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All the trees are empty of persimmons; only the oranges are left. They are sold on Thursdays by a bent-back hag out of her front room, grey wooden pallets full of fruit, water beading and freezing on their rough, bright skin. Steam from her kitchen, a batch of sweet-bean manju buns, wafts out in warm, white puffs. Sparrows collect in the dead grass, picking withered berries from the ice, fluttering up between the branches as I shuffle in new boots to the train station, the brown earth lifting into the sky. The leaves turned so late this year. I do not think it will snow. But the monks bang their drums at dusk and tie their prayers to dead branches all the same. November is a silent month when the islands sit uneasy on the sea. The harbor-waves wash rusted bicycles onto the sand, jellyfish tangled in their spokes. Five hundred miles south, there is one tree left, outside Kyoto, which has not dropped its persimmons like a thief´s purse. It stands on the edge of a winter lake, throwing fire into the water. Catherynne M. Valente is the author of The Labyrinth and Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, as well as three collections of poetry: Apocrypha, Music of a Proto-Suicide and Oracles: A Pilgrimage. Between novels she occasionally moonlights as a literary critic. She currently lives in Virginia with her husband and two dogs. |
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