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You asked to walk me home
But I had to carry you
“Would—would I have to, really?”
It’s the way Kyomoto’s forehead crinkles into a sort-of uncertain, sort-of afraid expression that made Fujino stifle a laugh in the first place. Sort-of teasing. Sort-of guilty. God, why is she doing this, teasing a helpless girl that’s so afraid of everything? Surely this has to be a crime, but it is so funny, just watching Kyomoto’s sweet eyes narrow as she tilts her head in confusion.
“No, oh my God—no, man, you don’t actually have to carry me, I was joking,” Fujino bends over as her chest aches from the lack of breath—she should really stop wheeze-laughing. “You can’t seriously be that gullible, come on!”
“I’m… sorry,” Kyomoto’s voice is barely a whisper, wringing her fingers against her chest, and it makes Fujino truly feel guilty, this time, her laughter dwindling away into empty breaths. “I just thought, if I asked you to walk me home, then I’d—it’d only be fair if you ask me to carry you in return…”
“No, it’s not,” Fujino straightens up, surprised by the abrupt firmness in her words. “It’s really not, that’s why I was joking… Kyomoto, I’m your friend, right?”
“Of course!” Kyomoto exclaims, without hesitation, the lines on her forehead bunched-up into a frown. “Why do you suddenly…?”
“Well, friends do things for each other for no reason other than because they’re friends,” Fujino shrugs, “and I’m your friend, so yes, I’ll go the long way home so I can walk you back.” She grabs Kyomoto’s arm—her spindly arms, the pale softness of her skin, the way her fingers are tracing the knob of Kyomoto’s wrist bone when she says, “you know what, I’ll even carry you.”
“What?” is all that Kyomoto had the chance to say before Fujino, three years of karate lessons and running track up her back—abandons her backpack on the ground, ducks into a squat, wraps her arms around Kyomoto’s knees—and flings her entire body, backpack and all, onto her waist. It isn’t hard; Kyomoto is barely weight in her arms even with her backpack on, but the girl squeals and locks her arms on a death grip around Fujino’s neck, which—”Ack, I can’t breathe! Kyomoto!”
“Don’t drop me!” Kyomoto exclaims instead, her face buried against the back of Fujino’s shoulder blade. “Promise!”
“I won’t!” Fujino chokes, “promise, promise you I won’t, just—” there’s a haiku about this, Fujino remembers, something that goes may my eyes be blinded if my hands betray you— but it was vaguely swimming in the back of her head like a slippery koi that she couldn’t catch, and Kyomoto’s grip on her was bruisingly real, the perfect line of her nasal bone nuzzling warm, panicked breaths against the flesh of her shoulder, and it was all that Fujino could think about. “Let go. I’ve got you. Promise.”
The grip of Kyomoto’s arms around her neck unfastens, ever so slowly, like she was taking her time to be sure about it. Fujino lets her, feeling the arms gently loosen themselves until they’re barely hanging off her shoulders. And then, Kyomoto’s soft voice: “thank you,” but she doesn’t say what for. For walking her home, maybe. For carrying her home, on top of that. For not letting her go. For keeping her promise. (Fujino will promise her a lot of things, later, things that she won’t be lucky enough to keep—but she doesn’t know this yet. They both don’t.)
“So,” Fujino smirks, sending a playful nudge from her hip towards Kyomoto’s legs, and the girl lets out a delighted laugh this time, reverberating out her ribs and shuddering into Fujino’s through her back, her red beating heart against her flesh. It felt good. Warm, for some reason, like a fuzzy towel fresh out of the dryer wrapped around her body, warding away the cold of winter that’s beginning to unveil its pale hues over the horizon. “Shall we go home, my lady?”
“Yeah. Let’s go home.”
You pushed me in
And now my feet can't touch the bottom of you
“Just walk in, we’ve done the stretches. There’s never going to be a good time to walk in.”
“But it’s so cooold,” Fujino complains, even though it was exactly what they were looking for: some sort of relief from the sweltering, humid heat of summer. But the water at the pool is impossibly freezing, even under the intense glare of the sun above them, and Fujino finds the melting warmth a little too comfortable for her to even try to dip a leg into the water.
“Well, I’m going to go in anyway,” Kyomoto bravely decides, shivering with a giggle as she dips a leg into the clear blue water after the other.
