Lil and Pyushun: Part 1 (Short) (Patreon)

I should mention that there are no 'futas' in this one.  Lil and Pyushun is just a little old fashioned love story, emphasis on the little.  😋

***

I slump down on the rickety wooden chair and let my backpack fall from my right shoulder without even attempting to catch it.  It hits the floor with a heavy thump.

“Lil.  You gotta…hah…get…hoh…a car!”  I huff through hard, gulping breaths as I lean back and wipe the sweat from my wet brow.  “Whoooo!”

Just beyond the open sliding door my mamachari bicycle lay on the grass where I’d just abandoned it.  The twenty minute ride out here from town was bad enough but it was that final stretch over the bridge and up the steep path that lead to this century old farmhouse that always finished me off.  Sapping heat in the summer, mushy snow in the winter, I don’t think I could take three more terms of this.

I’d been putting off getting a little car, or at least a scooter, until I got the news of my extension.  My gaze drifts to the envelope on the antique hinoki rolltop desk in front of me.  Just yesterday I’d received the news that my application to stay on for another year had been accepted.  With the new school term just three weeks away the local council had left it until the last possible moment, probably hoping that I would retract my request so that they wouldn’t have to deal with the awkwardness of letting me go directly.  It’s not that they wanted to get rid of me.  But it’s not like they wanted me around either.  The truth was they just didn’t know what to do with me.  They’d been saddled with me thanks a new government sponsored program that was testing out the value of English language education in public schools.  If the program was a success every school in the country would get an foreign English teacher of their own.  But as it stood now there was no established curriculum, standards or practices for what I was doing.  Officials, faculty, teacher and students, all of us were flying blind.

“Hahh.”  I slap my knees and rock forward up to a standing position.

I walk down the long hall toward the dining room and ultimately the kitchen, my shoes echoing off of the hard wooden floor and through the empty rooms.  The drafty old house, once a home for generations of wasabi farmers, was way too much for just me.  There had initially been two of us here.  Rachel, a fun-loving young Aussie, and I had arrived on the same day one train apart almost exactly a year ago now.  Homesickness and boredom had defeated Rachel within four short months.  Ever since then I’d had this place all to myself.  While I missed having another English speaker to talk to her leaving had been a blessing in disguise.  Not only did I enjoy the quiet and privacy, it also helped to alleviate my own workday boredom as there wasn’t even enough for one of us to do, never mind two.

In the kitchen I open the sliding the door that lead out to the outside well just for the natural light and some fresh Spring air.  I return to the sink and begin heaving on the hand pump to draw water.  As I pump and wait for the water to arrive I chuckle yet again at the lack of plumbing here in nineteen eighty-five.

I remember well that day back in Texas, reading my acceptance letter filled with giddy excitement.  I remember how my dreams of the glittering metropolitan lights of Tokyo and Osaka were swiftly dashed as I continued reading that letter to discover that my posting was in a prefecture called Tottori.  Not only had I never heard of it before it took me half an hour with an atlas just to find it.  Japan was modern, enlightened, a beacon of cultural and technological advances, and the booming economic model for the future.  That’s what they told me.  Those people had never been to the inaka.

I fill my glass and wander outside, leaving the door wide open behind me.  Nothing I did could stop every super-sized creepy, crawly, critter from the dense mountain forest all around from getting in anyway.  I walk out into the center of the yard and take a long drink to quench my dry throat.  All around the trees whispered and the insects sang.  With the exception of a power pole and a single drooping wire that provided the place with electricity, unreliable as it was, there was not one other thing in sight that belied the true year.  It was a place out of time that would have looked just the same in the nineteenth or even eighteenth century.

“Mmm.”  I drain my glass then wander to the outdoor well to fill it once more.  As I pump I peruse the large garden patch and wonder again if I ought to do anything with it this year.  Coming from a land of cacti and dust and tumbleweeds it seemed a damned shame to waste such a fertile patch of rich, dark soil.

Water replenished I wander along the front of the house without coming to a decision.  I pass the front door and round the corner to the office.  Setting my drink down I pick up my bike and lean it against the wall.  No point in locking it.  Firstly because I’d yet to see or even hear about a single crime being committed in my year in Chizu.  Secondly because nobody ever came out here.  Ever.

I come to the wooden deck that lead out from the office and sit on it, my feet dangling outside a foot or so from the ground.  I glance back at my backpack that I’d dropped and think about the stack of final exams waiting to marked.  Those would be my big entertainment for the evening.

To say that I hadn’t blending in with the locals was an understatement of epic proportion.  As the only current, and from what I could tell first ever, ‘gaijin’ in the region local folks just didn’t quite know what to make of me.  I think the whole reason that they housed their English teachers out here was simply for us to be out of sight and out of mind.  Local English speakers were nonexistent beyond my grade school students and my piss poor grasp of Japanese, learned entirely through a textbook, didn’t do me any favors.  Even the smattering of Japanese that I did know was near useless thanks to their rural accent.  Every time I did try to use it they would smile and nod politely without having a clue what I was saying.  In the end communication would devolve to noises and gestures.  Now that I knew that I’d be here for another year I would make a point of learning the local dialect.

I sigh as I peer across the yard to the swaying crowns of the evergreens as I lazily kick my feet back and forth.

Though I try not to dwell on it, and I HATED thinking this way, I suspected that it just wasn’t just my language skills keeping me apart.  I knew that all of my cohort that came over last year were having their challenges integrating but I couldn’t help but wonder if the little bit of extra melanin in my skin made bridging that gap just a little bit harder.  When Rachel was here it sure seemed like she would be approached more often.  Though, to be fair, Rachel was far more outgoing than I was.  Beyond my mixed race heritage there was also some good old fashioned sexism that was alive and well here in the country.  As a woman I didn’t get invited out to the frequent hard drinking boys nights that all of my male colleagues partook of.  It was more a blessing than a curse in my eyes but it did limit my networking opportunities.  And my female coworkers just never seemed to have anything going on, at least nothing that they shared with me.

