Work Text:
In the calculus of ordinary time, a brief flowering—
dense clusters of white blossoms, pale as marbled paper.
When they were younger this town didn't make them breathless. Asphalted slopes weren't winding; now it's just uphill, uphill.
Rei's winded, swallowing the clean air in healthy gasps. His mouth rounding around the blue, cloudless breath of June.
Here you can see the sky intact.
Two rich scions should cheat Yamaashiya and take a black-and-chrome cab up the northern slopes, so she doesn't know what they're doing with their bodies. So he can have her palm in his, like this, maybe... What a scheme.
Tugging her along to nowhere like a schoolboy. Letting him, like a schoolgirl. Their family homes are empty and locked up for holiday, and they left the keys in Tokyo.
Hiyori pulls on his hand. "Do you know where you're going?" she demands.
Rei laughs breathlessly.
Chasing lights led them out of the soundless gardens of Ashiya to Tokyo, steel and radio. Their voices on broadcast on centre streets, sparkly with static. Before they were bedroom pop, dreams just big enough to rub against the wallpaper. Of voices blown up to touch something beyond the ceiling.
When everyone on the street is listening, what do you say?
"I love you," Hiyori says, like a joke to be tried. Hiyori laughs.
All of a sudden Rei leans in, his forehead on her forehead, his eyes chilly like wine.
He slants closer and breath dresses her lips. "This is real life, darling." In it, the things you say mean something.
Kisses her. Tastes July.
Having accomplished nothing but blue sky before rain, they go back to the train station. Rei says good enough.
On good days, catch light in the palm of a hand.
On bad days…
"In plates."
"Rice bowls."
"Teaspoons!"
Wind curls through his hair, one side of a smile. On worst days, use the groove between fingertip and curve of nail. Let everything else splatter your hand with the confidence of rain. Gravity... let light cling.
Instability. Two taps of tongue tip on teeth, in English.
It sounds like what had been the anlaut of their relationship. Kissing and throwing things across the room. Screaming match then convenience store supper. Coming and going.
Lie!
Whatever it looked like, they were okay for each other. There weren't reasons to raise a voice. There weren't things worth throwing. If they had, whoever's watching, they can believe what they want. If it was half as trenchant as television wants it they'd be dead from the cuts. And who are the ones smiling on the glowing screens?
Pinned to tall glass, skyscraping, made to watch themselves. Once Hiyori hurt her neck to look at a screen, high up, of her own face.
Tap. Tap.
Don't give them one single thing!
The hours are inert and articulators chill with the threat of tsuyu wet.
"It's drinking weather." Hiyori stretches into his arms, mass of skin. "I want red Kirin."
Rei smiles. "I feel used," he says.
"Or you should consider that I only ever drink with you something of a privilege?"
They stumble onto the bus for Minamihama. She doesn't get her Kirin—maybe for the better, because their mouths are cold to the point of chatter already. His shoulder against hers as the bus bumps south across the bridge. His hip, too.
The warm curve these little particularities comprise, the whole way down.
Sand nuzzles into her boots the second they make the beach. The broad grey of the sky cusps it, an attempt of sunlight washing their cheeks.
A lone crow bobs down the wrack line. Rei turns to her. The grey behind him is cut by faraway heavy machinery, cranes without flight, tiny orange lights flickering on. Hyogo looks like this: honest.
"Maybe it's beneficial fiction to talk about something other than returning," he says over the wave sigh.
Yes, but two pop stars in the grisaille of a lost weekend is not right, it's honest. And every screen tells you a tipsy lie—and they will evaporate into the air by dark, without camera flash to light the way back.
She giggles. "Then, what's non-beneficial non-fiction?"
A hand around hers.
And screaming laughter when Rei pulls her into the tide.
It's the miracle of everyday life:
His murmur in her ear whispering about dinner. Seawater and sand grains in her socks, as they warm their mouths on skewers of pork and Rei's lemon sour.
The izakaya's tired air is oiled by sheets of charcoal smoke. Inhalation, (stretch of her stomach under her skin) and she wonders how they made it to this, moving on to something so gentle and careless.
Under the yellow bulbs, baby ghosts linger in every shadow their bodies cast. On the countertop, on the floor, on each other. Their children feed on the bones of what they eat, asking: Can I go out now? Can we go home now?
Full, they slog onto the granite mainland, undissolved. On the beach wrack they were flotsam—adult, alone, each other's, anyone's.
Now, behind them, in streetlight shadows, fifteen and sixteen… Their children, laughing at the starless dark.
The sky opens into deeper night with drizzle.
Hiyori huddles under Rei's coat. With no space for any more, her head presses tight to the hollow of his shoulder. The asphalt is splattered with orange light, and the air lifts with the perfume of wet hydrangea bulbs.
How difficult it is... to be kind.
Hiyori holds out her pointer, fingertip facing the sky.