Hitori’s grandmother braided strings of myths and stories into foreign taboos.
They were lessons to keep his sticky hands from clawing at the high cupboards that stashed away his grandmother’s sugared daifuku; prayers slipped into an intricately patterned omamori to ward off homesick tears, and twisted fiction that haunted his childhood until adolescent maturity stretched his limbs and outgrew his fear.
Before the nightmares began to devour him.
Those nights, he watched gore and macabre scenes unfold before him, paralyzed by an icy, alien force that ran his consciousness in dizzying circles. A constant foreboding dwelled in his shadow and incited chills no matter how humid the rural summers were. He soon lost count of the times he woke up in a cold sweat or covered in goosebumps.
Ill omens, his grandmother would call them—premonitions of a cataclysmic event; Hitori eventually grew tired of listening, and they stopped anyway.
❆
The train station is fairly empty when Hitori taps his IC card against the ticket gate and steps through, rubbing his flushed hands together. Outside the platform, a blizzard howls and bellows.
Winter is as much of a hell as it is a comfort: the lethargic fall of snow that paints everything in a lustrous white layer, resets the world into a tabula rasa as people sit by a crackling fire, and fills the open mouths of elated children. But winter also plagues the life it touches—frosted flowers and stripped trees and vapor from stolen breaths. It delights in its ruthlessness the whole way through.
Hitori clicks through his few texts repeatedly as he waits for the train, having to strain his eyes multiple times. He really should’ve waited until morning to depart; his mother, of course, just had to schedule a family reunion this abruptly, and she never takes no’s as answers.
His breath slithers through the cold.
This year’s winter will pass, and the next will arrive with the same somber acrimony in the chains of flesh-biting icicles hanging from a roof, insatiable blizzards, and snow-sprinkled hair—all hideous grays flecked with sickly white.
Rumbling in the distance pulls Hitori’s attention from his phone, and his mind drifts to his childhood home. Hopefully, his grandmother is doing well. The thought of seeing her brings a small smile to his face.
When the train finally arrives, Hitori shuffles on, eyes blinking tiredly. As he peers outside the window at the city slinking beyond the dark horizon, the snow falls heavily, and he lets himself slip into a slumber.
A scorch pulls at his senses.
[死]
The smell of charred wood jolts Hitori from sleep, the crackles of a fire popping in his ears. A pungent, suffocating aroma of smoke clogs his nose, and an uncomfortable heat caresses his face as he sits up.
“Hitori, are you awake yet?” His grandmother’s voice is redolent of childhood summers spent in the mountains, where he learned basic household chores and how to make traditional meals with her, as his parents’ impartial attitudes often led to long periods of neglect. And when Hitori lost their faces to the passage of time, only his grandmother’s remained with him.
“Hitori?”
“I’m awake. Sorry.” Her smile softens the way it did back then.
“Come help me with dinner, then. Our guests will be here soon.”
Hitori studies her as she walks back to the kitchen. At first glance, his grandmother seems no different, but there are more delicately carved lines on her face, each weaving its own story—like cracking ceramic. Her hair shines silver, and the white strands far exceed the dark ones since they last saw each other. Her limp thumps heavier against the wooden floor; less life resides in her movements. So many winters have passed between them; Hitori wonders if she ever feels bleak like he does when they both realize how sadistic solitude can be.
He struggles to recall that exact sensation.
As the distance between him and his grandmother widened as he matured, Hitori's life expanded into narrow timeframes and color-blocked schedules. Everything—from the way he typed up a document to what he spent his weekends doing—was methodical, captured in a washed-out light, without any resemblance to the free innocence he once had.
The fire crackles.
There were happier moments. Hitori’s grandmother used to scold him for catching colds from running through the snow, his mouth opened jubilantly, tongue splayed out to swallow the little cold flecks; he would laugh at the way his breath formed cloudy puffs like a train.
But that youth soon lost its golden touch—no more time for building snowmen or taking yuzu fruit baths during Tōji—and along with it, Hitori surrendered his naivety.
Heat flickers across Hitori's face, returning him to the present. Something rotten slithers into the fresh smell of food and the sweet, memory-draped fragrance of cherry wood. As the last remnants of memory fade away, a sickening burn bubbles on his skin—akin to the ones he suffered through after a deathly nightmare. Foreign—like he doesn’t belong.
Wasn’t he sleeping on the train? When did he get here?
