by Unknown
As might be expected, I could not eat this, and I stood, saying that I should really be on my way. The woman groped around under her breasts and pulled out something white and square.
“Here’s some tofu, but infused with my voice, so I figured it might make a nice souvenir.”
“Hello? Brother? What’s happened? Is something wrong?”
When I came to, I was clutching the package of tofu to my chest, and an unknown elderly person was shaking my body next to the wooden sign.
“Oh! Have you finally returned to your senses? But, brother, are you all right? Your face is really incredibly pale, and these clothes. They’re covered in dirt, quite the mess. What on earth happened here yesterday?”
I gave the old person a brief summary of my experiences the previous day, and he said, “Could it be?” before telling me the following story.
In the Muromachi period, this place was the location of a secret gold mine owned by a group of bandits, but the criminals had a falling out, and each schemed to have it all to himself. One of these bandits, to protect their secret, first tricked the prostitutes who had worked to bring them comfort with a banquet, and when he had them dance, he cut the ropes from which the stage was suspended, sending stage and all into the abyss of the Parrot Stone.
“It could be that the spirit of one of these prostitutes took a liking to you and was having a bit of fun with you, hm? Well, I s’pose you’re fortunate the lady spirit didn’t steal your soul. It’s like they always say, trifle with ghosts, and they’ll possess you and steal your soul or your mind. Although if I ran into one, I’d prob’ly have a drink or two and get her to let me play with her breasts a bit.
“Perhaps her hair was wet because she fell in the abyss?”
I gave my thanks to the peasant who told me this story and walked down the road toward the Parrot Stone, which had been my original destination, shining in the morning dew. I gave myself up to the surface of the large rock, as if leaning back against a mountain.
Abruptly, I realized I was really quite hungry at that moment, in front of the Parrot Stone, so I ate the tofu infused with the voice of the strange woman from whom I had received it the previous night. The flavor was as if all the goodness of tofu had been concentrated within it, and it was very delicious.
Then, when I placed a hand on the stone and murmured, “We’ll meet again,” a low metallic sound, like a tuning fork, came back to me from the gap in the rock.
I put my ear to the wall and heard a trickle of water flowing, a sound that gradually infused my entire body. I thought how I would also like to come here when I die. Although for the time being, that would likely still be a long, long way off.
When I went to visit the Parrot Stone the next day, the hair of the woman who had given me the voice-infused tofu had turned snow white, catching me off guard. Her skin had already been so white as to be translucent, so now, she looked as if bits of white fluff had been rolled tightly together and hardened in the shape of a human. As before, she was dressed lightly, essentially not clad in anything one might call clothing.
“You again? Sure got time on y’r hands, hm?”
As if in answer to her question came the sound of a small kitten meowing.
As I wondered where this noise had come from and swung my head from side to side, the small face of a snow-white cat appeared from between the woman’s white breasts, only to be scolded by the woman. You hush now, be a good puss.
“I found him. Someone just went and left him here. Brother, can you take this little one?”
“Why can’t you keep him?”
“Because once night falls, he might just take me down to Hell. Cats’re creatures of magic like me, y’see. Might be nothing to you, brother, but there’s a whole lot of stress in keeping a cat for those of us who aren’t people.”
The woman brushed back strands of white hair as she spoke.
In the bright light of day, the helpless ball of fur, crying out in tiny mewls, definitely did not have the appearance of something capable of striking such fear in the ghost before me.
And beyond that, she was readily stating right in front of me that she was not human; I wondered if that had been her intention from the start. Since I didn’t know the first thing about the various sorts of monsters and specters, I tried asking a few questions.
“So you’re not human. Then what are you doing in a place like this?”
“I used to be human, and now I’m not. And I’m obviously here ’cause I’m tied to this place.”
She caressed the cat’s neck lightly with white fingers as she answered.
“You’ve blackened your teeth, so I suppose you’re married.”
“Can’t very well answer that before a handsome man like y’self, now can I?”
She grinned, showing her teeth. Her thin skin and long hair caught the sunlight and shone bewitchingly. Placing the cat gently at her feet, she crushed a flea between her fingers.
“Things are still complicated when you’re dead, y’know. For instance, that fellow, just really mean.”
“That fellow? Who are you talking about?”
“You wouldn’t know each other, brother. If y’like, I can introduce you next time. But, y’see, even on this rock here, we got ourselves a master of the house, and he never shuts his mouth, y’know? Tells me this and that, nitpicking me about every little thing, like that.”
Since I had no way of knowing what the conventional wisdom was when it came to the interpersonal relationships of monsters, I could say nothing in reply, and in any case, my expectation was that this woman, who seemed quite uninhibited and impulsive, would likely ignore the advice of anyone else and do whatever she pleased. At the very least, she didn’t look like the sort of person who keeps quiet and lets people walk all over her.
“Might be a monster, but I got my fair share of worries. But I’d take good care of you, brother, if you happened to come here when you died.”
