Satellite Love

by Genki Ferguson

  Snow was covering the windshield, blocking my view of the mall. I had been in the parking lot for a while by this point, and the inside of the car was only getting hotter. Some sweat got into my eyes, making them sting. I saw some banners on the other side of the street, sun-bleached flags waving at me to come closer. They said the mall was holding a fundraiser for a nearby city, which had been hit by an earthquake the month before.

  First, an earthquake, and now a freak snowstorm. Something abnormal was happening here. Was this a divine punishment? Did the people here do something to anger the gods? Did I? The snow started coming down thicker. Felt a lot less friendly.

  I wasn’t sure who to give my coin to. The gods, or the people? Five yen is worth almost nothing to humans. Couldn’t even buy bottled water or instant noodles. It’d make more sense to go to the shrine, throw the coin in the offering box, ring the bell, and clap my hands three times. Then I could ask for help. The bell would be so loud it might disturb the gods. Let them know we exist.

  But if I donated the coin, I would still be helping someone. The value shouldn’t matter, whether it’s five yen or five thousand. You never know how far a small gesture can go. I couldn’t decide. It was impossible to leave my seat. Even with the hole in the middle, the coin felt heavy in my hand. With five yen, I could wake the gods.

  ANNA

  IN RETROSPECT, I PROBABLY should have gone to the school nurse. Packed snow just wasn’t cutting it. Still, I definitely couldn’t go back to class now.

  As I walked through Sakita’s streets, the melting slush I held to my wrist dampened my sleeves. I looked down at my wrist, slightly swollen, and tested moving it in circles. No sharp pains, but a dull throb. Just a sprain; it would heal soon enough. I briefly considered stopping by the convenience store to buy painkillers but decided against it. Even the conbini wasn’t safe anymore.

  Far in the distance, I heard Westminster chimes. Lunch period must have ended, and my classmates would now be filing into Geography.

  With my left hand, I rolled my skirt up a couple of notches, not wanting to get the edges wet in the snow. The best course of action seemed to be killing time in Sakita for a while, and letting myself cool off. I didn’t want to go home just yet. I knew that if I did, I’d find another voicemail from Ms. Tanaka for my mother.

  Hello, Mrs. Obata? I’m afraid there’s been another incident with your daughter. Yes, this time it happened during lunch. I was told your daughter said something quite disturbing to her classmate, and quite frankly, I don’t think it would be appropriate to repeat it here. I should mention that this classmate was crying, however. There’s also the question of damages caused to school property…

  I hated that word. Daughter. Don’t hide my name like that. Say what you really think: Anna’s head isn’t screwed on quite right, and she’s making us nervous.

  The wind stung against my skin, my breath coming out in short, bitter bursts. I increased the pressure on my wrist. A sweet-potato truck cut through the slush in front of me, crooning its low, low prices from roof-mounted speakers. Line after line of low-rise homes stretched into the city beyond, their tiled roofs overlapping like beetle shells separated from their bodies. As I walked farther from school, I kept my eyes closed, testing how well I knew Sakita’s heart. The breathing exercises Mr. Hamada taught me came to mind, too. Empty your head and think of nothing other than your breath.

  In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose…

  There were maybe eight or nine girls in on Mina’s lunchtime joke. At 780 yen per meal, multiplied by nine, that was 7,020 yen spent overall. Enough to buy a new pair of Mizuno sneakers. Enough to buy a handful of cute Miffy pins.

  In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the…

  I wished they’d kept to teasing me about being Anna-terasu instead. Not even the goddess of light could avoid ridicule. What would she have done back there? Eyes half-shut, I pictured myself rising high above Sakita as I walked. I could swear my feet lifted off the ground at one point, as if the satellite were pulling me up into orbit. But then I would stumble, come crashing back down. No matter how hard I tried, I was still human.

  I gave up and opened my eyes, and found myself right across the street from Sakita Central City Mall. The roads were white, slippery where the snow was beginning to melt. As far as I could see, my footprints were the only ones in sight, already being erased.

  I saw then a pair of tire tracks, leading to a lone car abandoned in the middle of the parking lot. A humble silver two-door, with a Sapporo license plate. Curiosity got the best of me, and I went to investigate.

  The windows were fogged, but I could make out the outline of someone slouched in the passenger side. I knocked on the glass, prompting the person to lean over and hand-crank the window down. It was a boy, about my age, maybe. I didn’t recognize him at all.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  A hot blast of air came from inside the car, catching me off guard. Whoever this was, he really didn’t want to catch a cold.

  “Soki,” he replied.

  What an old-fashioned name.

  “You’re new. I’ve never seen you before,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Just moved here. Going to start school next week.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” he said. “We’ll be classmates, maybe.”

  I told him that seemed likely, and he peered over my shoulder, as though searching for someone in the completely empty lot we were in.

  “Are you waiting for someone?”

  A nod. “My mom.”

  “She’s shopping?” I asked. We were at a mall, after all.

  He nodded again. “I’m going to the shrine.”

