mrs. tsubaki
One rainy Tuesday morning, Mrs. Tsubaki farted loudly before her second-grade class. It happened during work time, and the room was stiller than usual. Kids were zeroed in, coloring the hell out of Voltron handouts.
Mrs. Tsubaki used work time to mentally replay episodes of whatever she’d watched the night before on Netflix. The X-Files. Survival of the Thickest. The Great British Baking Show.
I too bake the fuck out of some lemon-lavender shortbread, she thought.
At the Oyster Ridge Elementary bake sales, Mrs. Tsubaki often fantasized about an encounter with Prue Leith. Prue, perhaps visiting her American godchild, entered this school cafeteria and discovered the Tsubaki shortbread.
“Dribbling with anticipation,” Prue would say.
O, Mrs. Tsubaki thought, I guess Prue has heard of my shortbread?
“Everyone has heard of it,” Prue would say. “I knew, on this trip to visit my American godchild, I’d have to try it for myself.”
Prue would nibble, her eyes flashing with astonishment.
“The flavors,” she would say. “Absolutely delicious.” She would use a vibrant scarf to dab the corners of her mouth. Principal Flor Espinosa would be there, dragging over a chair upon which Prue would sit moaning into the shortbread, perhaps even removing her shoes and, out of a feverish delight, fanning herself with a sock.
“Hollywood would love it too,” Prue would say.
And the handshake? Tsubaki would wonder.
“He’d probably slap your bottom,” Prue would say, reading her thoughts. “He has a thing for women like you. So watch out.”
Mrs. Tsubaki chuckled as she retrieved a fallen tray of googly eyes and glue sticks that Tommie Red-Pheasant had dropped.
She was no longer a flexible woman. As her body bent, she looked for a moment stuck, so that the kids paused their coloring and looked over. Mrs. Tsubaki seemed frozen in time. This is the image everybody would recall.
And then her little butt farted. It was surprisingly loud, frog-like, undeniably more than just the butt. It was Mrs. Tsubaki’s whole body doing a sort of vibrating fart-dance as she tried to correct into an upright posture.
Mrs. Tsubaki had attempted to clench off the sound quickly. But no. Maybe in her younger days. She wasn’t old exactly, but her sphincter was no spring chicken. More jalopy with a rattling core. The friction there, the muscles not fully choking the aperture, the fart became a bit musical. The pitch soared. The class went silent. It was like a bugle had been sounded at a funeral. Young brains were on fire.
And then Mrs. Tsubaki slapped her thigh and began to shake-laugh. Everybody lost it. Darcy Nguyen, unaware she was holding a green marker, laughed with such abandon that she marked up her right cheek. Ely Mulwray climbed onto a back table like it was a medical gurney and laughed into a wad of lost-and-found jackets. Kids threw themselves onto the floor and sob-laughed.
As Tsubaki laughed, two more aftershock farts popped out. Completely unchecked at the border, they were like an old dog barking. Many of the children had been wearing sunscreen, and now their eyes were clenched and burning. Rosalie Richardson had to take a hit off her inhaler. She looked like someone had shot her in the face with champagne.
A thing like that happens and everyone knows the day will not go back to being regular. It would be like if Taylor Swift walked through the door and played “All Too Well” (the ten-minute version) and then handed everyone a hundred-dollar bill. You couldn’t exactly transition into a math lesson after.
On the chalkboard, Mrs. Tsubaki wrote What is a fart?
From that day onwards, Mrs. Tsubaki’s class spent fifteen minutes every afternoon talking about farts. How people of every country, culture, and religion farted. How queens, kings, the Dalai Lama farted. Taylor Swift farted. How there are scientists dedicated to studying farts, called fart doctors.
Everyone would remember when Ely Mulwray raised his hand and said that his aunt was a famous fart doctor, and how Ely too wanted to make it big as a fart doctor, though his father grumbled he’d need better grades.
Mrs. Tsubaki’s class talked about why they thought farts were funny. Was it because of their odd sound? Was it because they came out of a butt? Bebe Kobayashi said her grandmother once farted and it sounded like a ghost talking, and Mrs. Tsubaki said, yes, well, she supposed a fart is a sort of ghostly language of the butt.