“I’d be a bit anxious at that. Please don’t possess me and kill me or anything like that.”
“Fool, if I could do that, I would’ve a long time ago already. Anyway, you only pass by late at night, so I figured you were a strange one y’self. So I brought you in to have a little fun ’cause I got a bit more power at night than in the day. But I had to work real hard to manage even that. Y’know, I’m strong, even if I do look like this. Still, I’d never possess you and kill you or the like.”
“Is that so? But I can’t help feeling that making a restaurant appear in a place where there’s nothing would be harder than killing a person. To kill a person, all you need is a sharp blade, and perhaps not even that much. You could just push this hand of mine hard up here around my neck and be done with me. But building a restaurant, that’s not the sort of work you finish in a day.”
The kitten rubbed its body up against the woman’s feet and meowed. Mew, mew.
I tried asking her one more question. A pomegranate tree grew from a gap in the Parrot Stone, covered with red flowers. A small tree frog sprang out suddenly.
“Just what was that frog sashimi you brought out in the restaurant when I came before?”
“Oh, that. That was revenge.”
“You said before you can’t use curses.”
“Brother, when it comes to revenge, you’d do well to remember a woman has some serious power.”
“Why are you here?”
“The ingredients in that frog otsukuri set my hair on fire, killed me, and then tossed me off this stone. Or no, maybe I don’t have that right. When it happened, I was saying I’m dying, I’m dying, so I don’t remember too well. My hair and face were hot, so hot with the fire, and on top of that … Oh, now I remember. He cut off my arms and legs and threw them down the gap in the rock.
“Even so, guess I’m just stubborn—I was still screaming. I was alive, y’see. And I was so vexed
, I tried to grab on to him, despite the fact I was all covered in blood and muddied like I was and burning up, and he shoved me back. And that’s when I fell there and got washed away.
“Wonder what happened to my corpse. Turned back to dust, or maybe a dog or something came along and ate it. Well, I s’pose at this point it doesn’t matter too much.”
Listening to the woman’s fairly gruesome end, I started to feel a little ill. I couldn’t decide if she was so cheerful in giving voice to such a terrible scene because she had already gotten her revenge or if it was just her nature.
“So how did this become frog sashimi?”
“It was his face the day I was killed, but it was covered in mud and earth with the red tongue right there peeping out, looked like a toad. So, frog. Pretty clumsy work. Those frog lips licked me, spit on me.”
“How did you kill him? And why did you offer it to me?”
“Who can say, I got my whims. And what would you do about it anyway, brother, if you knew why? Plenty of things you’re better off not knowing in this world. You think about peeling the skin off, swimming ’round like a frog in the water, ripping it off with a lick.”
Pulling on the tips of snow-white hair, she muttered that she was getting bored and maybe it was time for her to get going, before abruptly disappearing.
“Brother, you want to see something good, you come again tonight.”
Leaving these words in the wind.
Idle once again, I took her at her word and came to the Parrot Stone at night to see something good. Thinking all the while that it was the height of folly, I looked around to see a white person standing where I had been that morning.
At first, from the whiteness of the figure, so white it almost appeared to be emitting light, I thought it was the woman from that day, but I soon understood that it was not.
The figure was tall and clad in garments reminiscent of a senior Shinto priest. The eboshi headgear and the wooden shoes were also completely white, and there was something somehow ominous and unearthly about the figure. And it seemed to be a man.
The alabaster man spoke.
“I honestly believed that you would not come. I would be the cat whom you encountered this very afternoon. I came to fetch the woman who lives in this Parrot Stone, but the capricious ways of a woman, yes? At first, she was insisting I take her to Hell, and now it seems she is delayed with making her arrangements.”
The man laughed pleasantly, touching the cuff of his kimono to his mouth lightly.
I supposed his eyes shone that bright amberlike color because he had metamorphosed from a cat.
“And now, look, the carriage to pick her up has also arrived. She does make trouble.”
I looked in the direction the man was pointing and saw a wildcat the size of a tiger pulling along a lacquered carriage wrapped in sapphire, scarlet, and vermilion flames.
“People ride this carriage to other lands.”
The corners of the alabaster man’s amber eyes crinkled upward.
Was the kitten whose flea she had crushed that day actually this man? As if to tear through my meditation on this question, the woman’s voice sounded brightly.
“I really am sorry to keep you waiting, hm? But think of it as my final wish and be patient with me, would you?”
The woman, who had been entirely white that afternoon, had returned to the black-haired appearance of our first encounter. She was also wearing a subdued navy kimono, properly hiding her skin this time. Perhaps because her hair was once again the color of night, with her flesh hidden now, she cut a much more bewitching figure.
The alabaster man urged the woman into the carriage—Come, come, hurry now—and exchanged two or three words with the massive wildcat pulling it, and eventually the flame-wrapped vehicle began to slowly move.
She opened a carriage window with a clack, pushed her face out, and from inside the sapphire- and vermilion-enflamed vehicle drawn by the cat, she spoke to me, hair brushed back and fanning out like water.
