The Curd

*The Curd was shortlisted for the 2024 Bridport Prize.

Hideo Muguruma stood — hands on hips — before the class, breathing in deeply, thinking with immense satisfaction of the nice clean towels he'd draped on the drying rack at five-thirty that morning. He turned his attention to the rows of freshly sheared students before him — the spiky black tufts, neat glossy bobs, and stiff spines. With each note of the school bell, a sense of wellness chimed inside of him, out into the ringing silence.

Misaki shouted, "Please stand up!"

Her classmates obeyed. Reciting together, they greeted Muguruma and his assistant, Matthew; announced the date, time, and weather conditions; finally intoning, "Let's start English, ooooooooooooo-kay!" with varying degrees of enthusiasm, stoic little fists punching dutifully up into the air, dropping a moment later in response to Misaki's command to sit back down.

Despite its perfunctory nature, the morning greeting remained an abundant source of invigoration to Muguruma. If asked to describe why, he would have found it difficult to articulate an answer. Having been obligated himself, since childhood, to engage in such behaviour, he'd only really become conscious of its particularity — let alone the strangely soothing, galvanising effect it had on him — at the age of twenty-three, when he'd travelled to the United Kingdom as part of his study abroad program. He could still remember vividly that first night flying into London, the unnatural lights far below blinking and crawling densely — a cold, impassive beauty.

"Soooo, Matthew? How are you?" Wheeling around to Matthew, he clapped his hands together. "Did you enjoy the holiday?"

"Yes," Matthew replied, hands rising to grasp two invisible handlebars. "I rode my bicycle on Shodoshima."

Their discourse was slow and exaggerated, reminiscent of a pantomime.

"Oh, really?" Muguruma responded, turning — wide-eyed — to their audience of mildly perplexed children.

Hideo Muguruma's own relationship with the English language was complicated. As he'd sat on that runway in Kansai, looking out at the Asiatic sea while it turned — beyond the port window — from blood to oil, he still hadn't fully understood how that strange, lithe language had managed to burrow so deeply beneath his skin. Above the blood and oil swarmed frantic visions of the life he would lead in England — a future of eloquence, authority, and glamour — closing in like moths around a white-hot bulb. He'd heard English countless times before, of course — in songs, on the television, on the innumerable CDs he'd purchased to prepare for the English proficiency exam — but at some point it had ceased to be just an external sound.

"How abowchu?" Matthew asked, just the way Muguruma insisted — emphasising the elision between the words 'about' and 'you'.

"It was alright," Muguruma responded. "I fed my chickens."

"Is that all?"

"Yes." A tense pocket of silence. "But I'm a little tired today, actually."

"Oh," said Matthew. "Why? From feeding the chickens?"

"No." His face flinched with impatience. "I got up at four-thirty this morning."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"What, seriously?" Matthew broke character, eyes moist with exasperation.

"Yes," Muguruma replied. "I was doing my laundry."