They talked about why it’s normal to feel embarrassment about a fart, but that a fart should not cause shame, and how embarrassment and shame are different in intensity, duration, and transformation of self-identity, and about how one’s self-identity should not be transformed by a fart, because it’s not like a fart has ever been a life-or-death situation. Though a week later, after she’d thought about it, Mrs. Tsubaki revised her opinion and said maybe farting could be a life-or-death situation if you were a caveman hunting animals with big noses or if you were hiding in an attic from Nazis.
The class talked about why if everyone farts, and if everyone has smelly farts, and if no one can control a fart smell because if they could, they’d obviously choose a great smell, but no one could choose, not even Taylor Swift, then no one should ultimately be judged for their fart smells. Why no one should be judged for their beautiful bodies or their essential functions. The body was an extraordinary machine. Mrs. Tsubaki had taken out her phone and played “Extraordinary Machine” by Fiona Apple, which used some farty-orchestral moments to symbolize humanity’s triumph over our always-evolving discomforts.
Darcy Nguyen talked about how her mother never farted around strangers but couldn’t stop farting at home in front of their family, and did this mean farts had something to do with knowing somebody too well—so well you almost wish you could know them a little less? She’d heard that you always hurt the ones you love. And then Mrs. Tsubaki said she loved them all, opened the classroom windows, and declared that anybody who needed to fart should go ahead.
Word got around. Principal Flor Espinosa pulled Mrs. Tsubaki aside one day and told the story of how she came out as gay to her parents and grandmother. How the conversation had been so tense and painful, and then her sister had done a loud fart, and everybody had laughed so hard, and later hugged, and her grandmother even told a story about how she’d done lesbian things in college. The principal nominated Mrs. Tsubaki for the district’s innovative teaching award, and it was a runaway victory. It was a year when everything felt like it was glowing.
Some years farts were on the curriculum. Some years not. It depended on the class chemistry. Some kids couldn’t handle it. Sometimes Mrs. Tsubaki thought about staging a fart, because she wondered if the original fart had been a catalyst for their discussions and learning. But she decided against it; the kids would know it was inauthentic. And if that fart was a lie, the students might question if everything they learned was a lie.
As years went by, former students visited Mrs. Tsubaki. Or she would run into them at the library or Costco. Once, Tommie Red-Pheasant handed Mrs. Tsubaki her late-night order at El Rodeo Taco Spot, and he said he remembered her lessons, though it had been over ten years. He looked sad then, and Mrs. Tsubaki reached out into the dark El Rodeo window and squeezed Tommie’s hand. And then Tommie shrugged and smiled and gave Mrs. Tsubaki an extra Choco Taco.
More years passed. Principal Flor Espinosa retired. Mrs. Tsubaki retired and moved to Hawaii. In their twenties, Darcy Nguyen married Ely Mulwray. In their marriage, there were a lot of valleys, way more than peaks. Though, one special summer, they took a family vacation to Hawaii, and Darcy and Ely visited Mrs. Tsubaki on the beach. The three of them drank lilikoi martinis and dipped their toes into the warm sand. Over time, Darcy and Ely had a lot of stories together.
Decades passed. Estate sales. Funerals. Just outside the school cafeteria at Oyster Ridge Elementary was a plaque for Principal Flor. Her engraved quote: “There isn’t one blueprint for beauty. How many are there? Well, how many dreams have occurred on earth? That many.”
Darcy was in a lot of pain in the days before she died. Ely sat near her bed and held her little hand inside his massive hand. He reminded Darcy of Mrs. Tsubaki’s fart. When their kids still had chubby, mischievous faces, their child-farts bubbling up through the bathwater. Their granddaughter, about to fart her little butt into second grade. Too bad Mrs. Tsubaki wasn’t teaching any longer. Mrs. Tsubaki had left her bones in Hawaii beneath a trillion lilikoi blossoms. Ely could easily envision the young Darcy Nguyen, laughing so hard, clutching her green marker. The stories kept Darcy breathing steadily.
Nurse Raynette was in the room the evening Darcy died. Darcy’s face looked contorted, and Nurse Raynette leaned in to see, was she laughing or crying? There was a tear running down Darcy’s face. But she was laughing. She was dreaming. The analgesic properties of dreams, wow—extraordinary machines. As the nurse leaned in, Darcy’s body jerked suddenly, and the nurse’s lips grazed Darcy’s cheek. A stripe of dark lipstick shot across the wrinkled skin. Ely moaned, asleep nearby. He was curled up on a hospital cot, using a wadded jacket as a pillow.
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi is the author of The Book of Kane and Margaret (FC2 / UAP).