“Mother.” Her daughter, who had been silent up until now, suddenly raised her voice. “Sorry, but please be quiet for a bit.” The daughter spoke formally, even to her mother.
It feels distant, Sayuri thought, but I wouldn’t be able to react if she suddenly called me ‘mom,’ anyway. I would just feel uncomfortable if she did that, so either way goes, really.
Being told ‘Please be quiet’ was a little unexpected, and left Sayuri unable to respond. Even as a child, her daughter hadn’t expressed her opinions very often. Has she finally reached that ‘rebellious age’ I’ve heard about? she wondered.
“I think it’s...making a sound?” While Sayuri was busy being a little moved, her daughter brought her face close to the TV. Pressing her cheek against the cold CRT TV screen, she put her ear against it.
“There shouldn’t be?” said Sayuri, feeling perplexed. “That TV is broken.” Sayuri walked over while lightly pounding her lower back— the daily farm work was getting to her. She was worried, because she thought that her daughter might be going strange in the head.
Squatting next to her, she focused her hearing: there was no sound. It was plugged in, and pressing the power button didn’t change anything— no program was being shown on the TV. It was completely dead. There wasn’t even any static.
“Mother, smoking isn’t good for you,” her daughter commented. “You know, health-wise.” The cigarette she’d been smoking earlier must have left a smell, because Sayuri’s daughter wrinkled her nose. Trying to apologize through her actions, she stroked her daughter’s head. Sayuri wasn’t concerned about her health, but she really should stop smoking. In the worst case scenario she might end up causing a fire, and that would be terrible. But, old habits die hard.
“Hmmm...there was...a sound?” Imitating her daughter, Sayuri also pressed her ear against the TV. There shouldn’t be a sound, but she certainly did feel something.
“I can’t hear anything...what kind of sound is it?” she wondered out loud. What Sayuri felt was weird, like back when her daughter was still in her belly, before she’d showed any physical signs of being pregnant. It felt just like she did then. It would be nice if she could just chalk it up to some sort of hallucination.
“Hm?” Looking at the TV from up close, Sayuri felt that something was wrong. Sayuri and her daughter’s faces were reflected on the dead TV screen, which was subtly curved, so that their faces were warped like they were laughing.
“Perhaps, this...move away a bit.” Moving her daughter off to the side, Sayuri shook the TV. When she did that, some latch or clasp got disconnected, and the screen readily fell away, just like a fruit would peel.
“Whoops, it broke... No, wait, it was like this from the start.” There were signs of the TV having been forcibly pried open. Its innards had been taken out, and then the screen glued back on, like a lid. They’d probably removed the TV’s mechanical innards to sell, but even so, this was a rough job.
This TV had been thrown away, so it was easy to guess what had happened. Seeing even further proof that what she picked up wasn’t a TV, but just trash, was a real disappointment. No wonder she was able to carry it so easily all the way to the cabin— it was much lighter, with no innards.
The TV was hollow; like this, it was just a box. There’s no way anything would be shown on the screen...
“Hmmm... Maybe there is something...inside...” It would be awful if it was a dead body, Sayuri thought. During Sayuri’s youth, it was a popular urban legend that, in the dump, there was a refrigerator with a body hidden inside.
“What is it...” she wondered out loud. “A bird’s...egg?” Inside the TV there was a bird’s nest, with several eggs inside. Sayuri didn’t know much about the subject, so what kind of bird’s eggs they were wasn’t clear. For just a moment, though, she thought If these are edible it would save me the trouble of finding ingredients for dinner. But if these eggs were hidden inside the TV the whole time, they were probably already dead and rotten.
Inside the oversized trash bin that was the TV, there was food waste; well, as a punchline, it wasn’t very funny. The sound her daughter had heard was probably the nest, or its eggs, moving around randomly.
“Mother.” In her arms, her daughter was holding the screen that Sayuri had just removed while calling out to her. The screen was covering her face, so it looked like the TV screen was talking rather than her daughter. This girl sometimes does the strangest things, Sayuri thought. It was pretty creepy.
“Those eggs,” her daughter asked, “may I raise them?”
“No,” Sayuri answered, “I think these are probably dead. But you can do what you like with them, I don’t mind.” After replying, Sayuri stood up, thinking, Well, that was a waste of time.
She headed for the kitchen, which was located in the back of the room. “I’m making dinner,” she said. “What do you want to eat?”
“What do chicks eat?” her daughter asked.
“No,” Sayuri told her, “I’m asking about you, though? They won’t hatch that quickly. Actually, didn’t I already tell you that those eggs are dead? Well, probably so, anyway... There’s been cases of food poisoning going around, so I’m gonna make something hot.”
“But mother, you always make mistakes with the strength of the fire and end up burning the food...” her daughter complained, before hesitating for a moment. “These eggs...they aren’t edible, right?” she wanted to know. “It’s okay to raise them, right?”
“It’s fine, do as you like,” Sayuri reassured her, still preoccupied with the problem of dinner. “Alright,” she decided, “then I’ll just make something random.” I managed to talk a lot with my daughter today, Sayuri thought happily. With that, she completely forgot about the TV, as well as the eggs that were inside it.