“No but—wait! Don’t leave me,” Fujino whines. It’s funny, this sort of role reversal that they have every once in a while—Kyomoto likes to feel brave, and Fujino likes to be whiny, sometimes. Likes to hold her arm with both her hands like a needy toddler. Sometimes.
“Should I just push you in?” Kyomoto teases as Fujino starts the comical tug-and-pull of their arms together, back and forth, fingers intertwined between the valleys of each others’. “Should I, really?”
“Yes,” Fujino says without thinking, and regrets it immediately when she sees the mischievous look blooming on Kyomoto’s face. “No no, wait—” but it’d been too late: with a swift move, Kyomoto’s spindly arms pushed her off the edge of the pool, and although Fujino is bigger, braver, stronger than she will ever be—she falls.
The freezing crystal-clear water of the pool immediately engulfs her body whole. Fujino was into a few seconds of shock, her lungs adjusting to the sudden lack of oxygen, and breathes the air out into a thousand tiny bubbles, watches them race up, up, up towards the surface, towards Kyomoto’s body floating above her. In the halo of the sun, the light seeking between the gaps of her hair strands, she looks—
Like the sun, almost. Like the angels up in the mountains that her grandmother once told her about one stuffy summer night, in her cabin with the windows open, looking over the lake. White apparitions dancing over the stagnant surface, ever-so-gently nudging the water into soft ripples. Heavenly person, heavenly messenger, light of the sun. Kyomoto’s grin, gleaming under the burning circle of the sun, hundred little bursts of its blinding light around her. All that inexplicable, immeasurable beauty.
You couldn't have, you couldn't have
Stuck your tongue down the throat of somebody
Who loves you more
This is a habit: the 7-Eleven in the outskirts of the town, where the roads stretch far into emptiness, and each evenly-spaced sleepers on the train tracks melts into each other, one after the other, over and over—you’d get a headache, really, if you think about it too much. The world is so achingly, dizzyingly large, and her hands are so freezingly small, but the white-and-green glow of the 7-Eleven light grounds Fujino into a hidden pocket of the universe of her own.
Of their own, Kyomoto’s little hand bundled up in hers, she had always been so much smaller than her—in the sharp ringing of the entrance bell, in the midst of the humming heater, their hands browsing through the magazine aisle past the watch of its heavy-eyed employees—the world is theirs.
And then, one day far into the sixth-year habit of theirs, the other shoe falls.
In the blizzard, the light of the fluorescents on the 7-Eleven ceiling radiating on the white snow stretching out into the terrifying darkness. Beneath the electric hum of the light above, by the heavy whirring of the heater working hard to ward away the cold. The tips of their index fingers brushed over each other, ever-so-gently. Fujino feels it, feels every cell that builds up the skin of Kyomoto’s palm brush against hers, despite the thick fuzz of her gloves engulfing her own. She shudders, tries not to shudder for a second time, and goes back to reading from where she’d left off, the top of the second column—was it second, or was it the third?
This is a habit, too: the distraction of having another person breathing in the same space by your side, the same air—Fujino had learned to tolerate it the first few weeks of befriending Kyomoto. How the space that was once all hers to occupy, her own little world with hanging white strips of paper on a clothesline for birds, had let another occupant in. An occupant that became a resident. A resident that became—
“What?” Fujino asks, the second time the side of Kyomoto’s palm nudges against hers. She’s busy with her own manga—the third volume of Utena, by the looks of it, and her own small hands are flicking the unpaid pages ever-so-delicately—but still, the little touches, the subtle glance of her eyes. Fujino decides to ask: “Hey, what—which volume is that?”
“The third,” Kyomoto whispers, glossy eyes still focused on the pages. “This is the one where Utena and Anthy—” a hitched breath. Then, just abruptly: Kyomoto looks up, her eyes looking straight into hers. The wide, open black of her pupils, like the darkness of a cliffside inviting you in, whispers an urge to fall off the edge.
Still, Fujino’s idiot mouth asks, “where they what?”
Kyomoto falls first. There isn’t a world where Kyomoto doesn’t fall first. Over the gaps between the bricks on the sidewalk, over a tree root protruding off the ground, over her untied shoelaces. Over Fujino’s idiot mouth, and the way her tiny cold hands reached out to grab her jaw, her cheeks, before she smashes her own entire mouth against her lips.
