The woman does not flinch, nor widen her eyes. She waits with lips pressed together, as though she knows that isn’t all of it.
Under the pressure of such kindness, Natsumi cracks open, telling her grandmother everything. Of the frogs that cling to the sides of her handbells when she dances kagura, of the fleet of walnut shell boats that clashed in a full-scale battle on the surface of the chozuya yesterday, of the tanukis that fell like dominos up the shrine stairs when one stepped on the tail of another. She tells her grandmother how no one else seems to see them, not even the priests nor the other miko. She speaks lastly of the man in the kimono, the man with the dancing eyes and the ever-present grin.
“I think I should go to the hospital,” Natsumi says. “To be assessed.”
But her grandmother smiles, smooths out the fabric of her pale pink skirt over worn, tired legs.
“Ah,” she says at last. “So you’ve met the Demon Prince.”
And although fear spreads through her at that name, at the admission that what she has seen is real, there is, too, a flickering of warmth that she is believed, that she is not alone.
Through the chill of that isolating space, Grandmother reaches for her hand. Her fingers are rough and wrinkled and warm as they clasp Natsumi’s, as the two drift together under the swirl of stars.
Natsumi steps lightly on the tatami-covered stage, jingling the handbells as she arcs to the sound of the flute and the thump of the odaiko drum. Beside her, Misato rings her own handbells, matching Natsumi step for step. Tourists lift their phones to snap photos and videos to bring home from their holidays in Okinawa.
She jingles the suzu handbells again, the sole of her socked foot tracing a slow arc across the bamboo floor. She tries hard to ignore the shimmering golden foxes that scurry in figure-eights around her legs, soft fur brushing against her hakama skirt as they dart underneath.
“You’re not hallucinating,” her grandmother had told her. “I saw them, too, when I worked at Naminoue as a girl. You get used to them.”
“Who are they?” Natsumi had asked. “What do they want?”
Relief, then. She wasn’t imagining them. But a wave of fear crashed over the ebb of relief.
She wasn’t imagining them.
“They’re spirits,” her grandmother had said. “Memories, perhaps, trapped in the fabric of the shrine’s long history. They want what any living thing has wanted—to exist, to be acknowledged.”
Natsumi flicks her wrist again, the handbells jingling. A crimson raven flutters down to land on top of Misato’s pointed hat, but the miko doesn’t seem to notice the added weight. As she turns her head, Natsumi sees the swirling stare of the Demon Prince from the top of the roof beside her, the sun glinting on his ebony horns as he reclines across the curved clay tiles. A pair of ravens peck at the roof near his feet, preening their slick black feathers without the slightest worry about the demon lurking beside them.
He’s been changing over the last few weeks, shifting. He’s grown larger, with horns that tangle around the bun in his hair. His eyes are brighter, his obi glowing at night like a flickering lantern tied around his waist. His hands are no longer human, but gnarled with knots for knuckles, claws for nails, and his skin holds a pale green sheen. The more Natsumi sees of the spirits under his charge, the more power it seems to give him.
She nearly stumbles as her foot comes down on a sleeping fox. The creature lets out a yelp and dashes off the stage, and she catches herself just before she falls. When she shakes the handbells, she finds them heavier than before—three frogs hang to the golden brim around the handle, their long legs dangling over the back of her hands. The music stops, and the frogs drop to the tatami, scattering at the tourists’ applause.
It’s magical, she thinks, to see these things, but it’s tiring too. Except for her grandmother long ago, no one else can see, nor understand. She must live this world alone, then pack it up with her things, file it away on the train ride to her nursing classes.
Misato takes the handbells from her, smiling, asking if she’d like to go for coffee with her and her boyfriend on Saturday. The crimson raven on her head pecks at the tassel on her hat.
The Demon Prince rises to his feet, his wooden sandals echoing on the clay tiles as he walks to the edge of the rooftop. When he steps into the air, he glides down as though he has wings of his own, as though there is no gravity nor any rules at all.
