Worlds Seen in Passing

by Irene Gallo

  Young Makino rubs the end of the cucumber.

  Is there no way to befriend them, Mother? But she doesn’t say those words, she merely thinks them, as her mother digs out the last stroke, the tail end of no in Ma-ki-no.

  She frowns at the display, or perhaps at the memory. If I throw a cucumber in the hot spring it will merely be cooked, she thinks. She buys a few anyway. At home, she hesitates, and then picks one up and scratches in Tetsuya’s name with a knife. She drops it into the river while biking to work the following morning. The rest of them she slices and eats with chilled yogurt.

  * * *

  When it appears next it is close enough that if it reached out it could touch her, but it stays in place.

  “Shall I recite some poetry for you?”

  She shakes her head. She thinks, the skins we inhabit and the things we long to do inside them, why are they so different?

  “I don’t even know your name,” she says.

  The way its beak cracks open looks almost like a smile. “I have many. Which would please you?”

  “The true one.”

  It is quiet for a moment, then it says, “I will give you the name I gave the rice farmer’s wife, and the shogun’s daughter, and the lady that died on the eve of the firebombs.”

  “Women you have loved?” Her own voice irritates her, thin and breathless in the steam-filled air.

  “Women who have called me Kawataro,” it says. “Women who would have drowned, had I not saved them and brought them back to life.”

  “Kawataro,” she says, tears prickling at the corner of her eyes. “Kawataro, why did you save me?”

  “Kindness is always worth saving.”

  “Why do you say I am kind?”

  It tips its head, the water inside sloshing precariously. It seems to be saying, will you prove me wrong?

  She swallows, lightheaded, full of nothing. Her pulse simmers in her ears. She crosses the distance between them and presses herself against its hard body, kisses its hard little mouth. Its hands, when they come up to stroke her back, are like ice in the boiling water.

  * * *

  Kawataro does not appear in the onsen the next time she visits. There are two foreigners sitting in the bath, smiling at her nervously, aware of their own intrusion. The blonde woman, who is quite lovely, chats with Makino in halting Japanese about how cold it is in winter, how there is nothing more delightful than a warm soak, or at least that’s what Makino thinks she is saying. Makino smiles back politely, and does not think about the feeling rising in her stomach—a strange hunger, a low ache, a sharp and painful relief.

  * * *

  This is not a fairytale, Makino knows, and she is no princess, and the moon hanging in the sky is only a moon, not a jewel hanging on a queen’s neck, not the spun silk on a weaver’s loom. The man she loves is dying, snowfall is filling her ears, and she is going to come apart unless somebody saves him.

  The bakery closes for the winter holiday, the last set of customers buying all the cakes on Christmas Eve. Rui comes over as Makino is removing her apron. “Mizuki-san. Thank you for working hard today.” She bows. “I’ll be leaving now.”

  “Thank you for working hard today,” Makino echoes. She’s not the owner, but she is the eldest of the staff, the one who looks least attractive in their puffy, fluffy uniforms. Rui and Ayaka are college students; Yurina and Kaori are young wives, working while they decide whether they want children. Makino gets along with them well enough, but recently their nubile bodies make her tired and restless.

  She never had her own children—a fact that Tetsuya mourned, then forgave, because he had a kind heart, because he knew her own was broken. She used to console herself by thinking it was a blessing, that she could keep her slim figure, but even that turned out to be a lie.

  Rui twists her fingers in her pleated skirt, hesitating. Makino braces herself for the question, but it never comes, because the bell over the door rings and a skinny, well-dressed boy steps in. Rui’s face breaks into a smile, the smile of someone deeply in love. “Just a minute,” she calls to the boy. He nods and brings out his phone, tapping away. She turns back to Makino, and dips her head again.

  “Enjoy yourself,” Makino says, with a smile.

  “Thank you very much. Merry Christmas,” Rui answers. Makino envies her; hates her, briefly, without any real heat. Rui whips off her apron, picks up her bag, and runs to the boy. They stride together into the snowy evening.

