by Misumi Kubo
“I’m not going to come here anymore,” I said, surprising myself by how cold my voice sounded.
Anzu opened her eyes slowly. After a while, in such a quiet voice I struggled to hear, she said, “You have to.”
“I’m not going to,” I said.
“You can’t stop,” Anzu said, this time springing up from the bed and flinging her arms around me. I could hear the whirring of the love egg.
“You’re married, aren’t you?” I just about got the words out when Anzu’s hand came clamping down across my mouth. Her other hand grabbed one of mine and guided it to her crotch. As ever, her panties were soaked through, and I could feel with my fingers the whirring of the love egg.
Now her hand came reaching out toward my crotch. I brushed it away.
“I’m underage. What you’re doing is a crime,” I said, in the most expressionless voice I could muster. I instantly felt disgust at myself for coming out with a line like that. If it was a crime, then we were in on it together.
Suddenly, Anzu grabbed my arm and bit down on it with all her might. The pain was so intense I almost cried out, but I managed to hold it back. My right arm was now branded with two sets of Anzu’s tooth marks, beads of blood rising to the surface.
“I’m not going to see you anymore,” I said once more and made to leave the room.
“I’ll curse you for this,” Anzu shouted, as a pillow came flying in my direction. It struck my back and fell to the floor. I could barely even feel it.
“You’ll be back here. I know it!” screeched a voice at my back as I closed the front door to the apartment.
* * *
I’d never split up with anyone before, so I didn’t know if that counted as the official breakup or if there was more to come. Knowing Anzu, I figured she’d probably start texting me and calling me endlessly, stalking me, posting photos of me in cosplay and other sketchy stuff around the neighborhood and who knows what else, but in fact there was none of that. The messages she’d been sending me every day stopped abruptly.
I saw Nana at the pool every day, and every day she looked cuter.
While I felt kind of bad ditching Ryota, I started going to and from the pool with Nana, with me pedaling and her perched behind. Her hair, her skin, her ears, her lips—they all seemed somehow bursting with moisture, like she was glistening from the inside out. Her skin tissue, even her cells seemed young. At first, when I wrapped my arms around her, I could see Anzu’s teeth-marks there on my right bicep, but they soon started to fade until in no time they were barely visible.
There was always someone at home in both Nana’s house and mine, so we would ride in the opposite direction to our preferred spot at the foot of the bridge. There we’d lie, concealed by the grass that grew taller than Nana’s head, and I’d feel her up like crazy.
Nana gave off a sweet, cheap smell, like American shampoo or something. I was lying there, staring down at the whorl on the top of her head, which came up to my chest, and thinking of the strange time I’d spent with Anzu in that room, when Nana suddenly piped up,
“Your mom’s a midwife, right? I want to be a midwife, too.”
“There’s nothing good about being a midwife,” I said. “You don’t get to sleep or take holidays, and there’s no money in it.”
Nana looked up at me and said with her squirrelly grin, “But I just love babies so much!”
There was something about this that seemed like a reflection of something shallow in Nana. It put me in mind of something I’d heard my mom say a bunch of times when I was growing up: It’s not a job to do because you like babies. Goodness knows who she was trying to convince. After my dad had left home for another woman, my mom had raised me all by herself. I’d grown up listening to the screams and wails and cries of the women as they brought all those new people into the world.
I’d had my eyes opened to the world of sex by the medical textbooks in my mom’s study, full of countless gynecological photographs. Not long after I got into middle school, I read a passage in one of those book that explained: From the time of their birth, women’s ovaries are filled with several million primordial follicles, which can later develop into egg cells. That sentence shook me to the core. Reading it, I felt the same sense of disgust I got when I swatted a cockroach and saw the eggs come spilling out of its abdomen. Until that point, salmon roe marinated in sticky soy sauce had been one of my favorite dishes, but from that day on, I went right off it. Sometimes in class, I would start imagining the belly of the girl next to me jam-packed with all those tiny eggs, and I’d feel the bile rising to the back of my throat. For a good six months, I lost all trace of the interest in sex I’d previously been feeling.