Natsumi forces a smile at Misato, and the miko leaves. But Natsumi is still, unable to move as the Demon Prince approaches. The Shisa dog-lions wag their stone tails as he walks past them, as he steps onto the raised tatami platform for the kagura dance.
He is terrible and frightening, and Natsumi longs to run away. His very presence seems to pulse with powerful magic, his eyes swirling with red stars and galaxies and the darkness of space.
“Kaori,” he says. “You’ve come back.”
At first Natsumi cannot find her voice. She never expected this other world to confront her so directly. She thinks of the demon mask her father would wear at Setsubun, how she would shriek and throw beans at him while she hid behind the couch cushions, how he growled between laughs as the beans pelted against his pale skin.
There is no basket of beans now, no warm and familiar smile behind a paper mask tied with string. But the Demon Prince’s voice is as soft as the golden foxes’ fur. And after a moment, she finds herself able to answer. “Kaori is my grandmother,” Natsumi manages. “I am Natsumi.”
His eyes look confused for a moment, then sad. “Ah,” he says. “Time is a strange thing to me.”
She pities him then, as his power and terror subside to his vulnerability.
“Is it not Showa anymore?” he asks.
Natsumi shakes her head. “Not even Heisei. It is Reiwa now.”
“Reiwa?” the demon says. “So it goes.” A raven perches on his shoulder, pecks at the cobalt threads coming loose on the neck of his kimono. “Well, Natsumi of Reiwa,” the Demon Prince says. “These eyes have seen Tokuji, Bunmei, Genji, Meiji, Showa, and others. And now they have seen Reiwa. Will you walk with me awhile?”
And at his smile her fear melts away, and Natsumi walks with the demon around the shrine, the thick heat of Okinawan summer cut by the flutter of raven wings and the twitch of tanuki tails.
Natsumi fills with the spirits of Naminoue, her world full of colour and surprise. She bursts to tell anyone who might understand. Only Grandmother listens, but it brings such a sad smile to her face that Natsumi stops telling her everything.
At night, she sneaks out to the shrine, where the Demon Prince waits, and the tanuki in their best straw hats, glasses filled with strawberry juice and plates teetering with purple beniimo tarts. She and the Demon Prince laugh as the water bugs clash their walnut boats against each other in a battle for glory and tart crumbs. Natsumi throws a paper origami ball for the Shisa, and the dog-lions leap from their pedestals with a crunch and a wag of stone tails. The Demon Prince laughs, his eyes lit with bright stars, fireflies catching on the horns that wrap around his head.
At home after, Natsumi lies in the dark silence with a heart full of foxes and tanuki, frogs and ravens. The spirits burst and flutter in her head like cherry petals. She sits up and pulls her laptop from the table beside her bed. It hums to life as she types. She sits up this night, and the next, long past essays and memorization of medications and filled practicum hours. She sends her manuscript to publishers, and waits, and writes another, and waits. Sometimes she writes with the Demon King peering over her shoulder, ravens pecking at her notebooks, tanukis tracking muddy paw prints across her words.
At last her first children’s book is published, Mr. Tanuki’s Tea. She has a signing at a bookstore in Naha, in Okinawa City, and another in Motobu. She laughs politely as children and adults ask about her book, how she came up with a tanuki preparing ma
tcha in a tea ceremony.
She doesn’t tell them it’s true, that he spun the whisk between his furry paws, that she knelt on the red carpet and waited next to a monarch of ravens and dreams. She doesn’t tell them how the lanterns flickered to match the fireflies’ glow, or that she’s seen the same elderly couple go over the mountain cliff four times now, and that there are never bodies on the beach below.
At her signing in Motobu, the Demon Prince walks in the door. His presence startles Natsumi, but no one else seems able to see him. He stands patiently in line to get his copy of the book signed, while lost fireflies cling to his horns and flash like tiny fireworks. A frog clings to the side of his obi, his back legs pedalling against the fabric, trying to gain his footing.
“Congratulations,” the demon says when he reaches her, stars and planets dancing through his eyes.
“I thought you couldn’t leave the shrine,” Natsumi whispers.