  * * *

  That night, the foreigners are gone, and Kawataro is back. It tells her about the shogun’s daughter. How she would stand in the river and wait for him, her robes gathered around one fist. How her child, when it was born, was green, and how she drowned it in the river, sobbing, before anyone else could find it. How Kawataro had stroked her hair and kissed her cheeks and—Makino doesn’t believe this part—how it had grieved for its child, their child, floating down the river.

  “And what happened?” Makino says, trailing one finger idly along Kawataro’s shoulders. They are sitting together on the edge of the tub, their knees barely visible in the water.

  Kawataro’s tongue darts over its beak. Makino thinks about having that tongue in her mouth, tasting the minerals of the bathwater in her throat. She thinks about what it means to be held in a monster’s arms, what it means to hold a monster. Kappa nappa katta, kappa nappa ippa katta.

  Am I the leaf he has bought with sweet words, one leaf of many?

  Kawataro turns to her, face solemn as it says, “She drowned herself.”

  It could not save her, perhaps; or didn’t care to, by then? Makino thinks about the shogun’s daughter: her bloated body sailing through the water, her face blank in the moonlight, the edges of her skin torn by river dwellers. She thinks of Kawataro watching her float away, head bent, the water in its sara shimmering under the stars.

  Katte kitte kutta.

  Will I be bought, cut, consumed?

  She presses her damp forehead against Kawataro’s sleek green shoulder. Have I already been?

  “How will this story end?” she asks.

  It squeezes her knee with its webbed hand, then slips off the ledge into the water, waiting for her to follow. She does.

  She spends Christmas Day in the hospital, alternately napping, reading to Tetsuya, and exchanging pleasantries with the doctors and nurses who come to visit. She leans as close as she can to him, as if proximity might leech the pain from his body, everything that makes him ache, makes him forget. It won’t work, she knows. She doesn’t have that kind of power over him, over anyone. Perhaps the closest she has come to such power is during sex.

  The first time she and Tetsuya made love he’d been tender, just as she imagined, his fingers trembling as he undid the hooks of her bra. She cupped his chin and kissed his jaw and ground her hips against his, trying to let him know she wanted this, he didn’t need to be afraid. He gripped her hips and she wrapped her legs around him, licking a wet line from his neck to his ear. He carried her to the bed, collapsing so that they landed in a tangled pile, desperately grappling with the remainders of each other’s clothing. His breath was ragged as he moved slowly inside her, and she tried not to cry out, afraid of how much she wanted him, how much she wanted him to want her.

  On his lips that night her name was a blessing: the chant of monks, the magic spells all fairytales rest on.

  Now he stirs, and his eyes open. He says her name with a strange grace, a searching wonder, as if how they came to know each other is a mystery. “Makino?”

  “Yes, my darling?”

  His breath, rising up to her, is the stale breath of the dying.

  “So that’s where you are,” he says at last. He gropes for her hand and holds it. “You’re there, after all. That’s good.” He pauses, for too long, and when she looks at him she sees he has fallen asleep once more.

  * * *

  The next time they meet, they spend several minutes soaking together in silence.

  She breaks it
without preamble. “Kawataro, why do you love me?” Her words are spoken without coyness or fear or fury.

  “A woman in grief is a beautiful one,” it answers.

  “That’s not enough.”

  Kawataro’s eyes are two black stones in a waterfall of mist. It is a long time before it finally speaks.

  “Four girls,” it says. “Four girls drowned in three villages, before they fixed the broken parts in the bridges over the river. My river.” It extends its hand and touches the space between her breasts, exerting the barest hint of pressure. Her body tenses, but she keeps silent, immobile. “You were the fifth. You were the only one who accepted my hand when I stretched it out. You,” it says, “were the only one who let me lay my hands upon you.”

