FICTION
KELLY MURASHIGE
HANGERS
She stares into her closet, at the metallic mess of hangers.
For so long, she treated hangers as her father did, pulling shirts off each one and leaving plastic shoulders bare. Then, once she started doing her own laundry, she copied her mother and left her naked hangers on the far right of the bar, jamming them together so their hooks overlapped.
It wasn’t until she was well into her twenties that she developed a style of her own, placing each hanger carefully on the right so all the hooks were straight. This habit was a sort of coping mechanism, her way of trying to deal with it all. She convinced herself if she could just get one thing right, everything else would come into alignment. It was like yoga, she reasoned, just with clothing hangers.
She checks the time. Her eyes opened early today, giving her an extra seven minutes before her alarm goes off. Instead of staying in bed, she pushed herself to her feet and told herself to do something productive.
She peers into her closet now. One of the few things she can control.
She stopped paying such close attention to the hangers sometime in the middle of winter, when just about everything started going wrong. Her former friend abandoned their newly revived text conversation. Her uncle’s bad cough turned out to be cancer. A family friend who had shown her an immense amount of kindness passed away. Rearranging some hangers won’t fix all of that.
Will it? Won’t it? Couldn’t it, somehow? If one flap of a little butterfly’s wings can cause a whole storm, couldn’t some hangers be what saves them all?
She organizes the hangers, shifting them around, dropping a few in the process and apologizing to her downstairs neighbors for the noise. Then, once she’s done, she takes a step back and studies her work. The hangers’ metal heads glint like mirthful eyes.
Behind her, her phone buzzes. Her time is up now. She must get on with her day.
Deep down, she knows the hangers won’t help. Yet if she can be the kind of person who believes, even a little, that something so small can bring about such a change, maybe she’s strong enough to survive.
Taking a hanger off the rod, she selects a shirt that says “Choose Joy” and tries. With everything she has, that girl really tries.
Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, Kelly Murashige is the author of the award-winning YA novel THE LOST SOULS OF BENZAITEN, as well as THE YOMIGAERI TUNNEL, which received a star from Publishers Weekly. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions.