Somewhere along the line, I’d managed to forget about my aversion entirely, but now, out of the blue, I started thinking about all that tiny roe hidden away inside Nana’s body and let out a deep sigh. Whenever I got to thinking about these things that we men and women got stuck with and had to go carrying around with us until the day we died as they caused us endless kinds of trouble, I felt so exhausted that my head would grow numb. To try and dispel the feeling, I kissed Nana hard. As usual, when I stuck my tongue inside her mouth and began fishing around in there, Nana instantly pulled away.
“It’s scary when you do that,” she said with a smile.
As all that was happening, I could hear a dry rustling, and then a homeless man suddenly popped his face above the dense grass, grinning at us. I grabbed Nana’s hand and began to run, up onto the mound of the riverbank. When we finally came to a standstill back where Nana’s bike was parked, I felt a stinging in my calf. I looked down to see a cut running straight across it, the blood dribbling down.
“Oh, no! You’ve cut yourself really badly! Are you okay?” Nana said, pulling out a pack of pocket tissues from her bag and wiping away the blood. Anzu’s curse, I thought to myself immediately.
Sometimes, when you’re thinking about a person all the time, you end up bumping into them in the most unexpected of places. It always really shocks me when that happens, as if the contents of my head had gotten out and materialized right in front of my eyes.
That particular day, I’d gone to the shopping center in the next town over to buy onesies for my mom. It was the middle of summer, but that hadn’t stopped it from raining solidly for a week. Unable to do any laundry, my mom was about to run out of spares, or so she said. Shopping for onesies or diapers or sanitary pads or whatever didn’t bother me in the slightest, as it would have some people. I’d made a note of what was needed on the back of my hand in marker pen—4 l-sleeve muslin, 4 s-sleeve muslin—and was making my way through the baby section, glancing down at my hand from time to time, when I noticed someone in one of the aisles. It was Anzu. Right in the middle of the baby section, deserted of people despite its being the summer break, was Anzu. She was staring down at a pair of baby socks, so small that they fit in the palm of her hand. She was taking her time, comparing the patterns and sizes the way a mother would do. Concealing myself behind one of the shelves, I stood there and watched, like a stalker.
Needless to say, Anzu wasn’t in cosplay. She was dressed like a student, in jeans, a T-shirt, and a gray zip-up hoodie. Suddenly, a thought occurred to me, and I felt a dull pain shoot through my stomach, a chill coming over me. Surely, I said to myself, surely it couldn’t be. I moved closer. Noticing me beside her, Anzu looked up in surprise.
“Are you pregnant?”
My mouth went dry the moment I opened it, and I could hear how thin and papery my voice sounded. Anzu shook her head and attempted to smile, but the expression she managed was more like a child being told off. We stood there, our eyes locked on one another’s for a while, and then Anzu put the baby socks back on the rack they came from and moved off quickly in the direction of the escalator.
From that day on, the only thing I could think about was Anzu.
Maybe, I thought, maybe I’ve fallen in love for the first time ever.
I kept replayi
ng the image of Anzu with the baby socks in her palm, in slow motion, frame by frame. At work I was a total mess. I got a telling-off from my boss for failing to notice a child who was on the verge of drowning. Some lifeguard I was. Nana got so upset with me for responding like a zombie that she was now totally ignoring me.
At home, the births weren’t letting up. “It’s because it’s a full moon,” said my mother resignedly. She had barely slept for days. When I was younger, I used to think my mother was some kind of witch because she came out with stuff like that.
The deliveries went on throughout the night, and even when I shut my eyes, I could still hear the moaning. Unable to sleep, I jumped up, put on a pair of sandals, and ran down to the river.
I walked across the stretch of grass until I could hear the sound of the water. I picked up a few pebbles and, flicking my wrist, skipped them over the pitch-black surface, listening to the sound they made as they moved across the surface of the water. Disappointed by how dull it was skipping stones in the dark, I picked up another stone at my feet, this time the size of a baby’s head, and hurled it out toward the river, like I was throwing a shot put. It plummeted into the water closest to my feet with a dull plunking sound. With the palm of my hand I wiped away the lukewarm spray that had landed on my cheek, and then I walked back in the direction of the bank. Crouching down in the grass, I lit a cigarette, sucking the smoke deep into my lungs.
