The Cuckoo Colloquium

4 - Pinky Bell

Fifteen-year-old Pinky Bell was from Kyoto, Japan. She had a pageboy hairstyle cut with bangs in the front, along with almond-shaped eyes and stubborn baby pudge in her cheeks.

She also liked the color pink. She liked bells, too. That was what she must have been in a previous life-a tinkly, pink bell. That's why she adopted the pet name of Pinky Bell a long time ago, two years back, in junior high. She had a pink cell phone and a couple of pink bags, too. Her knee socks were pink, and her underwear was often pink. Sometimes, she even put her hair into tiny pigtails and decorated them with pink bands and bows.

"You dress like a toy doll," the American boy, Windy, had said to her during dinner, and Pinky Bell didn't know how to feel about that. If someone called you 'a toy doll', was that person being nice or rude? Westerners were just plain confusing.

When it came to her footwear, however, Pinky Bell may have miscalculated: She wore pink heels to the rain forest. They were not outrageously high heels; they were just slightly high. They were her pink travel shoes, with heels that lengthened her legs-legs she felt looked like two Japanese daikon, or fat radishes. She was pleased with the five centimeters the heels gave her; they made her look older, and she felt older, though walking in the rain forest required a good deal of concentration.

If any hiking was scheduled, especially night hiking, Pinky Bell could foresee a problem-like the one she had now...

In the darkened hut Pinky Bell had to pee, and the only toilet was in some stinky outhouse way at the other end of the lightless camp. She wriggled again; just thinking about the absence of a handy commode summoned the urge to make water even faster.

She was getting her share of insect melodrama, too-the buzzing, the droning, the rasping, the whirring, like little chainsaws-and it was growing in intensity as the moon climbed the night sky.

When she turned on her flashlight she saw cockroaches on the wall, and, boy, did she hate those things! At home, they flew right at her when she startled them in the night. That was terrifying-to have a cockroach soaring into you like it was some fanatic, willing to die for its species. She'd scream, and her father would show up with a thick manga, or a tissue box, and then there would be a bug murder, which was not very nice, even though the house did feel safer afterwards.

Nature frightened Pinky Bell-it was mean-spirited, especially a jungle. After dinner in the advancing darkness she had been peering down at the ground, at nature in all its mean-spiritedness: such a beautiful, young butterfly, and the ants were killing it right in front of her eyes, and just as it had crawled from its cocoon, and was spreading its wings to fly for the very first time!

The sad scene captivated her-the parade of happy ants carrying away pieces of the poor butterfly that never got the chance to flutter in the warm breeze. That was her, kind of, in an insect-like way: Pinky Bell was also a butterfly, with a little pink bell around its neck.

And this pink-belled butterfly had to pee badly.

"Would anyone like to go to the, uh, facilities?" She knew the word came out funny-too many troublesome 's' sounds. English pronunciation was a big problem, though she practiced often.

'I am a gyaru of tha warudo' - That was the way the sentence came out in the minivan, and the others fell over themselves hooting at her efforts to say "R" and "L". In her mind she could form the sounds perfectly: I am a girl of the world. But when it came to actually saying the "R" and "L", especially when they were put together-as in girl and world-her tongue twisted up into a perverse corkscrew and nothing came out right.