A Vacation Sight (370 words)

 

Over at https://moreoddsthanends.home.blog/2020/08/05/week-32-of-odd-prompts/ this week, Jim and Anne prompted me with this (and a picture!)

As I tried to hurry through my breakfast, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cat door open, and a fat raccoon squeezed through. I didn’t start to worry until the fifth or sixth, but they just kept coming.

Aha! So... let’s see... darn it, I got a beginning, again, but... not sure where to go with it? Maybe I need another prompt?

A Vacation Sight (370 words)

By Mike Barker

Elizabeth shook her head. She still couldn’t believe that she had managed to get to Japan, and rent a house, way out in the countryside, for her vacation. Her lifelong dream, getting to visit Japan, and with Jim, too! She looked around the old style room, with the fire pit in the middle, and smiled.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the little pet door that someone had added to the farm door flip open. Was there a neighborhood cat or...

That’s when the raccoon squeezed through the door. It glanced around, then scurried forward. 

And another raccoon squeezed in. 

She held her hands over her mouth, watching, as raccoon after raccoon squeezed in. Then she watched the eight of them quickly form a circle, and sit up, in the entryway. 

As the ninth animal squeezed in through the doorway, she blinked. Wait a minute, those aren’t raccoons. This is Japan. Those are... she remembered the stories she had read, practicing her Japanese. Tan... tanuki! Raccoon dogs.

As the last one stalked into the middle of the circle, the ones in the circle started drumming on their stomachs. Yes. And... she looked a little more closely. In between their hind legs, huge dangling balls of flesh. Now she nodded. These are tanuki. They must be.

The one in the middle stood on its hind legs, and stretched up. And as the circle started chanting, it lifted a large gourd to its mouth, and she could hear it gulping as it drank. A hyoutan, that’s what it was. A gourd, with ribbons. Probably sake!

Now she started chuckling. This was straight out of the Japanese folktales!

Then the tanuki in the center winked at her, and suddenly changed into a young boy wearing a summer robe. He bowed to her.

She shook her head, and bowed back.

“Dear lady, we welcome you to our land.”

She blinked.

“You speak English?”

He laughed.

“Is it so hard to believe that I can speak your language? After all, I have become a man, just to talk to you. Is a language such a hard thing?”

She slowly nodded. 

“Well, yes, that’s true. But... why do you want to talk to me?”

(more later, when I figure out what comes next!)