  The memory breaks over her, unreal, so that she almost feels like Kawataro has cast a spell on her—forged it out of dreams and warped imaginings. The terrible rain. The realization that she couldn’t swim. The way the riverbank swelled, impenetrable as death. How she sliced her hand open on a tree root, trying desperately to grab onto something. How she had seen the webbed hand stretched towards her, looked at the gnarled monkey face, sobbed as she clung for her life, river water and tears and rain mingled on her cheeks. How it tipped its head down and let something fall into her gaping, gurgling mouth, to save her.

  “I was a stupid little girl,” she says. “I could have drowned then, to spare myself this.” She laughs, shocking herself; the sound bounces limply against the tiles.

  Kawataro looks away.

  “You are breaking my heart, Makino.”

  “You have no heart to break,” she says, in order to hurt it; yet she also wants to be near it, wants it to tell her stories, wants its cold body to temper the heat of the water.

  It looks to the left, to the right, and it takes a moment for her to realize that it is shaking its head. Then in one swift motion it wraps its arms around her and squeezes, hard, and Makino remembers how kappa like to wrestle, how they can force the life out of horses and cattle by sheer strength. “I could drain you,” it says, hissing into her ear. “I could take you apart, if that would help. I could take everything inside you and leave nothing but a hollow shell of your skin. I do not forget kindness, but I will let you forget yours, if it will please you.”

  Yes, she thinks, and in the same heartbeat, but no, not like this.

  She pushes against it, and it releases her. She takes several steps back and lifts her head, appraising.

  “Will you heal my husband?” she asks.

  “Will you love me?” it asks.

  The first time she fell in love with Tetsuya, she was making tea. The first time she fell in love, she was drowning in a river.

  “I already do.”

  Kawataro looks at her with its eyes narrowed in something like sadness, if a monster’s face could be sad. It bows its head slightly, and she sees the water inside it—everything that gives it strength—sparkling, reflecting nothing but the misted air.

  “Come here,” it says, quiet and tender. “Come, my darling Makino, and let me wash your back.”

  * * *

  Tetsuya drinks the water from Kawataro’s sara.

  Tetsuya lives.

  The doctors cannot stop saying what a miracle it is. They spend New Year’s Eve together, eating the osechi-ryori Makino prepared. They wear their traditional attire and visit the temple at midnight, and afterward they watch the sunrise, holding each other’s cold hands.

  * * *

  It is still winter, but some stores have already cleared space for their special spring bargains. Makino mouths a rhyme as she sets aside ingredients for dinner. Tetsuya passes her and kisses her cheek, thoughtlessly. He is on his way to the park for his afternoon walk.

  “I’m leaving now,” he says.

  “Come back safely,” she answers. She feels just as much affection for Tetsuya as she did before, but nothing else. Some days her hollowness frightens her. Most days she has learned to live with it.

  When the door shuts behind him, she spends some moments in the kitchen, silently folding one hand over the other. She decides to take a walk. Perhaps after the walk she will visit her mother. She puts a cucumber and a paring knife into her bag and heads out. By now the cold has become bearable, like the empty feeling in her chest. She follows the river towards the bridge where she once nearly lost her life.

  In the middle of the bridge she stands and looks down at the water. She has been saved twice now by the same monster. Twice is more than enough. With a delicate hand, she carves the character for love on the cucumber, her eyes blurring, clearing. She leans over the bridge and lets the cucumber fall.

  ISABEL YAP was born in Manila in 1990 and grew up in Quezon City. In 2013, she graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in marketing and minors in English and Japanese. That same year, she attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego. Her fiction and poetry have appeared on Tor.com and in Uncanny Magazine, Shimmer, Apex Magazine, Nightmare, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005–2010. She currently lives and works in the California Bay Area. She has also lived in London and studied abroad in Tokyo.

  The Litany of Earth

  Ruthanna Emrys

  The state took Aphra away from Innsmouth. They took her history, her home, her family, her god. They tried to take the sea. Now, years later, when she is just beginning to rebuild a life, an agent of that government intrudes on her life again, with an offer she wishes she could refuse. A dark fantasy inspired by the Lovecraft mythos. Edited by Carl Engle-Laird.