The full moon peeked its head from beyond the clouds, lighting up the river.
I looked toward Anzu’s building on the other side. I could feel the tears streaming down my cheeks like water out of a tap. I didn’t bother to wipe them away, just let them run down my face, dripping from my chin onto the grass at my feet. The day my dad had left, I’d come here and cried, staring out at the river like this. I’d stood on the bank and wailed out loud, and then I’d gone back home and seen the patch of greenish, unfaded tatami where my dad’s chest of drawers had used to be and cried all over again. I hadn’t seen my dad since that day. Back then I’d been a child, powerless to stop myself from being hurt. To be hurt so spectacularly like that was one of the special privileges of childhood. But I wasn’t going to be that wounded child forever. It was me, after all, who’d severed the tenuous thread tying Anzu and me together. Suddenly, I felt utterly pathetic, sitting here on the bank lamenting over Anzu, and I screamed out as loud as I could.
“AAAAAAAAARRRGGGGGHHHHH!”
Clasping my head in my two hands, I went rolling down the sloped riverbank. Blades of grass snuck inside my T-shirt, and the chirping of the crickets rang deep inside my ears.
* * *
The following day, I skipped work without telling anyone and went to Anzu’s instead.
A slim man in a suit I passed in the hallway shot me a suspicious look, so I made sure he’d gotten in the elevator before I rang the door to Anzu’s apartment. After a little while, I heard Anzu’s voice over the intercom.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” I said. The intercom cut out, and then, after another pause, Anzu opened the door a crack and stuck her head out. Her face looked dozy, like she’d just woken up. The summer sun coming through the door lit up her face, the freckles spreading like galaxies across her cheeks. I forced the door open and stepped inside. Anzu, dressed in a black tank top and a wraparound skirt with flowers on, looked up at me with a fearful expression on her face. Still standing there by the door, I seized her by the arms and kissed her. Her mouth tasted like salty bacon.
I had no intention of holding back the thing that was rising up in me thick as magma, and I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to. Anzu didn’t resist. With our mouths still locked together, I kicked off my shoes and pushed Anzu up against the wall of her hallway, which was for some reason stacked with cardboard boxes. I thrust my hands inside her skirt, using one hand to pull down her panties and the other to squeeze her butt. There was already spit all around our mouths. I undid my belt and, with my trousers and my boxers only half off, entered her. She wasn’t totally wet, but she felt incredibly hot. The noise she was making was louder than any she had made before—AAAAAAHHHHHH!—and it turned me on even more. In that unstable position up against the wall, I began to move my hips. It only took a few thrusts before Anzu was coming, and then so was I.
Still panting, Anzu took me by the hand and led me, for the first time, down the hall into the living room. There was a dining table laid with two people’s dirty plates and cups from breakfast.
We closed the curtains, then Anzu took off her clothes and then mine, kissing all the while. It was like some kind of game-show challenge, where you weren’t allowed to lose contact with the other person’s lips. Finally, we fell back onto Anzu’s sofa. In the dim light of the curtained room, I saw Anzu’s naked body for the first time. Her largish breasts, which had lost some of their firmness, hung down at an angle across her chest. I took one of her small, pale nipples into my mouth, and with my tongue moved it around my mouth like a boiled sweet. I tried sucking hard, then flicking it gently with the tip of my tongue. Anzu sat there with her eyes wide open, watching me as if she was trying to imprint the sight into her memory.
The warm juices that came flooding out of Anzu’s insides left wet spots on the sofa. I lifted one of her knees up on the sofa, and stuck my tongue right into the source of all those juices, pulling it out and sticking it in again. My jaw started to feel tired almost right away, but I kept at it. I hadn’t eaten anything for breakfast, and soon my stomach began to rumble. I wanted to fill myself up on these juices of Anzu’s, coming out of the place from which no babies could come. As I sucked away, Anzu’s moans grew louder and louder. With her hand she pushed my head closer into her body, until I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Point your tongue.”