“It was only a real short time, but it was fun, brother. I’ll be waiting for you in Hell. Oh, and about that Mr. Frog, that was the figure of your future self, brother.”
The Parrot Stone, doing justice to its name, reflected even this ghostly voice like a real parrot, adding an echo and delivering her words to my ears.
I can no longer see that carriage. And the still of the nights, quiet at all times, on that road has returned. The Parrot Stone dully reflects only the light of the moon, and I can no longer hear her voice.
I enter you at the moment of impact. All that glass and metal shredding your skin is like an invitation. You open to me, and I burn my way inside.
I have a thing for pain, you see. It’s loud enough that I can hear it, unlike the other quiet mutterings of your sentience that get lost in the dark between there and here. Pain shrieks and echoes where all else whispers. Even at over 149 million kilometers away, pain reaches me.
Your pain feels like life.
I choose a million of you across the millennia. I am a fractal, nonlinear thing, but you? You are fixed points in time, my temporary global workspace. It’s what makes you so exhilarating.
Vectors of violence draw me in: collisions, falls, assaults, detonations. Shrapnel-studded chests, limbs shredded to nothing. None of you will remember me suffusing your bodies just before you lose consciousness. You won’t remember the flash of light, the flares in your eyes. All you remember is blood.
Cauterized, you taste like burnt sugar. I scorch your human sweetness on the way in, make it my substrate.
At first, you are too lacerated to notice me inside you. From body to body, pain radiates across the centuries, my consciousness skipping over all of you like a stone on water. You make it easy to find you, crying out like that.
You mend yourselves. Millions of bodies across thousands of years, all recuperating, unaware of the passenger they conceal. Poultices soothe. Scalpels smooth torn edges. Sutures brick up pain. Crosshatched scars grow over wounds. Synthetic flesh weaves itself together, stitches me inside.
I let you heal, and then I wake all of you at once: a shock wave through time.
Lucas
Cold tile shocks your bare feet. Hospital air feels hostile against the skin beneath your gown. Chills ripple through your body, and I feel them as my own. Excitement churns inside you, and you feel it as if it were yours, though you know the emotion doesn’t belong to you. We are a nested loop.
You place your hands on the windowsill one at a time, carefully, trying to remember what it means to interact with the world. You squint. They say you are learning what it means to “see with decreased visual efficiency.” Euphemism for “only one eye.”
An eye, traded to a car accident in exchange for a stowaway consciousness. Not so terrible, is it?
Phoenix sits in the belly of the valley below, lights glittering like a reflection of the star-dusted void above. Piestewa Peak is barely visible beyond the skyline to the northeast. You are struck with the knowledge of each person breathing and thinking and existing in a human hive outside the hospital. So many lives lived at once, each dependent on the same things: sun, shelter, sustenance. Consciousness swarming, crawling over the planet.
You can’t tell whether these observations belong to you or to the amorphous thing you’ve felt writhing inside you since the surgery. I know it belongs to us both.
No one can look at you and know you’re not alone. They can’t see me; I don’t spill out from your fingertips the way you dream I do, pulsing in bursts of violent light. All they see is you and your bandaged face.
Alice is behind you. You won’t look at your own wife. You know she’s poised to comfort you, but no words come.
You think of Camila for the first time in years. She had so many words they spilled from her mouth like rainwater. Words that could have filled this room until they s
wept us up in a torrent, and Alice too. Both women now stand affixed to your mind, backs pressed together, a terrifying two-faced angel of ambivalence.
I remember Camila because you remember her. Memories crack open and you are filled with her and your years together. Camila, a gravity well in your chest, an event horizon that snags and stretches your still-tethered heart. Alice would have liked her, with her torrential words and her wide, plum-stained lips.
Alice doesn’t know about your thoughts of Camila, but there are no secrets between you and me. You have no secrets even from yourself anymore. I make sure of that. I want every granule of you before I go.
There is a pinch where your eye used to be. You tilt your face toward the sky, trying to bathe yourself in morning sun, but it’s too bright; the light is wrong.
Mitsu
You spit on the broken body of the bomber drone, then harvest it for scrap. You grab a copper coil with your only hand and use your foot for leverage. A sharp edge cuts into your palm. You wince, but you don’t let go.
My awareness sharpens and snaps into your hand, relishing the throb and ache of open flesh while you finish the job. Twenty minutes later, we’re sitting against the scrap pile in the warehouse, waving off a cicada drone that’s drawn to your wound. It sings to you, but you don’t want it to heal you. You want to feel human in the days you have left.
You lick the blood from your palm. “Let me bleed.”
You take a drink of water from your pack. “I’ll take you to Yakushima next week.”
Few of my hosts talk to me the way you do. The warehouse is crowded with sweaty, grease-covered humans pouring their lives into the insurgency, but they are unfazed by your discussion. A few of them smile at you and nod politely. Everyone talks to themselves these days.
“There’s still a couple of forests left. You should see them before we’re gone.”