A Small Charred Face

by Kazuki Sakuraba

“Stay with me always, okay?” Momo whispered in my ear. “Marika. Marikaaaa. I don’t want you to disappear on me! I mean, like, when I think about me sleeping all nice and sound like this, and then one night I wake up and you’re gone, I get so anxious.”

  “Yeah, yeah…”

  “You’re the only one…who knows…”

  “Huh?”

  “What happened to me.”

  “Ohh, that?”

  “I mean, I’m never going to tell anyone else my whole life!”

  “But what’ll you do if you fall in love? Won’t you have to be honest with them?”

  “I won’t. I won’t tell.” Marika opened her narrow eyes and shook her head stubbornly. “I won’t tell. I won’t.”

  “Mm.”

  “I won’t. I won’t.”

  “Mm.”

  “I mean, if I never tell, then someday…it’ll be like…it never happened…maybe.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No way! It’ll never be like it never happened. But you’ll know, Marika,” Momo said, her voice trembling. “You’ll remember for me. Immortal Bamboo…you’ll save me.”

  The bus shook even more fiercely. I sat up. “But Bamboo aren’t immortal.”

  “What?”

  “I told you. We live around 120 years. I figure I’ve got a little over ten years left. And just like bamboo, bam! In the end, we bloom these beautiful white flowers, and then it’s all over.”

  “No!” Momo exclaimed, quietly. Uneasy tears rose up in her eyes, like a child. “Don’t die!”

  “I told you—we don’t die, we disappear.”

  “Marikaaaa, that’s so scary.”

  “Well, when the time comes, I’ll show you some real flowers!” I said with a sneer.

  Momo sulked for a while, all “I don’t want you to,” but eventually, she murmured, “Okay, then promise me. For sure, okay?” and dropped quickly into sleep again.

  We reached the next town before dawn. We stayed in an old business hotel, and after closing the windows up tightly, Momo set up the simple blackout tent she kept in her rucksack for me. I slipped inside. I felt her presence outside, and I closed my eyes.

  “Night, Marika.”

  “Night…Momo.”

  Switch. Now it was my turn to sleep.

  I did it. It was me.

  Me.

  …But.

  (A hundred years. A hundred years.)

  Atop a telephone pole. Just after nightfall.

  I was standing on one leg like always, wobbling back and forth like a roly-poly toy for fun. The ultramarine sky of summer was incredibly expansive even at night. It threatened to suck you in. Momoooo, still nothing?

  Tonight, we were in a refined, expensive residential area that unfolded near the mountains. There weren’t too many people on the streets at night. The cicadas were singing, and I could hear automobile engines in the distance. The houses were all magnificent and massive, lit up invitingly.

  Momo finally appeared from around the corner.

  Tch! I clicked my tongue. She’s got an older woman on her arm now, doesn’t she? I told her younger’s better. Well, whatever. We do this every day—I can’t afford to be too fussy.

  I dropped down rapidly, the hem of my long skirt billowing out, my long hair fluttering up, a lion’s mane in the wind. I alighted without a sound behind the two of them, holding my breath, keeping myself hidden. And the game begins again. I liked my prey the most at this moment, when they were focused on talking with Momo, unaware of the Bamboo behind them. Humans smiling, their guards down. Like idiots.

  Her salt-and-pepper hair was permed. A dry neck poked out from a high-quality linen blouse. Her voice, though, was still younger than mine. But I guess it would be.

  “Once you get to that house, turn at the second corner—oh! To the left. When you do that, there’ll be a house that’s been painted green, all right?” The older woman kindly gave Momo directions, Momo looking like she would burst into laughter at any second, nodding with a meek look on her face all the while.

  I pushed my head between them, and Momo snorted, suppressing a laugh. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, her smile deepening.

  My prey finally cocked her head, curious at Momo’s sudden silence, and looked over at the girl beside her. Now, she’ll notice this girl with no nose, no ear, and no arm, and she’ll scream. Heh heh, this is fun! Another night hunting.

