Photo by Vanessa Chng
Mr. Shimizu places a hand on my chest.
Twenty-two seconds. I count. I take it all in. The burning circle of his palm. The cool ridge of his wedding band. Ripples in the hot night air around us. His fingers, drumming on my buttons.
He reaches into me. I think about his wife, keeper of the other ring, whose face I’d snatch, bones I’d slip into. He never talks about her. So I fill in the blanks. I imagine us to be antithetical—I, born in a factory town, and built strong and square. She, a city girl by birth, with lips pinched pink and hands that have never known a day’s hard work. I paint mental pictures of Mr. Shimizu and his wife, cozied up against each other in domestic settings. As a couple in the kitchen, crafting homemade meals on weekends. As man and wife, in bed. Her body, small and soft, coiled against his. There are things about Mr. Shimizu that I will never know; depths that his wife dove into, but that I, at best, grazed.
Then Mr. Shimizu stops coming to see me.
I stand outside his office in the midday heat, watching his colleagues spill from the building’s main doors at lunchtime, hoping to find him in the crowd. Mr. Shimizu isn’t a tall man. At full height, his ears come up to my shoulders. But I’m taller than most in this city. One look at the office workers shuffling down the street, and my eyes sweep across their scalps. I can even smell everyone if they come close enough. The top of Mr. Shimizu’s head is a lattice of coffee, sweat, and smoke.
I think about the first time I met him. He had stepped out of his office for a break, bought a coffee from me, sat on the curb to gulp it down. It became a routine, and it reminded me of the men back in my hometown, who laboured away in factories, had rough hands, and put up posters of cars and women they could never have on their lockers. At the end of a shift, these men cracked open cheap beers and toasted to the sunset.
Distracted by my searching, I mix up orders at work. I serve one salaryman, a common pigeon of his flock, a lemon soda instead of the peach he ordered. He opens the can and empties its contents on me. I spend the rest of the workday in a wet skin of sugar.
Another customer has eyes like Mr. Shimizu. Two dark pools, black as ink. I stare at her for longer than is polite, as if to feel his gaze on me for a second longer, through this stranger. The customer files a complaint with management: Broken down. Please fix.
A technician checks on me at midnight.
He fixes me up and inserts grimy coins into my slot, then pushes one of my buttons for a Pocari Sweat. My insides whir and hum again. I send the ice-cold bottle tumbling down into my pick-up box. The technician shoves a calloused hand into me and retrieves it, satisfied. I cough out his change—money that Mr. Shimizu once put into me—greased with my tears. The technician winces. Shaking his head, he collects the wet coins and wipes them against his pants. This gesture, a balm.
Vanessa is from Singapore. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Spectrum Literary Journal, Eunoia Review, and SAMPAN. She has presented at the Singapore Writers Festival and Asian Festival of Children’s Content.