Her voice was quiet, but it was unmistakably an order. I curled my tongue into a U-shape, to make it as pointed as I could, and flicked at her hardened clitoris. She lay there moaning for a while, then suddenly looked at me straight in the eyes and said, “I want you inside me.”
Just those words were enough to almost push me over the edge, but I managed to control it and entered her.
Taking hold behind her knees and pushing them up toward her head, I began moving my hips. Before, Anzu had always done her best to wriggle out of the missionary position as soon as we got into it, but today she stayed there, making noises, her eyes locked firmly on my face. Her pelvis was moving in time with mine. She reached her index finger inside my mouth and moved it around. Then I felt the tip of my penis brush up against something hard inside her, and Anzu let out a wail like a baby, and I knew couldn’t hold it any longer. I saw a thin ray of light go streaming through my head, and my nose tingled with pleasure. The next moment, I exhaled and released what felt like endless amounts of semen inside her.
When I detached myself from Anzu’s body, white cloudy liquid dripped down from inside her. Anzu reached out a finger, scooped some up, and licked it.
“It doesn’t taste very good.” She looked me right in the eye and smiled. I took one look at her smile and moved straight back inside her.
* * *
After we’d had sex more times than I could count and taken a shower together, we sat down at the kitchen table to eat slices of watermelon Anzu cut for us, and that’s where we were when Anzu announced, “I’m going to America for a while.”
“. . . America?”
“Yep.”
“Whereabouts?”
She pronounced a place-name, a cluster of harsh consonants. I’d heard of it, but I had no idea where it was.
“I’m going to meet someone who’ll give birth to our baby.”
“Whose baby?”
“Mine and yours.”
I choked on my watermelon.
“Just kidding,” Anzu said, straight-faced, and took a bite of her watermelon. “I’m going to meet someone who might be having a baby for me and my husband.”
Outside the window, I could hear the cry of th
e cicadas. A picture floated into my head of Anzu, all dressed up as her favorite anime character, cradling a newborn baby.
I sat there, staring at the watermelon on Anzu’s plate, not moving a muscle. The slice bore a clean U-shaped set of tooth marks, the exact same shape that she’d left on my right arm. Instinctively, I looked down at my arm now, but there was no longer a trace of any teeth.
“Thank you for everything,” said Anzu quietly, her face deliberately free of any emotion, and bowed her head.
“Don’t go,” I said, without a moment’s hesitation. “You can’t, I don’t want you to. Don’t leave me here.”
In that moment, I truly believed that if I behaved like a total brat, if I threw a tantrum in the most immature way possible, then maybe Anzu wouldn’t have to go anywhere. I was still a child. Anzu looked at me for a moment with a look like she was about to cry, and then said, in an even quieter voice than before, “I think it’s time for you to be getting home.”
The sinking sun had stained the sky the color of honey. I stood in the middle of the bridge, staring out at it, wondering if a fall off the side would be enough to kill me. I guessed not. I imagined myself hobbling my way into the start-of-term assembly on a pair of crutches.
Over to the west, the sun was sinking behind the mountain. I’d climbed that mountain with my dad once when I was young. I remembered him telling me how the water coming out from a crack deep in the rocks turned into this river that we lived beside. At that time, it seemed unbelievable to me that water so clear could be connected with the filthy river flowing near our house. When I looked down now under the bridge, the paltry stream had parted into two sections, exposing a section of dried white riverbed underneath, before rejoining farther on to form a single, narrow stream.
Come to think of it, both my mom and my dad had taken me to the mountains after they’d had a fight. I’d been with my mom, and I’d been with my dad, but I had no memory of the three of us going together. The moment my dad got into the mountains, his pace would quicken, and I’d have to run along behind him so as not to lose sight of his sturdy shoulders, his rucksack. When I went with my mom, she’d pick up a twig and beat down the grasses and foliage growing on either side of the mountain path. She, too, would plow steadily ahead without ever looking back at me.