  She shrieked.

  The instant she did, I tumbled through the air several times and landed on my back as if blown away by a sudden squall.

  Stunned to her core, Momo turned around. My prey also stopped and looked down on me in surprise. “M-miss—er? Huh?” She began to look back and forth between me and Momo. My strange appearance. Momo and the unfathomable look rising up on her face. Sensing danger, her face stiffened. She retreated one step, then another.

  A small dog popped its head out of the bag on her shoulder. Bark bark! Bark! Bark!

  I started shaking.

  “What?” my prey murmured.

  Momo hurriedly reached out. She tried to grab the woman’s neck, but Momo had never really done anything like that, and she lacked nerve. The woman pulled away from her. My prey staggered into a run, almost pitching forward onto the ground.

  “S-someone! Excuse me! Someone! Help!” The woman tried to shout, but her voice betrayed her.

  I put my right hand down on the ground and staggered to my feet. Even though I was long used to not having it, the lack of a left arm made it hard to get my balance back immediately, and I fell on my back. “Dammit,” I muttered, as I kicked at the ground and flew up.

  “Marika? She’s getting away!”

  “Ngh! Like I’d let her!” She’s supposed to be my prey. She’s a human. How dare she! I flew into a rage.

  The dog kept barking.

  Dog! A dog… Honestly! Don’t worry about it. It’s fine… Fly!

  My prey rounded the corner and tottered out of sight.

  I’ll get you!

  I could hear her wild breathing. Haah! Haah! Haah! The sound of the heart of a human getting the wrong idea—that I was some kind of killer—and panicking. Slowly but surely, this was starting to be fun again. It was plenty exciting. The nightly hunt! Old hat for me now.

  The dog barked.

  I descended abruptly, but I so spectacularly failed to stick the landing it was kind of amazing. I fell directly behind my prey like a piece of garbage flung onto the road. I might have been old, but this was over-the-top! Not at all Bamboo-like! Hurry up! Jump one more time! In a syncopated, staggering rhythm, my prey dropped her bag and let out a high-pitched scream before running, escaping.

  I flew again. The shrill barking of the dog grew distant. My prey kept running. She jerked her chin up; it looked like she was struggling. I descended and perched on her shoulders, a large eagle. I had finally caught her!

  Dig my heel into the back of her neck! I did it the way I always did, just enough so that she wouldn’t die. At least, that’s how it should have been. But.

  Crack! I heard the sound of bones breaking.

  Huh? I slowly got down from her shoulders. Floating horizontally, I stared at my prey’s face in profile.

  The middle-aged woman slumped to the ground. Her head hit the asphalt, face turned to one side. Eyes wide open. An expression of surprise was frozen on her features. Just as I wondered if her limbs weren’t shaking slightly, the shuddering stopped.

  Momo finally caught up with us. She bent over, breathing hard, her hands on her thighs as she looked over at me. Sweat was pouring down her forehead, and the scholarly black frames of her glasses were also askew. She peered at my prey.

  “For real, Marika?!” she cried out, in disbelief. “Come on! What about catch and release? This is supposed to be a game! Isn’t it, Marika?!”r />
  “It was the dog!” I roared.

  “Huh? The dog? Why?”

  “What was I supposed to do?!” That’s right! I mean, come on! But on this trip with Momo, I had promised to take only blood, not lives. But, like, Bamboo mess up sometimes!

  “Marika.” Momo’s voice was so quiet I almost couldn’t hear her. “You killed someone, and you’re asking me what you were supposed to do?”

  “Sh-shut up!” I dragged the body away roughly and tossed it behind a tree in a children’s park. In the distance, the dog was still barking. The dog… I wasn’t going to listen to that thing anymore. I bit into the neck of the dead woman and furiously drank her blood. She wasn’t young, but I wasn’t in a position to complain.

  The summer wind blew, and the scent of blood mixed in with it. The night turned dark red. When I was finally full and absently lifted my head, Momo was standing stock-still.