Immediately—the feeling of chapped lips on her tongue. Fujino gasps, surprised at the swell of her own chest, at the feeling of skin against skin—Kyomoto’s cheekbone, Kyomoto’s nose, Kyomoto’s mouth, all pressed against hers. The flavour of her own strawberry lip balm on her tongue—the lip balm that she’d deliberately, religiously, always swipes over the dried skin of Kyomoto’s lips in the winter, across the reddened swell of the parts that she’d picked out. Kyomoto, Kyomoto, Kyomoto, all on her face, all around her, nestled in the frantic swelling of her heartbeat. Her mouth chasing after hers, the obscene wet noises that it makes. If she doesn’t end it here, Fujino is going to die.
So, just abruptly—Fujino shoves her away.
Wholly, by the chest, with both her palms thrown against it. And because Kyomoto is so small, she had a few seconds of grace before her entire body topples backwards onto the cold, hard tiles of the 7-Eleven floor with a loud thud . Fujino does, too, surprised by the sheer force that her body had acted upon, but she’d managed to grab on the edge of the magazine shelf before she could manage to slip off her feet. The heavy-eyed employee only made a note to lazily look over the cashier, once, with an eyebrow raised up, before retreating back into their own world.
A hitched breath.
“Oh my God,” Kyomoto whispers, her hand hovering over her mouth, her lips, the scene of the crime—and then a series of whimpered, “oh my God, oh my God, Fujino I didn’t mean—I really, I didn’t know why I did that, I’m so sorry—I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…”
“Dude.” Fujino deadpans. “It’s fine.”
Kyomoto lets out a gross half-sob, half-whimper, her teary eyes looking up at her with a terrified frown, “whuh… what?”
“It’s fine, ” Fujino repeats, with the same even tone, perfectly even tone—”I’m fine, and you’re fine. Sort of. Did I push you too hard? Get up here. Does your butt hurt?”
“What?” Kyomoto kept on repeating, with the same terrified whisper in her voice, even as Fujino extended a hand. “I—I don’t understand…”
“And neither do I, but it’s fine,” Fujino shrugs. “Really. Are you gonna keep me waiting or what?”
Kyomoto reaches out to take her hand, tentatively, as if she’s afraid that Fujino would help her up only to slam her back down harder, for what she’d done. She expects a backlash, a sort of what the fuck, how dare you, I don’t even like girls, and I certainly don’t fucking like you that way, but—
Nothing. Only Fujino’s strange, even smile, her even tone, her nonchalant shrug. Like absolutely nothing had happened. Nothing at all.
So I will wait for the next time you want me
Like a dog with a bird at your door
The blizzard hadn’t fully ebbed by the time they both arrived back to town, but they couldn’t wait any longer at that 7-Eleven. They didn’t want to, for reasons as obvious as the biting cold nipping on their skin—yet, pretended like it had never happened. Fujino couldn’t live with it if she didn't. And Kyomoto—well.
Kyomoto drops her on the doorstep, because tonight the stars are under their feet and Fujino doesn’t walk Kyomoto the long way home through the rice fields like she always does. She stood there, on the edge of the pathway where the sidewalk diverges to her front porch, just standing there. Sort of digesting it. Sort of accepting her fate. Always watching Fujino walk away.
“Wait—” her words get ahead of herself, always. Kyomoto’s hand reaches out to the cold emptiness, but the rest of it is strangled in her throat. The only thing she could tug out of the hot tangled lump was: “Forgive me.”
“It’s fine, man, really,” Fujino shrugs off over her shoulder, like this was another insignificant, silly mistake that Kyomoto keeps dwelling on. “Really.”
Kyomoto stares. Fiddles with her own intertwined fingers, thumb against thumb. There’s nothing to say to that.
“Be careful on your way home,” Fujino calls out, and doesn’t look back. She keeps on walking, unlocking the front door, kicking the heel of her boots off. Leaving her there. Doesn’t say the mandatory Text me when you arrive home, so I know you’re safe. But that was supposed to be Kyomoto’s line, anyway.
In the night, despite it all, Fujino’s little flip phone resting on her nightstand vibrates with a soft ding, lights up the entire ceiling for a split-second. Under the engulfing warmth of her covers, in the darkness, Fujino doesn’t make a move to reach for it. It’s a hot ball of aching desire too much for her to swallow, too heavy for her to stomach. She couldn’t have done it even if she wanted to.
