoto stands on the gymnasium roof surveying the flattened landscape of his hometown. The wave had been a moving wall as it raced toward the breakwater wall, relentless in its coming, its leaving, its coming again. A blackened gyre of debris – roofs of houses, Styrofoam blocks, fishing nets – swirls around Masaya and the handful of students who huddle and shiver on top of this concrete island in the sea. As night falls, exploding fuel tanks ignite the fishing boats drifting in the harbor amidst the falling snow. From a distance the boats look like lighted paper lanterns set afloat at Obon, the festival of the dead, to welcome back the souls of the departed.

     From the moment the principal introduced Holly Patterson at the first school assembly in April, Masaya felt like his heart had been reawakened. Each year Kamaishi Junior High was assigned an assistant language teacher as part of a government initiative to place native English speakers in schools. Masaya had taught history there for four years, but hadn’t paid much attention to the foreign teachers up until then. He was too shy to open his mouth and reveal his halting accented English, and the three previous teachers may as well have arrived from a distant planet. The first woman appeared to have stepped out of a commercial for shampoo or toothpaste, with her silky blonde hair and blindingly white straight teeth, which she flashed sparingly. She had been followed by a tanned buff Australian who stood a foot taller than any of the other males at the school. When he sauntered down the hallway, the female students and teachers alike tittered, concealing shy smiles behind cupped hands. The third teacher, who was British, seemed to have been on more than friendly terms with a number of the male students, never missing the opportunity to drape his arms around their shoulders or assist in gym class.

     Holly was American, but different from Masaya’s image of the aggressively confident women he saw in movies. Her humility showed that first spring day when she stood in front of the assembly and gave an endearing bow and a smile that revealed a snaggletooth. Her auburn hair hung in soft waves past her petite shoulders and freckles peppered her nose, on top of which sat a pair of large round tortoiseshell glasses that magnified her hazel-flecked eyes. Kawaii, cute – that’s what all the girls said, and before long Masaya noticed that many of them were ditching their contact lenses and wearing the same style of glasses as Holly-sensei.

     Holly embraced her life and the people in Japan, teaching softball to the girls, joining the kendo team, and learning calligraphy. She had a soft spot for the kids who were bullied, and often sat beside them during lunch in the school cafeteria. But her biggest passion was animals: she volunteered at the local animal shelter where she adopted an Akita doomed to be put down. She named him Sora, sky; his lopsided ears and grumpy, forlorn face only endeared him to Holly more. Of course, Masaya heard all of this from his students, who noticed the way their sensei’s face softened, then reddened, whenever he saw Holly.

     He observed Holly for months: under a canopy of cherry blossoms at the school picnic; from the river bank hunting for fireflies; at the school sports festival, the heavy persimmons ready to fall from the trees; and at the hillside Buddhist temple on New Year’s Eve, listening to the bell ring out 108 times, one time for each sin. Holly always had a smile for him, always asked “How are you, Miyamoto-sensei?”, to which he could only reply, “Ah, yes, sankyu,” his nervous smile coming out more like a grimace.

     Masaya had been nearing the end of teaching sixth period, wondering whether he might see Holly in the teacher’s room after class, when the shaking began. It started off as a soft rocking, but within seconds the windows were rattling violently, like an intruder trying to smash his way inside. Masaya and the students dove under their desks in the manner that they had practiced every month since they were five years old. This time, though, there was no furtive whispering between the girls or wisecracks from the boys: instead, the girls cried out iyada, yamete, no, stop, appealing to the earthquake as if it were a monster that could be reasoned with, while the boys groaned in breaking voices, okaasan, mother. For four terrifying minutes Masaya endured the jolting until he thought his skull would explode.

     When the shaking subsided, the teachers rounded up the students in the field outside the gym to take them to the highest point in town, the hillside temple. Masaya’s heart pounded as he scanned the field for Holly to no avail. Then he remembered: it was Friday afternoon, when she had gym class. He tore towards the gymnasium, bursting through the doors, and was on the second flight of stairs yelling “Holly-sensei” when she almost crashed into him on her way down. With tsunami sirens beginning to keen in the background, Masaya knew that their only chance of survival was to head for higher ground.

     He frantically waved his hands back and forth in front of his chest, his arms making X’s scissoring back and forth, and then jabbed a futile finger up towards the stairs. Kiken, danger, he repeated to Holly, but she whispered back to him “Sora,” the hazel flecks in her widened eyes glowing like embers. As she moved to push past Masaya, he grabbed her arm and pressed his face closer to hers than he ever thought he would dare, so close that he could see the freckles standing out on her nose. “No,” he exclaimed, the authority in his own voice sounding foreign to his ears. Holly shook her head and flew down the stairs, leaving Masaya to stare at his hand, warm with the imprint of her bare skin.

     With the presence of Holly still alive on his fingers, the whimpering voices of two girls on the staircase drives Masaya further up the stairs, herding them like skittish sheep as a low faint rumbling fills the slack air. They emerge onto the roof like shipwrecked passengers finding dry land, where one girl squats back on her heels, rocking back and forth, her hands over her ears. Masaya looks up to see a flock of seagulls sailing in formation over his head, moving towards the temple that houses the white robed statue of the Goddess of Compassion. The rumbling becomes a roar, and Masaya wheels around to face the harbor. There, in the distance, he sees the brilliant speck of Holly peddling her bicycle towards her apartment by the breakwater wall, her auburn hair spread out as if suspended in motion, her face raised to the sky.

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