He grins, as always. “I can’t, Reiwa Miko. But you are as much a part of the shrine as any of us.”
Natsumi watches him leave after, fading into nothing as he touches the sunlight of the street outside. Will I be trapped in the fabric of the shrine too? she wonders. Will a brown-haired half-Japanese miko sweep the stone pathways into eternity? Will her soul lap against reality like the waves below the shrine, barely a whisper, but etching the stone away one breath at a time?
She writes more books, after that. Some are published, some stored in desk drawers. It’s wonderful, it’s painful. It tears her to shreds. But she has no choice. She is overflowing with a magic others can’t seem to understand. It is beautiful, and lonely, as she drowns in the light and colour of the demon’s galaxy of stars.
One Saturday, as she goes to the café with Misato and her boyfriend, they have brought a man to meet her. He shyly clutches Mr. Tanuki’s Tea in his hands, bowing as they’re introduced. His leg bumps the table just a little as they sit down. A friend of Misato’s boyfriend. He is nothing like the Demon Prince; he is clumsy, unsure of himself. He has short black hair and a wide nose, and he smells of cigarette smoke and the unforgiving muggy heat. His eyes are not full of stars, but they are warm and brown, and they crinkle around the edges when he asks Natsumi what she would like to drink.
The Demon Prince stands a little smaller when she goes back to the shrine that afternoon. His horns have receded from the bun in the back, his sandals more tranquil against the stone. He smiles, still, a raven perched on each shoulder. The water bug navy have struck a truce, and their shell boats lie empty beneath the walnut tree. The chozuya basin ripples only from a gasp of the coming fall wind.
It is a quiet fall day years later, when Natsumi again steps under the great stone arch of the Naminoue Torii. There are no tanuki tripping up the stairs, no firefly clouds nor walnut shell boats. But the deep red of the shrine is the same as she remembers, the sound of the rattling suzu bells as the thick ropes are swung with hope that the gods will hear.
Grandmother stands beside her, the baby girl in her arms. They are tied together with an embroidered crimson kimono, wrapped around them like a blanket. Natsumi chose one stitched with ravens and flowers and Shisa. The girl’s eyes are warm and brown, and the edges crinkle when she looks at the towering stone gate. They match her brother’s, whose little hand tugs at Natsumi as they bow together under the Torii.
Grandmother starts up the stairs, and Natsumi and the boy follow. She wonders if the Shisa will wag their tails, but then the little girl begins to cry, and Natsumi forgets everything else. She hovers above her daughter’s tiny face, cooing gently to her. If the dragon sculpture looks at her, she does not see it. She hears only her daughter’s cry, her son’s sigh as his patience wavers. She is tired, worn, folded in on herself like a paper crane. She is no longer the paper, but a new shape, creased and bent—the children’s mother, one of five mothers here at the shrine for omiyamairi, the first visit and blessing. Little children wander around the shrine, their parents pleading for obedience and quiet, bribing patience with sweets and jingling charms to keep the young ones amused.
Natsumi looks to the roof of the shrine, but the Demon Prince isn’t there. He faded so slowly before her, his horns shrinking, his obi dulling, his kimono fading from cobalt to a feathery black. The last time she saw him, he opened his mouth, and nothing but the caw of a raven came out.
Her next book is due in five months, but she struggles to write between feedings and laundry and comforting and playing. She isn’t sure she’ll return to her shift at the hospital after her leave. The world is bursting at the seams again, and she drowns in love and service. She is invisible yet exposed, everything and nothing at once. Longing to exist, to be acknowledged, to unfold just a corner of her origami life.
The tiny rattle tucked into the kimono of her daughter falls onto the stone path with a clatter. It sounds out like handbells, and her grandmother gasps with surprise.
Natsumi apologizes, dusts it off, tucks it back into her daughter’s tiny hand. The girl lets out a small yawn on small lips, wraps her tiny fingers around the rattle. Her eyes gleam as her eyelids lower, as sleep overtakes the girl who is too new to know the difference between reality and illusion, the expected world and the spirits.
