The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

    I should never have stopped when I saw the laughing man in the middle of the road. His face was bloody, his khaki pants and red polo shirt were dirty and torn, and his bare feet were red and scaly from however far he’d walked on the hot asphalt before plopping down to have a good time braying at the sky like a donkey. Tears left tracks down his cheeks as he wept with the effort of chortling and guffawing so hard and fast and loud that his chest shuddered with the effort to suck in enough air between bursts. He looked exhausted and pathetic and crazy, but also like someone that needed help. So instead of driving around him, I slowed to a stop just past him and pulled over to the shoulder, glancing both ways down the long stretch of highway before walking over to him. “Sir? Um, are you okay? Were you in an accident?” The man kept laughing as he rolled his eyes in my direction. “Acci….dent…” I wasn’t sure if th...

  My father is dead. He died last fall of complications from acute lymphatic sarcoidosis after first getting sick just two months earlier. It was strange how fast it all happened, and given what I know, I wonder if there was more to his sudden passing. For his part, my Dad never questioned it or even complained about receiving a surprise death sentence at fifty-eight. He has always been a private person—stoic and reserved most of the time, though he could still be very funny and warm when the mood struck. I knew he’d spent his most of his career as a geneticist working on hush-hush government contracts, and growing up I’d almost seen him as a kind of nerdy spy—assigned to some top secret mission he could never tell his family about. As I got older, I’d laugh at that. Odds were, I figured, he was just a normal scientist working on something boring that had a federal grant or something, and the only reason he didn’t talk about it was be...

    When I was twelve, my mom got too drunk and left me at the afterschool program. I say it like it only happened once, but it was actually a pretty common thing until she finally sobered up the month I left for college. But the time I’m talking about, a gray day in October when I had just turned twelve, always stood out to me. By five o’clock I knew she wasn’t coming, so I walked the mile to the bus station to wait until the 5:30 bus came by. It was a hassle, but I knew the way home well enough, and it was a lot easier to get back on my own than deal with her icy silence and glares that night if I’d called and woken her up. Besides, if left undisturbed, she might not get up til eight or nine, which meant hours of my pick for t.v. and dealer’s choice for dinner. I reached the bus stop about 5:20 and was glad to find the bench empty. I wasn’t too worried about strangers generally, but sometimes there were older kids looking ...

  I looked up every time the bell chimed at the diner’s front door, my stomach tensing and then dropping when it was just some stranger coming in or heading back out after a greasy hamburger or a milkshake. I was nibbling at a plate of cold fries, checking my phone every few minutes, wondering if she was going to show up at all. It was already after two. Less than eight hours left, and I didn’t know who to call if this didn’t work. In fact, the only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to die. Sighing, I stuffed the phone back into my pocket. Either way, I needed to stop wasting time waiting for…Wait, there she was. Thirty minutes late, but that was okay. There was still time. Ella met my eyes and headed over, her smile awkward but friendly as she sat down in the booth across from me. Setting her bag down, she rolled her eyes as she shook her head. “Sorry, Travis. I know I’m like super late. Fucking work, you k...

    I noticed a stone lion today, right at the edge of the small park between the university library and the lab building. Its presence was strange, in part because I use that park as a cut-through on a regular basis on my way to see Betty during her lunch break and in part because it didn’t look new at all. I’m often accused of being too lost in my own thoughts, but have I really not noticed a massive, glaring stone lion looming over the crushed gravel pathway I take through the park? Or did someone actually install an old lion from some other spot? The latter seems the most likely, though why anyone would bother is beyond me. I was running late and just spared it a passing glance, but the next time it occurs to me, I may examine it more closely, if only to provide more padding to a mysterious tale I can tell my girl tomorrow. I had been dating Ryan a month when we first slept together. We had both come from bad relationships th...