Delicate clouds were massing over Seattle to complement the gorgeous
sunny morning the city had already had. Hannah stood still, looking up, as
one briefly shaded her, then resumed her trot down the sidewalk.
    She had been to three sushi restaurants already that day and no longer
looked forward to others. But she had offered.
    As she stepped into Tenkara, the patches of blue sky thought about
giving up and going home. Likewise the kids asking for spare change on the
street. Likewise Hannah.

    Tenkara morbidly greeted visitors with a wall full of its namesake
fishing lures. Still not hungry, Hannah stooped to read the attendant
plaque on fly-fishing techniques. Once suitably educated she told the mai-
tre d' she was dining alone and gratefully accepted a table in the back.
    Her friend Sy wanted to move west and open a sushi place, and Hannah
pledged to him her talents as a scout, or maybe a snoop. As cover for her
note-taking she had brought a full sketchbook, whose resident images were
picking up totally inapposite captions. (A park scene had become "quick
and friendly, not so attentive" while the policeman on the next page was
named "rancid avocado".) She even snuck in a few marginal kitchen sketches
in case those helped.
    Hannah handed over the sushi slip and tried opening her senses to the
surroundings. It was much darker than Sanmi Sushi. Few people, even for
2pm, and the uncommitted servers held eerily still, waiting for something.

    After college, all of them had scattered across the world. Hannah's
relationship with Sy, like with most of the others, had faded from frequent
contact to occasional requests for crash space or job help. Setting up the
day's investigations had used more waords than they usually exchanged in a
year and even so, Hannah had to fill in the details herself.

    The good food lit her up more than she expected; finishing her strat-
egic sampler of Tenkara's offerings went fast, and left a strong enough
impression that she decided to write her notes on the bus. Upon exiting
Hannah forked her leftovers over to one of the street punks (jaded; that
must happen a lot) and rounded the corner to wait.
    Twenty minutes and one transfer later, she found herself hopping off
to finish her trip on foot. She descended the downtown streets, retracing
mnemonics for them in her head: Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Pressure.
John Candy's Mom Sends Us Presents. Journalists Can Make Shit Up Promptly.
Just Call Me, Sy Urged Penny. That last one had stopped being funny a
little too fast. And how was Penny doing? Hannah wondered.
    Not for the first time, it struck Hannah as poor planning for so many
people to associate forgiveness with love. In her experience, the one pre-
vented the other once stakes were high enough.

    The riot of smells at Pike Place Market reminded Hannah of one last
memo for Tenkara, so she sat down on a convenient bench. Under her own
awkward rendering of the Mona Lisa she inscribed: best maki tasted of
shiso. A cloud of fake lavender fell on her from the bath shop nearby,
confounding her attempt to call up the flavor one last time.
    It was time for the rain, if only it would come, and Hannah set out
for her last stop with patience-- just enough to get by.

written for Sanmi on the opposite couch 9/27/08

I searched for "Sanmi" on the web and nearly all the top hits were two Japanese restaurants in Seattle and San Francisco. (Sanmi-the-client was German, and endearingly capitalized the nouns on her list (so I know she meant "love" as a noun and "fly" as a verb, not that I felt bound by that). Once I had both sushi and avocado in mind my general direction seemed clear.

The first half was written while low on ideas, and to me a lot of it reads like treading water. I nearly described the process of getting on the bus, paying the driver, sitting down, etc. Since I don't remember anything in particular about Seattle buses this would have been especially dull.

On re-reading, I see I used "relationship" for Hannah and Sy when I really shouldn't have; I mean, you can apply that word to friendships, but why create ambiguity? (At that point I didn't yet have the minor offstage breakup bit in mind so maybe I just wasn't worried about it.)

I forgot about the weather until the very end. And then forgot that I had remembered it, so that as I was rereading, I thought, "Wow, I never even got back to the clouds-- oh, wait, there, I did."

With this story, "blue" becomes the first word to be requested three times.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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