  After a year in San Francisco, my legs grew strong again. A hill and a half lay between the bookstore where I found work and the apartment I shared with the Kotos. Every morning and evening I walked, breathing mist and rain into my desert-scarred lungs, and every morning the walk was a little easier. Even at the beginning, when my feet ached all day from the unaccustomed strain, it was a hill and a half that I hadn’t been permitted for seventeen years.

  In the evenings, the radio told what I had missed: an earth-spanning war, and atrocities in Europe to match and even exceed what had been done to both our peoples. We did not ask, the Kotos and I, whether our captors too would eventually be called to justice. The Japanese American community, for the most part, was trying to put the camps behind them. And it was not the way of my folk—who had grown resigned to the camps long before the Kotos’ people were sent to join us, and who no longer had a community on land—to dwell on impossibilities.

  That morning, I had received a letter from my brother. Caleb didn’t write often, and hearing from him was equal parts relief and uncomfortable reminder. His grammar was good, but his handwriting and spelling revealed the paucity of his lessons. He had written:

  The town is a ruin, but not near enouff of one. Houses still stand; even a few windos are whole. It has all been looked over most carefully long ago, but I think forgotten or ignorred since.

  And:

  I looked through our library, and those of other houses, but there is not a book or torn page left on the shelves. I have saugt permisson to look throuh the collecton at Miskatonic, but they are putting me off. I very much fear that the most importent volumes were placed in some government warehouse to be forgotten—as we were.

  So, our family collections were still lost. I remembered the feel of the old pages, my father leaning over me, long fingers tracing a difficult passage as he explained its meaning—and my mother, breaking in with some simple suggestion that cut to the heart of it. Now, the only books I had to work with were the basic texts and single children’s spellbook in the store’s backroom collection. The texts, in fact, belonged to Charlie—my boss—and I bartered my half-remembered childhood Enochian and R’lyehn for access.

  Charlie looked up and frowned as the bells announced my arrival. He had done that from the first time I came in to apply, and so far as I knew gave all his customers the same glare.

  “Miss Marsh.”

  I clo
sed my eyes and breathed in the paper-sweet dust. “I’m not late, Mr. Day.”

  “We need to finish the inventory this morning. You can start with the Westerns.”

  I stuck my purse behind the counter and headed back toward the piles of spine-creased Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey. “What I like about you,” I said honestly, “is that you don’t pretend to be civil.”

  “And dry off first.” But no arguments, by now, that I ought to carry an umbrella or wear a jacket. No questions about why I liked the damp and chill, second only to the company of old books. Charlie wasn’t unimaginative, but he kept his curiosity to himself.

  I spent the rest of the morning shelving. Sometimes I would read a passage at random, drinking in the impossible luxury of ink organized into meaningful patterns. Very occasionally I would bring one forward and read a bit aloud to Charlie, who would harumph at me and continue with his work, or read me a paragraph of his own.

  By midafternoon I was holding down the register while Charlie did something finicky and specific with the cookbooks. The bells jangled. A man poked his head in, sniffed cautiously, and made directly for me.

  “Excuse me. I’m looking for books on the occult—for research.” He smiled, a salesman’s too-open expression, daring me to disapprove. I showed him to the shelf where we kept Crowley and other such nonsense, and returned to the counter frowning thoughtfully.

  After a few minutes, he returned. “None of that is quite what I’m looking for. Do you keep anything more … esoteric?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. What you see is what we have.”

  He leaned across the counter. His scent, ordinary sweat and faint cologne, insinuated itself against me, and I stepped back out of reach. “Maybe something in a storage room? I’m sure you must have more than these turn-of-the-century fakers. Some Al-Hazred, say? Prinn’s Vermis?”

  I tried not to flinch. I knew the look of the old families, and he had none of it—tall and dark-haired and thin-faced, conventional attractiveness marred by nothing more than a somewhat square nose. Nor was he cautious in revealing his familiarity with the Aeonist canon, as Charlie had been. He was either stupid, or playing with me.