He hears his grandmother call him again before leaving the fire’s warmth, yellow-orange hues dying blue-gray.
❆
Bandages hug two of Hitori’s left fingers when his grandmother finally gives up with a laugh and tells him to wait for their guests to arrive. Almost half a decade of take-out or cheap, instant meals rendered him unadept in the kitchen, and the dishes his grandmother taught him always tasted better when she made them anyway. He smiles, remembering the first time he helped her skewer chicken pieces for yakitori.
But Hitori sits at the dining table instead, arms lax against the lacquered surface, and gazes outside a window, his view illuminated by an outdoor lamp. Hitori thinks it’s ethereal, how the snow shimmers ephemerally in the golden glow—like starlight descending from the heavens, alight only long enough for his eyes to capture its crystalline beauty in a single moment before disappearing. Not even a millisecond to spare.
Time is short-lived until it sours.
Hitori sometimes wishes he had never left his grandmother for college. The independence that came with it jarred him more than it freed him. Cities ran on so much smoke and fuel compared to the countryside, and he found himself hyperventilating in a bathroom far too often.
So Hitori graduated without any distractions. Searched for a well-paying job in a prestigious company. Lived the mundane life of a fish—where he swam listlessly in his glass bowl and only observed the surroundings supplied by his minimalistic life.
But the little hindrances in Hitori’s life—from his father’s sparse drunk calls to berate him on everything work-related or his mother’s occasional persistence in setting him up on pointless dates—they all tied strangled knots around him as he went on. Constricting. Maddening. He repeated this excruciating cycle: lapping up the scraps of attention from them, left to rot again, then still chasing after them despite it all; even during the periodic family reunions, his parents never ceased their torture. Life ticked infuriatingly sluggish, and Hitori might as well go mad waiting for its end.
Time pleases no one.
So his parents’ abrupt appearances shouldn’t have shocked him as much as they did.
“Hitori!” his mother coos. “Aw, look at you! You’ve grown so much!”
Hitori stands stiffly as his mother crushes him into a hug. The foreign smells on her wrap him in a stranger’s arms—cheap beer cans, Mevius cigarettes, and drugstore perfume, likely from Matsukiyo; Hitori’s willing to bet some of the flowery scent isn’t hers.
As his mother blabbers on, his father strides past indignantly, settles in a chair, and grimly scrutinizes his phone. Deep creases line his face, permanent scars from his contempt; he bears a severely sharpened scowl to the point where glares would bruise darker than whatever physical beatings he never threatened. Hitori prefers that he raise a hand than nothing at all.
“Hitori, have you been doing good? Did you see the girl I sent you a picture of? Oh—where’s the food?” His mother’s nails dig impatiently into his cheek, and he shakes her hands off, looking away.
“Dinner will be ready soon. You can sit down if you want to.”
His mother twists at her rings awkwardly and takes a seat by his father, immediately pulling out a bejeweled mirror. Some trinket from an inconspicuous suitor.
“Hitori, dear?” calls his grandmother. “Have your parents arrived? I’ll be there as soon as I finish plating everything.”
Hitori slips into the kitchen wordlessly and takes out a pile of bowls from a cabinet, his grandmother smiling, silent gratitude in her sagging shoulders and the soft grooves of her face. She starts humming a cheery tune.
Boiling water ripples on the stove, and plates and bowls clink irregularly as the soft-boiled eggs tap against a metal pot’s walls.
They merge into the rhythmic tick of a train gliding over its tracks. The train Hitori was on.
He still can’t remember how he got here again.
❆
“So, how are you, Hitori?” His mother draws another obnoxiously red layer on her lips, and golden, flashy jewelry shackles her neck, hands, and wrists.
Family dinners birth awkward silence. They mean a need to socialize, a smiley facade cramping Hitori’s face, and arrowed questions digging into his ribs. Yet, while his mother’s sentiment for these reunions is solitary, Hitori finds himself feeling it too in moments of weakness.
“I’m fine.”
“Good! That’s great!” She laughs, followed by harsh silence. “Do you have a girlfriend yet? The grating scrape of chopsticks on ceramic and his mother’s clinking jewelry have nauseating effects on Hitori’s already-dwindling appetite.
“No,” he replies.
His mother eyes him from across the table, irritation clear in her abstract face. “Okay, well, look at the pictures I sent you. I think you’ll like this one—she’s super cute!” She rubs at the red in the corners of her mouth before puckering her lips at the mirror. “Anyways, how’s work?”
