Love Story

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Love Story Kaj Tanaka (bio) A while back, my wife and I went to a restaurant because she was craving deviled eggs and I was craving raw oysters. We felt lucky, both of us, to have identified such specific desires and to have found a place so close to our apartment with expertise in those particular offerings. But when the old man brought out our plates, we couldn’t tell the difference between the two dishes. They looked, to us, exactly the same. What’s more, the old man, perhaps thinking he was doing us a favor, had not set the platters next to our forks and cloth napkins, but side by side in the center of the table. “For sharing,” he said. We don’t get out very often, my wife and I, which means we hardly ever eat such dishes. In fact, as we stared at the two plates, I couldn’t say for certain I’d ever eaten either food. We agreed about one thing, though: I did not want deviled eggs and my wife did not want oysters. And so, we found ourselves at an impasse. In a way, it felt like a puzzle; in another way, it felt like a trap. Years passed. The old man continued to refill our water glasses; customers came and went. We made trips to the restroom to pee, and we watched the seasons change outside the big window near our table as our two plates remained between us, untouched. Dust drifted through the air in bright flashes of sunlight. As time wore on, our plates acquired a certain familiarity, though we never identified their contents. We became students of the two plates, and the longer we knew them, the less we cared about our original orders. For example, I would come back from using the restroom, and I’d catch a glimpse of one plate and think, “What if this plate has been a ham sandwich the entire time?” My wife and I both love ham sandwiches. I looked at my wife and became so lost—so helplessly in love with her—that I completely forgot about the uneaten food on the table between us. [End Page 78] We passed the best years of our lives in this way. Looking back on that time from the place we currently reside, we remember what a dream it was the years we spent in that restaurant. What a thrill, to yearn for what we could not recognize, to be on the verge of understanding it. We took something small and fragile, and, together, we turned it into a beautiful life. [End Page 79] Kaj Tanaka KAJ TANAKA’s fiction has appeared in New South, The New Ohio Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. His stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf ’s Top 50. He lives in New Mexico. I love orality in fiction, and fairy tales—because of their brevity, their tight formal structures, and their strange events—are easy to tell, recall from memory, and retell again. To me, this is storycraft at its finest, and it is what I hope to create every time I sit down to write. I love simple, memorable stories that, though perhaps familiar, still elicit wonder in an audience. For this reason, I find myself constantly returning to fairy tales for inspiration. Copyright © 2022 Wayne State University Press, Leonard N. Simons Building