#267 Rationing- Mary Yukari Waters
If you only have a finite amount of energy or time, is it
better to lament the bad things around you, or to use that time to try to
alleviate the suffering? This story is about the rationing of emotion for more
practical pursuits.
Saburo was only 6 when Japan surrendered, and he cannot
remember his father from a time before the war, buts sees him as a pragmatic
rock of a figure. “What he heard was his father’s voice: a voice like the
universe, regulated and unknowable, with the endurance of silent planets
rotating in their endless solitary orbits.”
He has a lifelong fear of running out of time, or preparing
for a longer life than he will be allotted. This doesn’t seem to spur him into
living life more fully, but seems to paralyze him into not making solid
decisions. This is a one-life-in-twenty-pages type of story, so all we see are
snapshots in the life of Saburo. He is lonely and afraid to disappoint his
family.
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