  “Marika! Marika… What is this?” She was crying. Making that face.

  Huh? Is she saying this is my fault?

  I snapped. “It wasn’t on purpose, okay!” I stood up, not wiping the blood away from my mouth. “Just forget about it! Come on, let’s go!”

  “But she was a nice person…”

  “She was an old bag you didn’t know,” I said, surprised at her reaction.

  Momo stared hard at me and said nothing.

  For some reason, I brought up my right hand and slapped her. She burst into tears. I turned my back on her and bit my lip hard. She didn’t seem like she was going to stop crying anytime soon. This was a problem. Stop. I’m telling you, don’t be difficult.

  I left the park and started walking. The night road. When I walked, even the air shook like it was boiling. The cicada song gradually returned to my ears. It was like the closer you were to the asphalt surface of the ground, the higher the temperature.

  I looked back. Momo was still crying, but even so, she was following me. I was relieved. I floated up from the ground and tried flying. Slowly. And I looked back again. Right around the end of the residential area. The dark national highway.

  Momo was still following me.

  I spun around and came down lightly beside her. Her tears kept coming. But when I reached my arm around her slim waist, she didn’t resist… What a relief. We’d made up once again. I flew into the air and struck a pose that made us look like a strange constellation in the night sky. Momo’s sobbing suddenly got louder. I basically had no idea why she was crying and getting so sad over the fact that someone she didn’t know had died. Momo was a weird kid, you know.

  A tunnel. An unbending white passageway from the subway station. Dead silent. Like no one else existed in this world.

  Because I forgot to steal the woman’s wallet, we were spending the night here today. The cold tiles were apparently comfortable; Momo slowly closed her eyes. Crouched up against me, her tears stopped, and I felt a weight lift from my chest.

  Suddenly, just when I was thinking she was asleep, she asked, “Why did you get so freaked out when the dog barked?”

  I opened my eyes. For some reason, Momo was watching me closely. Was she still thinking about that thing from before? I rolled my eyes. I wrapped my arm around her and looked away.

  “A long time ago, I had a dog. I suddenly remembered. That’s all!”

  “You’re a Bamboo, but you had a dog?”

  “No, that’s not it!”

  “Huh? Then…is this when you were a human being? You never talk about that. What was the dog’s name?”

  A faint breeze blew through the tunnel, the wind lukewarm like tepid water. It was just us in there, so the tunnel was silent again. Momo still seemed sad, but nevertheless, she was apparently trying to bore a hole in my face with her eyes.

  I sighed and opened my mouth. “Fal. Falstaff.” I gave voice to the dog’s name. For the first time in around a hundred years.

  An avalanche of memories tumbled from the night sky…

  I grew up in a nice residential neighborhood, like the place we were hunting tonight. Square three-story house. One older sister. She excelled at everything. I was just average. My father, a manager at a pharmaceutical company, was incredibly together, a man who hated dishonesty, who loved the straight and narrow. Given that his work involved selling pharmaceuticals wholesale, he should have been forced to toe the line with the mafia, but he always went head-to-head with them.

  One day, he came home from somewhere with a dog. Said it was a present for me. This was a mixed blessing.

  It was right before my younger brother was born, and I guess my parents thought I might hate him. So they decided to turn the focus of my attentions on a dog.

  “This is your dog, Marika,” my father said. “He’s your responsibility. You’ve got to take good care of him.”

  So, reluctantly, I started taking the animal for walks, making sure it peed and stuff. And the puppy was stupid. I’d teach him things, and he’d forget all of it right away. Training him was super annoying. But he loved food and walks and playing. And he slept like the dead. I wasn’t falling for him and loving him the way my parents had hoped, though.

  But one day…

  “One day?”