  Soki seemed relatively normal. A little neurotic, judging from how he kept staring at his feet, but maybe he was just nervous around girls. The only unique thing about him was a scar from a cleft-lip surgery, running a thin line from his nose to a missing front tooth, leaving a gap in the middle of his mouth. He spoke without any difficulties despite this, though the clipped nature of his speech made it hard to tell for sure. Maybe it was a way to hide a lisp.

  I wanted to invite him out of the car, for fear that he might be slow-cooked alive against the dashboard. But when I leaned against the edge of the window, he recoiled a little, as though he hadn’t seen another human being in years.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “People call me Anna-terasu.”

  He glanced down at the way I was holding my wrist, concerned. “Strange nickname. Never heard anything like it. Where’d you get it from?”

  “I’m named after the sun goddess. My classmates think we look similar,” I said.

  “I can kind of see it,” he said, staring at me with a sudden interest. “Around the eyes maybe. You know, my dad—” but he caught himself.

  A tremor from the heart. Soki sat back and fiddled with the AC controls in the car. The system kicked into gear, fluttering the handful of Shinto charms hanging from the rear-view mirror. They reminded me of tea bags dipped into red and gold lacquer, holding small prayers instead of tea leaves.

  “Those are my mom’s,” he said, noticing my staring.

  “What are they for?”

  “Safety in traffic. All three of them.”

  There was an awkwardness to his speech, and not just because of his rapid-fire sentences. He didn’t really enunciate what he was saying, instead shortening his words and sentences as though conserving his breath, stringing them together into a mumble. I thought back to that license plate and wondered if what they said about people from the north was true.

  “Hey, you’re from Hokkaido, right?”

  His eyes widened a bit, surprised. “How’d you know?”

  “Are your tongues re
ally stiff because of the cold? Like, is that why our accents are so different?” I took a closer look at him, trying to catch any other differences between us.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I still talk this way in the summer, so…”

  I’d never met anyone from the north before. The snow continued to fall gently around me, making me wonder if I’d accidentally walked as far as Hokkaido. My lips were starting to chap from the cold, but I wanted to keep talking to Soki. What was he doing so far from home? Did he feel lonely here?

  “I’m not sure if the charms really work, by the way,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, I don’t know if the charms are real or not. My dad says they’re basically meaningless. Fake.”

  That line of thinking struck me as quite sad, and maybe even fundamentally wrong. “That’s stupid,” I said. “Why should it matter?”

  He stared back at me, too stunned to reply. I wasn’t sure if I’d said something rude. “Those charms probably don’t do anything,” I continued, “just cloth and paper, after all. Nothing magical. But your dad’s missing the point.”

  “What point?” he asked.

  “At least your mom believes in something. Even if charms don’t change anything, believing alone is worthwhile, right?”

  He said nothing in response, and for a second I thought I really had offended him. But then he laughed, and not in a cruel, mocking way either. A small, gentle chuckle, regretfully short. Different from what you hear in the south.

  At this he closed his mouth and turned his head away slightly, as though he had let a secret slip by mistake. His missing tooth probably made him self-conscious about his laugh. I wanted to tell him that it was okay. Things go missing sometimes—like teeth, fathers, even memories. It’s only normal. My grandpa especially, he’s lost more teeth and memories than Soki and me combined. But the words I wanted to say wouldn’t come out, were stuck in the same part of my chest that hurts whenever Grandpa forgets my name.

  I had been staring at Soki for a minute or so before he finally looked up at me, furrowed his brow a little. Maybe even smiled.

  “You’re weird.”

  And for the first time, I could tell this was meant as a compliment.

  * * *

  *    *    *

  When I got home, there was a surprise waiting for me. The voicemail left by the school was wholly different than what I was expecting.

  Hello, Mrs. Obata? This is Ms. Tanaka calling about your daughter. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of an incident, and Anna had to leave halfway through the day. I spoke to some of the girls in her class, and they mentioned that she had fallen ill, perhaps from food poisoning? Anyway, please do let her know that we hope she gets better soon, and that we will be working to ensure she doesn’t fall behind in class.

  Also, regarding the parent-teacher meetings we have yet to set up. I understand that your work keeps you busy, but we would greatly appreciate if you—

  I deleted the message without bothering to listen to the rest. A part of me felt dangerously excited. My classmates were afraid of me. They were too scared to tell Ms. Tanaka the truth.

  It was getting dark out, and I lay down on my futon, not bothering to change into pajamas. My wrist was already feeling better; by tomorrow I might forget that it was injured at all. Downstairs, Grandpa would be sleeping, having reheated the dinner I’d fixed and spent the remainder of the day on his sudoku. He wouldn’t have noticed that I had come home late. If anything, he wouldn’t have even remembered that I was supposed to come back.

  That night, too exhausted to get out of bed, I forgot to watch for the satellite. A cool breeze swept into my room, a northern wind. I wondered what Soki was doing at that moment. If his way of talking would warm up in the Sakita air. If he would always hide that missing tooth from me when he laughed.

  As I lay there, eyes shut and fading away, I could feel the LEO’s constant gaze pinning me to this world. Like the weight of snow falling upon your body. Like the embrace of someone you love as you sleep.

