The nattering voices in the garden were indecipherable, at first, thrumming, elusive, like the buzzy hum of tower wires. When Yayoi tilted closer to try to catch up with them, they would slide and fade like the notes on a wonky violin. But in time, she grew more attuned to their nuances. The courgette’s pulsing, staccato repetition of syllables, the aubergine’s glassy, high-pitched bells. The string beans hissed at her like nasty swans. The pumpkins were friendlier, almost protective, with lilting, jovial, thumping voices, round and warm.

The girl loved the knobby turtle shell of the gourds, the spindly stalks of greens, the squishy bellies of the tomatoes. In time, she stopped being afraid. She knew no other humans who could understand these languages, but she wondered if she was special, chosen for some reason to be chummy with daikon and hakusai, to understand the existential anxieties of edamame. She loved walking in the garden, spying on beetles and butterflies, eavesdropping on the mustard and turnips. The scent of soil and foliage was elemental and filled her soul.

One night, she dreamed of dots, polka dots, circular pixels that were the essence of everything at the core. They moved so quickly that she was dizzy. When she opened her eyes, the dots were still there, they were everywhere, reeling, roiling, swallowing the ceiling, obliterating the thatched pitches of roofs, eating up the Sakura and the roads and the crowds at the market.

She could not get away from them. They swarmed her like the masses of millipedes on train tracks, monstrous white arthropods, but hers in rainbow technicolour. For years, there was no escape from the dots. Yayoi tried in vain to sweep them up, to catch them in nets, to poison them, but they ran right through her hands and all the walls like ghosts. The girl lived in eternal paranoia that they would swallow her whole, and they did, but still she walked and slept somehow, sleeping in their whirlwind slurry, waking to their eternal vortex.

The dots followed her year after year. There was no recourse and no escape. It was just a matter of time before she would disintegrate, until she would be completely obliterated by the churning flow of the dots. She was certain that she was but one small dot among the multitudes of dots, and that she would eventually be absorbed and disappear into their relentless flow. The only refuge was the garden, where the choir of pumpkins would perform apotropaic chants on behalf of their small friend, and she could huddle behind and in between them until her mother called her to come home.

One day, Yayoi decided to take matters into her own hands. She could not stop the conveyer belt of dots over every surface of her life, and she could not stop her fear of obliteration. So she began to make her own dots. She chose some gouache tubes, glossy black, juicy oranges and hot pinks. She began to paint her own circles over every conceivable surface, adding more dots to the world in her own way. She painted frenzied pastiches of tiny dots to infinity. She painted big fat dots. She painted dots in intricate patterns, and she painted them free and wild. She painted dots on her pumpkin friends, and on her dresses, and on walls and fences and rooftops. She painted dots on mushrooms and horses and trees.

Yayoi never stopped painting dots. Her terror was transformed into ritual participation in the natural obliteration of all the things that are and will be. The dots became art. Finally, others could see what she could see.

*Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) is a Japanese avant-garde conceptual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet, whose revolutionary abstract paintings are described in “Hypnotic and Alluring: Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets” by Sotheby’s (15 May 2020); link retrieved on 27 November 2025:
https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/hypnotic-and-alluring-yayoi-kusamas-infinity-nets

Lorette C. Luzajic

writes, edits, publishes, and teaches prose poetry and small fictions, usually ekphrastic. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Bending Genres, The Citron Review, The Disappointed Housewife, Flash Boulevard, Ghost Parachute, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Flash Fiction Review, Trampset, Unbroken, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions. Two of her flashes were chosen for Best Small Fictions anthologies.

She’s also the author of five collections of small fictions and/or prose poems: Disgust; The Rope Artist; The Neon Rosary; Pretty Time Machine; and Winter in June.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Mackinaw, a journal of prose poetry, which debuted on 15 January 2024. She is also the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal established in 2015 and devoted to literature inspired by visual art. Her ekphrastic journal’s first print anthology, co-edited with Clare MacQueen, was released in March 2024: The Memory Palace.

In addition, Lorette’s a teaching artist, and an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The White Rooms, ekphrastic flash fiction by Lorette C. Luzajic in Issue 27 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (March 2025); nominated for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Southern Soul, flash fiction and visual art, an homage to Lucinda Williams by Luzajic in Issue 26 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (January 2025)

⚡ Patience, and Other Virtues That I Lack, CNF by Luzajic in the Gratitude Issue (20X) of MacQ; nominated for Best of the Net 2025

⚡ Blue and Gold for Ukraine, mixed-media painting by Luzajic in MacQ (Issue 18, April 2023); nominated for Best of the Net 2024

⚡ The Triaminic Man, flash fiction by Luzajic in MacQ (Issue 14, August 2022); reprinted in Best Small Fictions 2023

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary by Clare MacQueen in Issue 9 of MacQ (August 2021), with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem by Luzajic in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net 2019 (selected as a Poetry Finalist) and the Pushcart Prize