Fujino closes her eyes. She doesn’t spare a look back.
We hate Tears in Heaven
But it's sad that his baby died
“Oh, well. That fuckin’ sucked. That really fuckin’ sucked.”
By her side, bundled up in mismatched blankets, Kyomoto cracks a knowing smile. “You’re just saying that ‘cause it was sad.”
“Well, duh, it sucked because it was sad,” Fujino scoffs. “Aren’t you sad?”
She shrugs, helplessly. “Of course I am.”
“Then it sucked! Dumb movie. Let’s move on to another.”
Kyomoto stifles a laugh, this time. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad. I’m sure there was a reason Leslie died, if you really think about it.”
“None other than to make the movie sad! So what, it develops Jesse’s character. Who gives a damn about Jesse? Leslie was too fuckin’ cool to die for that!”
“Well, I think there’s something more to it,” Kyomoto reasons. Her voice is barely louder than a murmur. “I think… the sad part is that, she didn’t have to die.”
“Exactly what I’m saying!” Fujino threw her hands up. “It was completely useless, such a waste of a cool character!”
“But, that’s how real life is, isn’t it. Nobody has to die.”
“Well…” Fujino shrugs, “I mean. Yeah, but eventually, don’t we all?”
“Unless you die painlessly at ninety-four after a long, fulfilling life surrounded by your grandchildren, I think every death would be a life wasted.”
“I guess.”
“And I think…” Kyomoto’s voice is so small. Her body, engulfed in the swell of the fabrics. Her face, illuminated by the flickering light from the TV. Her eternally rosy cheeks, the sad wrinkle of her eyebrows. Her face had always looked so sad. Fujino hated it with a passion. “I think, the saddest part is the idea that—Jesse will be missing Leslie longer than he’ll ever know her.”
“Okay… well,” Fujino sighs, sort of nonchalantly, because what do you say to that? “I’ll make a note to die when you’re old and wrinkly and sick. Okay?” And then she jabs at Kyomoto’s waist, gently, to make her laugh, so that Kyomoto would stop looking so sad all the goddamn time. “I promise. Now stop talking about that dumb movie!”
Between her laughter, her little tickled flinches, Kyomoto still managed to say: “Well, I hope I die before you do, so I don’t have to know how it feels to live without you.”
“Fuck you, man,” Fujino sighs out, defeatedly. “You always know how to make everything so fucking sad.”
Kyomoto doesn’t apologize for it, not this time. She just reaches out to grab the remote on the coffee table, nudging it over to her. Doesn’t say a word. Fujino doesn’t take it.
The credits rolled on.
And we fought about John Lennon
Until I cried
And then went to bed upset
Kyomoto was pacing around between the chaos of the living room of her house. It was a late Friday night in the middle of August, another one of the countless days of summer holiday blurring together into nothingness while they worked and worked and worked on the revisions of their comic before the publication deadline. It was the summer where Fujino bundled all her life’s necessities into a duffel bag and hauled it across the suburb towards Kyomoto’s house, because Kyomoto’s parents were never there—Fujino wouldn’t be surprised if she whipped up Kyomoto’s family registry and only seeing her name as a lone column there, not even a family name to begin her own with.
But that’s alright, really. The good part is that now they could use her house as the official headquarters for mangaka-ing out, in the summers where Fujino’s parents are always home and bedtime curfew is still eleven pm sharp. Fujino’s mother is still skeptical about letting them leave at all, because of that one time somewhere in seventh grade after Fujino slipped up about the fact that Kyomoto’s parents are barely home, if ever at all—so they lied. And Kyomoto didn’t like lying, so really, it’s Fujino who lied. For their own good. And most importantly, for their debut one-shot’s good. It was the only thing that occupied their minds lately.
The deadline is in two days.
It was the height of the summer before it slowly dwindled down into cold, rainy weather, and the suffocating dampness clinging on the air had them leaving every window open for the cicadas to happily trill their mating screams into. Fujino is sitting sprawled out on the floor, careful on not letting sweat drip from her forehead onto the delicate sheets of their supposedly final draft, when Kyomoto’s leg brushes past the stack of notebooks by her side and messes a letter inside the little dialogue bubble she’s been so carefully—”dude! What is your problem!”