  SATELLITE

  I THINK MY FAVOURITE thing about the humans was how they couldn’t fathom the thought of being alone. Take their religions, for example. Another common theme I noticed—besides their need for outcasts and scapegoats—is that the vast majority believed in some higher deity. It was as if the thought of being stranded in the universe was so painful, so impossible to accept, that the humans needed to create a greater power to watch over them.

  It was completely illogical, completely beyond reason, and completely fascinating. Fear, love, confusion, hope. Faith.

  Aside from the occasional micrometeoroid or space dust, 577 kilometres up above the Earth I was all alone. No heaven, no celestial realm, no omniscient deity in sight. Sorry, Homo sapiens.

  That peculiar adolescent girl, Anna, was back in school, barely paying attention while her teacher—a taller, older human—stood in front of a chalkboard. At the back of the class, I noticed a window had been broken, now boarded up to prevent a draft. This surprised me somewhat, as I hadn’t seen this during any of my earlier observations.

  Today, the older human was accompanied by someone else. A boy.

  “As some of you have already heard, a new friend will be joining class 2-A. His family is originally from up in Hokkaido, so I’m sure there is much for him to adjust to. I would greatly appreciate it if you could welcome him with sincerity.” The adult turned to the boy. “Please introduce yourself.”

  The boy self-consciously straightened his back and stared straight ahead, arms by his sides. After what felt like an eternity, but was in reality only 4.7 seconds, he spoke.

  “Pleased to meet you. My name is Soki Tachibana. I am new to this city, and I humbly put myself in your hands.”

  Soki gave a deep bow—another interesting convention—then took a seat at the back of the class. The other adolescent humans began whispering almost immediately, before being cut off by the teacher.

  “Right! Well, I hope you will enjoy Sakita, Soki. Continuing on with our lesson plan, many people believe that Amaterasu’s story ends with the cave incident. This is simply not true. In reality…”

  I hadn’t been observing Anna at the time, focusing instead on the peculiar new child. When I did set my ETM sensors back to Anna, sitting closer to the front of the class, I noticed a 12.7 degree straightening in her posture, her gaze set dead ahead. Her previously relaxed expression, which I’d come to recognize as boredom, was now rigid. Aside from the occasional blink, she could have passed as a statue.

  “…and so, Amaterasu, ruling over the heavens, was tasked with finding someone suitable to rule over the Earth. For this she chose her son, Ama-no-Oshiho-mimi…”

  From my aerial perspective, it was quite clear that none of Anna’s classmates were paying attention to the adult. In one form or another, they were all preoccupied with their new classmate. A couple of the female students kept sneaking glances backwards, while one male student passed a note to Soki, which, upon magnifying, revealed a question:

  What’s with the lip? Did you get in a fight?

  “…Ama-no-Oshiho-mimi accepted his mother’s offer. However, standing on the bridge that linked the heavens to the Earth, he was horrified to see the turmoil that was happening in the mortal realm. It seems as though, even back then, people were incapable of getting along…”

  I watched as Anna, with an unnaturally fixed stare, tried her hardest to focus on the speaker at the front of the room. The pressure of Soki’s gaze kept her locked in place, unable to move naturally.

  “And so, Amaterasu’s son decided to not cross that bridge, to not come down to Earth. Instead, he retreated back to the heavens, denying us his protection. A cautionary tale, I believe. Any questions?”

  Much to everyone’s surprise, Soki raised his hand from the back of the class.

 
“That’s not the end.”

  “Excuse me?” the teacher asked.

  “I mean, that’s not how the story ends. We do have someone looking out for us.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that—”

  “After Ama-no-Oshiho-mimi went back home, he had a son. Ninigi-no-Mikoto. And Ninigi wasn’t afraid to come down from the heavens. He wanted to help us here on Earth.”

  “Is that so?” the teacher replied. “You know your stories quite well!” Her eyebrows lifted by 0.4 centimetres, an attempt at hiding annoyance.

  “They’re not stories,” he said, quietly.

  At this Anna turned towards Soki, perhaps forgetting how nervous she had been moments earlier. I recognized that expression on her face—it was the same one she wore when staring through the telescope late at night.

  Watching those humans argue over their legends triggered something within me. I had an awful thought, then, one that I desperately wanted to revoke. The humans below had creators, in their gods and their parents, but who did I have?

  Anna turned back to face the teacher, eyes unfocused, clearly in the midst of some other reverie. Of everyone on Earth, she was the only one to stare up at me, night after night. She was the only one aware of my existence.

  GRANDFATHER

  I CAN’T SEEM TO find my keys. It’s the strangest thing. They were in my hands a moment ago, but now they aren’t there. I think I’m getting forgetful. I went grocery shopping today—or was it yesterday?—and bought milk. When I came home, the fridge was full of fresh cartons already! I wonder how that happened.

  My daughter, Yoshiko, tells me forgetfulness is a symptom of old age. I barely see her anymore. We live in the same home, yet she’s always gone. I tell her it’s dangerous for a girl her age to be out and about all the time, but she just laughs and tells me she’s nearly fifty years old now. Fifty! Imagine that. I don’t remember her turning forty, thirty, or even twenty, but here she is, a fully grown adult. When did that happen?