  “You’re still listening? I was going to stop. I thought you went to sleep. One day—so, like, I was almost kidnapped, okay?” The memory flickered back to life as I continued. An ancient Bamboo reminiscing about the old days—just remembering was an effort in and of itself…

  The denizens of the underworld despised my father’s strict management policies. So one day, when I went out to walk Fal, I was suddenly surrounded on all sides by black cars. And I thought, “Oh! This looks like the end!” I surrendered to my fate pretty easily. Because there wasn’t anything I really wanted to do in life to begin with, you know? Unlike my father and my sister, I wasn’t particularly smart or anything.

  And then Fal, this supposedly stupid dog, started barking his head off and biting the men who closed in on us, nipping their ankles. So they kicked him, and he went flying like an old rag. I thought he was dead. I mean, he was a pretty small dog, kind of puny. But he sprang up and came running back over, barking half-crazedly the whole time.

  One of the men pulled out a gun. He fired at Fal as the dog was racing around on the ground. Fortunately, he didn’t hit him, but then Fal sunk his teeth into another ankle and stayed put there. So I knew the second shot would definitely hit him. I threw myself at the man with the gun. I never dreamed I had that kind of courage in me, you know? The bullet went off course and hit Fal right in the tail. He let out this earsplitting yelp as half his long brown tail went flying. And then he started barking even more, if that was possible, bleeding the whole while.

  In all the commotion, I guess someone called the authorities to report what was going on. The police arrived, and the black cars all raced off in the blink of an eye. Fal had saved me.

  After dealing with the police, we took Fal to an emergency vet and got his tail treated. He howled in pain. He was really suffering, and he bit my hand hard. And then he turned his little beady eyes up at me as if to say, “Sorry for biting you.” I stroked his head. He whined pathetically.

  That’s when I really started doting on that dog. It was like we had forged this bond or something. I went out of my way to give him delicious treats. I would brush him and tell him how much I loved him, my little darling. I hugged him, rubbed my cheek up against him, ran my hand down his back lovingly.

  Eventually, my little brother was born…

  “And then?”

  The white tunnel, illuminated. The air a mix of summer heat and the cool from the day’s air conditioners. It wasn’t a popular spot; it was still just me and Momo.

  I shrugged lightly. “Look, I told you before, didn’t I? My family was killed too, just like yours. I said we had a lot in common that way, right? So, like, one night…when I went
home…”

  “Where were you coming home from?”

  “Mm. Hmm.” I nodded vaguely. “The minute I was there, standing in front of my house, I knew something was different somehow. But something else had happened that day too, so I thought maybe it was all in my head, like it was me that was different. But that wasn’t it… There was a strange man in the entryway. A Bamboo. The mafia in that town hired Bamboo, too. My father, my mother, and my sister were lined up on the floor already. My little brother was hidden under the sofa. Wrapped in a blanket. Yeah, he was alive. The Bamboo hadn’t noticed him. But he noticed me. I guess he was already full—he didn’t drink all my blood when he attacked me. The police took me away, just another dead body, and then in the morgue of the police hospital—”

  I woke up all alone in the middle of the night. Everything was cold, and the whole world looked different somehow. I jumped up in terror and slammed into the ceiling. I couldn’t control my power then. I fled the hospital, killing a doctor along the way, so the police came after me. They shot at me, and several bullets hit me right in the chest. But I didn’t die. I didn’t have the first clue about what was going on, so I just hid for a while.

  “And…ever since, all these years, I’ve been a Bamboo.”

  “What happened to your little brother? Did they rescue him? And what about your dog?”

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t get why Momo was worrying about a kid she didn’t even know.

  The tunnel was quiet, filled only with the echo of our voices. The place was deserted. And chilly, despite the summer, almost like the morgue that day.

  “Marika…”

  “Go to sleep, Momo!”

  “Hmm.”

  I opened my eyes again. Momo was quiet, a pensive look on her face. I wondered what she was thinking about.

  “Momo, tomorrow we’re going to take the subway someplace far away. We have to get away from this town. I mean, it’s gonna get pretty sketchy for us when they find that body!”

  She said nothing.

  “We haven’t killed anyone before this, so we were safe. Those guys’re up to some shady things too, you know?”