“It’s good. The general manager always compliments my work.” Hitori glances toward the rushing sound of water from the kitchen and wishes, to no avail, that his grandmother could finish sooner and shield him from his parents.
His mother hums in approval, and Hitori achingly wants to believe she’s as proud of him as she seems. “You always do well, Hitori. Taking after your father’s intelligence, aren’t you?”
He lifts his head, hope brushing stars in his eyes, but her focus stays on the mirror, and she merrily admires her reflection, not him. “…I guess I am.”
“Did you apply to the other company that I told you about?” If the scraping isn’t enough, his father’s bored voice deals the finishing blow.
“I…was rejected. But I’m doing well with my current employment.” Not that his father will care.
“Hitori,” his father sighs scornfully. “That’s not enough. You’re not doing enough.”
They stare at each other—his father, a stranger, and Hitori, a prisoner.
Hitori mumbles an apology.
His father continues eating through clenched teeth, grey hair hanging sharply over his eyes and shoulders tight. Something sour bleeds into the air. Hitori’s mother sighs—pitying—before she finally sets her mirror down. Her makeup looks as fraudulent as her sentimentality, and she’s too preoccupied with her vanity to pay him or anything else further concern. A sinking disappointment flames the dining room as Hitori’s heart sprints dangerously in his chest, then creeps into his throat, rattling like bones. The snow falls heavier outside, and another familiar burn trickles over his skin.
Hasn’t this all happened before? These brief moments of reunion with his family—merely bitter, fleeting seconds—always worming into his life. Is this another nightmare, branded in memory, ? Is he dreaming again? Is any of this as authentic as it feels?
Hitori closes his eyes, searing exhaustion curled in his back as he slumps against the chair.
And then, he’s back on the train. That burning train.
Hitori blinks a few times, frowning. He watches himself sleep peacefully as red, orange, and yellow swallow him in a beautiful explosion, all while the starlit snow drifts languidly above his face. The flakes melt on his hair, on his skin—over memories that burn, soaked in gasoline swapped for tear stains so they would catch faster, fuel the flames higher. He watches himself and remembers the charred incinerations on his skin, remembers clawing at his face for the fire to stop.
This is no nightmare.
Snow blends in with the sparks.
There will never be a next winter.
Hitori speaks amidst the flames. “I’m sorry, Mother, Father.” Words he knows he shouldn’t have to say. “I’ll do better next time.” His parents’ faces begin to warp and bubble, melting slowly as the fire rages. Sizzling crimson weeps against Hitori’s burning flesh. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. Give me another chance, please!” They merely stare back, features replaced by pale, smooth skin—a blankness comparable to winter. “Please…please! Just give me another chance!” The fire consumes with a mind of its own.
Hitori pleads aimlessly as skin and muscle bloom into ash—until bone chars, his voice minuscule in the face of Death’s fiery wrath, unable to move, only burning, burning, burning slowly.
The world crumbles around him. And he watches himself disintegrate along it.
This is no nightmare.
“Hitori?” Through the crackling embers, his grandmother calls, and the flaring tempest begins to recede as if it finally decided it was done gorging itself.
His parents mindlessly scrape their chopsticks across the ceramic dishes in jagged, inhuman movements, food rotten and blackened to crisps. Hitori’s eyes dart rapidly, unfocused, over their stripped faces. Only barren skin remains, devoid of any recognizable features. A cruel replica produced from his inability to remember—a vulgar rebirth.
Hitori leaves the table and gazes out the window, his breath immobilized by the jagged frost blooming over the glass like a frozen field of corpses. Icicles hang from the protruding roof as teeth. As an open maw that frames him. The warmth from the fireplace paints faint reflections across it all.
Odd. He feels—strangely warm.
Hitori stares into winter’s plagued, grisly portrait. His grandmother smooths his hair lovingly, and a child’s image mirrors his in the glass.
“You don’t have to see them anymore, Hitori.” He remembers sitting, sometimes standing, in front of these very windows, waiting through fevers and flu during past winters for them to come home. Sometimes, he prayed they would. Sometimes, he wished they’d just stop.
A comforting heat seeps into his fingertips despite all the cold around him. Hitori’s grandmother smiles down at him. “You’ll stay here with me, won’t you?”
But none of it matters anymore. Not now.
All Hitori perceives is death—and the vast stretch of winter’s falling snow.
Commenti