Natsumi strokes a tired finger along the baby’s soft cheek, runs a hand over her son’s raven-black hair. There is magic in this, too, she thinks. And Natsumi smiles, even as she drowns in miracles.
As they step forward, she no longer looks for the Demon Prince. As they wave the tamagushi and pray over the baby, she no longer peeks at the Shisa or the chozuya or the stone path. Nutshell boats float in her memory, and one day she will tell her children about them, about eyes made of stars and the tails of golden foxes that once swished around her dancing feet.
Her grandmother’s eyes widen as she looks at the edge of the cliff across the rope barrier. The elderly couple, Natsumi thinks. But she knows her grandmother will not look down as the two fall under the weight of life, nothing left but a scrap of blue yukata floating on the shore.
She will look up into the sky, where two ravens will fly upward, and always have, their wings stretched over the turquoise water of the sea. They will fly like cranes unfolded, edges creased and ripped, magic from the seasons in their bones. And the sun will glisten on their feathers, swirling on their backs like the light of stars.
Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: They are wrong. You are everything you need to be. You do not need to fold into yourself and hide. There will be times when they will not understand, but you do not need their understanding. You will grow and unfold and flourish in the moonlight. And bathed in such bright light, you will not see them anymore.
The Hollow Oath
Brent Nichols
“Afternoon, Doctor.”
Marvin Perlman grunted in reply, wondering if the woman was mocking him as he circled around the stepladder blocking the sidewalk.
“You have to see this.” She stood on the third step, pressing a palm-sized box against the side of a light pole. She let go, then tapped the box. A giant “25” appeared, projected onto the road. “It’s for the anniversary.”
Marvin looked at the digits, which sparkled and changed colour. A quarter century of alien meddling is a travesty, he thought. It’s not something you celebrate.
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s garish.” He stepped off the sidewalk and walked through the numbers, his shoulders twinkling silver, then gold. He headed across the highway that cut through the heart of Fort MacLeod. Three days until the anniversary. Then all this nonsense will be over. We’ll still be in the same handbasket, but at least we can stop pretending we’re happy about our trip to hell.
A young man shuffled along the centre line, face blank, stepping in a rain-filled pothole and stumbling without noticing. Curved strips of metal hugged the sides of the kid’s skull. Stepping around
him would have been easy enough, but Marvin took a deep breath and marched straight ahead. Their shoulders hit and the kid rocked back. Marvin had time to register an expression of startled hurt before the kid vanished from his peripheral vision.
You’ve had a moment of awareness there in the fog, he thought. You should thank me. He shook his head. Bloody addicts. Someone should do something. “Back in my day,” he muttered, then stopped. There had been addicts before the Gliders came. The medical community, to be brutally honest, hadn’t done much to help them.
Gwen is right. You’re a grump. He couldn’t quite help smiling at the thought. She thought he was an old crank, but it didn’t seem to bother her. There was always such love in her voice when she called him a curmudgeon that for an instant it would stop being true.
A couple of kids came trotting down the road, dribbling a basketball around the potholes. They swung wide around a woman standing motionless near the sidewalk.
Marvin stopped beside her, compassion replacing his usual annoyance with memory addicts. Ellen was a special case. Her hair, unwashed, hung in tangles that didn’t hide the mnemonic capacitors behind her ears. Her face, so gaunt he could trace every bone of her skull, hung slack, just the hint of a smile showing, at odds with the deeply-etched lines of grief.
She was pungent, her clothes grimy and unkempt. They were good clothes, he noted. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d met someone with real material needs. Not since the Gliders. No, what she lacked no one could give her.
“Ellen?” he said gently, moving as close as his nose would let him. When she didn’t respond, he shook her arm. It took another, harder shake before her smile vanished. She looked around, caught sight of him, and almost focussed on his face before her chin started to wobble. A pair of tears ran down her cheeks, making lines in the grime.
“Ellen, it’s me. Marvin. Doctor Perlman.”
Seasons Between Us Page 35
