a glass of water that you drink accidentally when you are not thirsty and do not remember it afterwards.
He tore up the piece of paper that had everything that you have read here about the sombrero. He tore it up very carefully into many pieces and threw them on the floor.
He would start over again the next morning writing about something else that would have nothing to do with a sombrero falling out of the sky.
His business was writing books. He was a very well-known American humorist. It was difficult to find a bookstore that did not carry at least one of his titles.
Why was he crying, then?
Isn’t fame enough?
The answer is quite simple.
His Japanese girlfriend was gone.
She had left him.
That was the reason for tears that started in eyes that he could no longer remember except for their crying which was now an everyday occurrence since the Japanese woman had left him.
Some days he cried so much that he thought that he was dreaming.
JAPANESE
As Yukiko slept, her hair slept long and Japanese about her. She didn’t know that her hair was sleeping. Protein needs its rest, too. She did not think like that. Her thoughts were basically very simple.
She combed her hair in the morning.
It was the first thing that she did when she woke up. She always combed it very carefully. Sometimes she would put it in a bun on top of her head in the classic Japanese manner. Sometimes she would let it hang long, reaching to her ass.
It was a little after ten in the evening in San Francisco. Drops of Pacific rain fell against the window beside her bed, but she didn’t hear them because she was sound asleep. She always slept very well and sometimes she would sleep for long periods of time: twelve hours or so, enjoying it as if she were actually doing something like going for a walk or cooking a good meal. She also liked to eat.
As he tore up the sheet of paper with words on it about a sombrero falling from the sky, she slept and her hair slept with her: long and dark next to her.
Her hair dreamt about being very carefully combed in the morning.
GHOST
He looked at the pieces of paper on the floor about a sombrero falling out of the sky for no apparent reason and somehow the sight of them increased his crying.
Who was she sleeping with? he thought, as his eyes raced with tears trying to get out, rushing all at once in front of one another, competing to get down his cheeks as if they were in an Olympiad of Crying with visions of gold medals in front of them.
He imagined her in bed with another man. The man he thought up to be her lover had no definite body or color of hair or even features. Her imaginary lover did not have bones, flesh or blood. The man he had placed in bed with her was just a ghost-like energy force with a penis.
He probably, if it’s possible, would have cried even more if he had known she was sleeping alone. That would have made him feel even sadder.
SAILOR
What was he going to do with the rest of the night? It was 10:15 in November. He didn’t want to watch the eleven o’clock news. He wasn’t hungry. He didn’t want a drink. He knew if he tried to read a book the pages would swim through the tears in his eyes.
So he thought about her fucking somebody else. He thought about another man, a nameless face with his penis entering her. He thought about her moaning and moving under the weight of another man’s cock. Thoughts like that were no good for him but he clung to them like a drowning sailor to a board in the middle of an ocean without horizons.
Then he looked down at the pieces of paper at his feet. Why should a sombrero fall out of the sky? The torn pieces of paper would never be able to tell him. He sat down on the floor in the middle of them.
ERASER
The Japanese woman slept on.
Yukiko had gone to bed very tired. It had been a hard day for her. All she wanted to do at work was to go home and go to sleep, and now here she was: she was home sleeping.
She had a small dream about her childhood. It was a dream that she would not remember when she woke up in the morning nor would she ever remember it.
It was gone forever.
It was actually gone as she dreamt it.
It erased itself as it happened.
BREATHING
The first time he met her he was very drunk one night in San Francisco. She had gotten off work and had gone to a bar with some co-workers. She didn’t like to drink because typically Japanese she couldn’t hold her liquor and besides that, she didn’t really like the feeling of alcohol in her body. It made her feel dizzy.
So she didn’t go to bars very often.
After she finished work that night she was tired but her two co-workers persuaded her to go with them to a local bar where young people hung out.
When he turned around on his bar stool, very drunk, which was a condition not unknown to him, and saw her sitting there in her uniform, little did he know that two years later he would be sitting on the floor surrounded by little pieces of paper dealing with a sombrero falling out of the sky, his eyes dashing tears forth like a spring creek in the mountains and he would have nowhere to go forever and his life would be tired of breathing him.
SUBURB
Yukiko rolled over.
That plain, that simple.
Her body was small in its moving.
And her hair followed, dreaming her as she moved.
A cat, her cat, in bed with her was awakened by her moving, and watched her turn slowly over in bed. When she stopped moving, the cat went back to sleep.
It was a black cat and could have been a suburb of her hair.
ORIGAMI
He picked up the many torn pieces of paper about the sombrero and dropped them into an empty waste-paper basket which was dark and totally bottomless, but the pieces of white paper miraculously found a bottom and lay upon it glowing faintly upward like a reverse origami cradled on the abyss.
He did not know that she slept alone.
GIRL
There had to be a way out of this.
Then