A skitter behind me draws my attention back toward the house just in time to catch a flash of something zipping out of the office and down the far side of the deck.  Something big.  God, I hope it wasn’t a suzumebachi!  Those giant hornets were a god damned nightmare!  They made our yellow jackets back home look like mosquitoes.  The fact I hadn’t heard a buzz probably meant that it was ‘only’ a huntsman spider.  Or perhaps some hitherto undiscovered insectoid monstrosity that had been hiding in these mountains since times prehistoric.

Though I knew whatever it was could get into the house if it really wanted to I still preferred not giving it an open invitation to eat my face off while I slept.  Getting up I hurry back into the office to close slam the door behind me.  I click on the overhead light which flickers to a reluctant glow and look around for any other bugs.  Thankfully there are none.

Turning to my left I spot myself in the old full length mirror that sat in the corner of the room and stop to smooth down my hair that had frizzed up from the sweaty ride home.  The mirror had been in the tatami room where I slept but I moved it here as I liked how the reflective surface helped to brighten the wonderful natural light the office received in the evening.  It’s antique frame also matched the rest of the antiquated furniture of the room nicely.

I swoosh my shoulder length black hair from side to side seductively then gaze deep into my rich brown eyes and shoot myself a wink.  “How you doin good lookin?”  I say with ‘what’s up’ lift of my chin then start to laugh at myself.

God, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be hit on.  While I enjoyed my privacy out here I was no shut-in either.  I never let my social challenges stop me from going out to activities around the community.  Whenever there was something interesting going on at the community center, the library, the temple, or the market I’d try to get out and mingle.  And of course the various school events sprinkled all through the calendar year.  In all those outings not once had a guy been brave enough to approach me.  And I couldn’t even blame them!

With a chuckle I turn my body to check myself out.

I could see how I would be intimidating.  My tawny brown skin aside, at five foot nine I was as tall or taller than eighty percent of the guys I met.  And with full, plump lips, an ample set of knockers and a big bountiful denim stretching booty I was something else entirely from the rail thin, effortlessly elegant and stunningly gorgeous local gals.  If they were fine porcelain dolls I was a big ol’ teddy bear.  The guys around here had just never seen anything like me in the flesh.  And there was a lot flesh to see!  Back home I’d be considered curvaceous but far from fat.  Over here however I was a giant!

I laugh and slap my thick Texan rump then run my hands up my hourglass curves.  “You don’t know what you’re missing boys.”

I sure knew what I was missing.  Hopefully something changed this year.  While my heart could wait another year, my pussy was getting impatient!  After indulging in a bit of romantic daydreaming I laugh again and shake my head.

“Well, I guess these tests aren’t going to mark themselves.”  I say.  “But supper first.”

I am just about to step away when something in the mirror catches my eye.  A shade of pale pink that I did not recognize in this room.  Just a spot of it on the desk behind me.  Turning around my eyes search the desktop and quickly find the source.

“What the…?”  I step forward and look down at the single pink flower that sat atop the envelope containing my extension.  Reaching down I very gently touch the edge of the one of the delicate petals, as if to be sure it was real.  “A plum blossom?”

This didn’t make sense.  Didn’t I just look at that envelope a couple of minutes ago?  I did.  I’m sure I did.  There was no flower then.  No way there was.  I couldn’t have missed it.  And even if it had been placed there while I was at work, how would it have gotten in here with the place locked up?  Had it wafted in on the breeze?  That didn’t check out either.  It would take a fair wind to carry a full bloom any distance and there was no plum tree on the property.  Besides…the way it was placed there in the dead center of the desk with it’s full floral beauty facing out toward the room…no, that was put there deliberately.

Half confused and half in a frightened panic I hurry back and slam the door open again.  I take up the four foot stout wooden rod that secured the sliding door at night and rush out onto the deck, my eyes scanning about for any movement.  I see nothing and nobody.  Not even the rustle of underbrush.  Were they still here!?  Holding the rod like a Louisville Slugger I hop off the deck and start around the back of the house.

“I know somebody’s here!”  I call as I walk swiftly around the clearing in a wide circle around the house so that I couldn’t be jumped from the corners.  When I get no reply I call again.  “You think that’s funny?  Scaring a woman out here by herself?  I don’t think it’s very funny.  Not one bit.  Show yourself ya coward!”

After giving the outside a good look around and even checking the little crawl space beneath the place without seeing a sign of anyone I let down my guard and try to make sense of it.  Fom the office and walked to the kitchen, got a glass of water, came out here, then went right back around to the office again.  My eyes widen and my head turns slowly toward the house.  They were inside!  They had to be.  They were inside of my house!

If I was smart I would have run for town.  But my blood was up now.  I did not appreciate being messed with like this.  Besides, it would have taken me the better part of an hour just to try to communicate what was happening.  It was probably just one of my students playing a prank on the foreigner.

Entering from the kitchen door I slide it closed behind me then lock it and secure it.  With my stick out in front of me I creep my way through the house, turning on every light as I went.  Empty.  Silent.  Alone.  There was nobody here but me and a few moths.

I sigh and force myself to relax.  They must have gotten away.  My mind is turning as I walk back to the office.  It was unnerving that someone had been here inside of my place while I was home and I didn’t even realize it.  But another part of me kept wondering…why a flower?  Of all things why put such a pretty flower on my desk?

Stepping into the office I look at the desk to see if maybe, just maybe, I’d imagined the whole thing.  My breath catches.  There was a second blossom!

Part 2