The subterranean grocery store does not make roof to stand under and chat, let alone to think undistracted fro m suns. A woman hurries through the unshaded courtyard until she enters the tunnel lined with bikes. She spends about 6 minutes almost completely still, suppressing sound of even her breath, just eyeballs spinning as if she is manually choosing routes on a big map in the air. Eventually she wrinkles her whole face harshly then relaxes it and aims her bike back to the exact same express path by which she came.
As she picks up speed, the world becomes fast and small. She hums, from silently to loudly, drinking the most wind with “sunny side of the street”. Unlike her way here, the sky starts sun-showering (drizzles without clouds). Drops touch her, hit the road with sounds, make visible splashes on the handlebars.
“Sunny side of the street” demo by Yutaro Shimizu and wind
“Sunny side of the street” demo by Yutaro Shimizu and wind
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The woman bikes fluently through the chemistry building elevator and brakes inside the polymer nano-material lab office. She goes to the post-it stuck centred on her corner of the whiteboard and scribbles a circle and a word in red:
Without pause she unloads her bag of five radishes and a bundle of papers onto the work station/lunch table. Carefully she unfolds the most clean paper, a printed screenshot dated 6 years back:
and traces her eyes through imaginary paths that she familiarised with for the past two weeks:
She has extracted all the information she could from this cryptic recipe, with the help of online dictionaries of her forgotten mother tongue and tangential botanical wikis that are unfortunately Mars-focused. From the pile of paper scraps and notes she takes only one:
Then she opens Geogebra on her laptop and clicks “start recording”. A light starts flashing inside the wet lab embeded in the office. Holding the only page and a few radishes she follows the light in.
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4 hours later, the door slashes open and she dashes out of the steam-filled lab, drenched and hair full of sand, inhaling loudly as if she held her breath under water for too long.
Looking as if she was a sleeping elephant or cut-off gecko tail, she magically manages to shake, sand-water droplets splattering on computer desks and textbook shelves just weekly-cleaned today. Not resting more than the time between swimmer relay, she goes to check on the Geogebra live-generated results with auto-interpreted captions. And as if the relay is completed, she sighs, deflates, gouges down air and stares at, no, through the screen.
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The woman’s home is a 40-floor skyscraper coated intentionally unevenly with PMMA for natural heating-cooling. As she walks to the first of many gates, hesitant and dragging her steps, she sees wet footprints. Rain didn’t come within 1 km radius so it must’ve been someone who walked a bit. The prints were pointed outwards and dense, made by small and ballet-like steps. She lives alone. Seeing this, she picks up her dragged steps and putting her keys through the second pair of locked gates rushed inside the yard. Grandma is standing in front of the second security checkpoint, with umbrella as her third foot, eyes aimed back at the first checkpoint. Grandma grins with her eye wrinkles, somehow it was similar to how she smiled 10 years ago picking granddaughter up from school for the last time, somehow it was changed. Granddaughter touched the green button on her phone for the gate next to grandma, then ran towards her. Maybe because their hug curvature slide into fit so perfectly, granddaughter can’t stop laughing hysterically. As she breathed longer and calmed down from intermittent giggles, Grandma points her chin secretively to a bag by her feet. There, leaning delicately to the umbrella, underneath a silk paper-wrapping, heated dry, the shadows of a shower head-like pod with frozen seeds ready to be revived.
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Here are granddaughter's notes from the years grandma and her raised the lotus:
Lotus skin is dense and hard, it can protect the embryo inside to live a long time. A thousand years, a lotus seed sprouts.
Every lotus part can be eaten: seed as tea, leaf as porridge or wrapping for dumpling, root as soup or fry… (for example this super spicy but loved ceremonious dish in Kuramoto Japan).