Abruptly, Kyomoto stops her frenzied pacing halfway through finishing her hundredth circle around the living room. She just stood there, for a full minute, wringing her hands and staring straight at her, until Fujino felt like she needed to stand up just to match her energy.
“I think,” Kyomoto starts, with the same, soft voice she always uses, “there’s something about the final revisions they made. It’s just, I just think…”
Fujino sighs, harshly. “What? Just spit it out, man, Jesus.” Fujino doesn’t even believe in Jesus. “You’ve been pacing circles since afternoon like a goddamn fly, and it’s giving me a headache.”
“Okay. Well…” Kyomoto shuts her eyes firmly when she says, “I think we shouldn’t cut out the scene at the end, near the final.”
“Why?” Fujino frowns, shifting over to search for the particular scene through the mess of stacked notebooks and loose papers, through the dust of pencil shavings and sweaty palms. “They had a seasoned mangaka as our editor, I’m sure they’d have a good reason to suggest the scene cut.”
“Yes, but—I liked that part,” Kyomoto sighs out. “I think it matters the most out of all.”
Fujino shook her head, thumbing through the loose papers filled with line art panels, “It’s just an interlude before the true conclusion, it’s really not that important.”
“I think it is. You shouldn’t—don’t scrap it away, please. We’ve already scrapped so much…”
She looks up. “Why are you insisting so hard on this, anyway?”
“Because I love your writing, and it’s already perfect the way it was!”
For some weird, idiotic reason, this is the part that sets Fujino on edge.”And I’m the one who wrote it all, so—so fucking what!” There’s an urge to fling the entire notebook into the air just to make a point, and her hands are itching for violence, to be satisfied with pain, but Fujino wrestles with it, tries to wrestle with it. This is Kyomoto’s house, after all—it’d be really shitty to break something that wasn’t hers to break.
Still, the anger burns. “ I’m the one who strung out the plot, and built the characters, hell—I’m the one who pitched it at all in the first place while you just stood behind me with your head down like that! And now the one thing left is to do what they told us to do before we both get what we want, which is getting fucking professionally published, by the way, if you still even remember—and you’re not even helping me! You’re just, running around, thinking about some scene that doesn’t even matter—”
“I’m just saying,” Kyomoto interrupts her tirade, with a small voice as sharp as hers, “I—” and then she deflates, again, with a shocked glare in her eyes, as if she was surprised by how angry she could be, too—”This novel is ours. This thing that we worked on… I know it’s not fair to ask for as much say in it as you do, but I’m just asking you this one. Don’t delete that scene, I think it’s important to the story you made. And I loved your story. I love—”
“Shut up,” Fujino snaps, “it doesn’t matter! It’s my story, anyway, you’re just the background artist that stood behind me while I—”
Her words ended at this fever pitch before her voice breaks, truly breaks—her throat hurts and her eyes stung with the threat of tears and she couldn’t, why is she the one crying—
“Is that all that I am to you?”
“Fuck you,” Fujino gasps, and the hiccup that follows turns into a sob. And then: a full blown meltdown. Her strangled breaths, and the tears that drip down her cheekbone and off her chin. And—shit, the papers. She didn’t want to ruin them, didn’t want to stain them with her horrible, idiot mouth, didn’t want to hurt her like this, but in the end—this is all that she does.
Like the coward that she is, Fujino runs.
Her mother opens the door for her with a face that carries the threat of a good scolding, for waking her up so late in the night—but she doesn’t say a thing when Fujino barges through her body and thumps down the hallway, all snot and tears and heartbroken sobs. She lets her slam her bedroom door closed, where Fujino jumped to bed face-down on her pillow—and sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed, until her sinuses stung and her head throbs with the force of a thousand hammers, until the fever breaks into complete darkness, into oblivion.
But now I am dreaming, and you're singing at my birthday
It is her voice. Kyomoto’s soft, quiet voice, surrounding her in this fuzzy mess of watercolour background that she wakes up into. It’s her house, maybe. Her living room, except—it’s too colourful to be. Fujino reaches out blindly to grasp at whatever that could ground her, and there’s voices, everywhere, singing in unison, but Kyomoto’s—
Her voice is so loud, despite its softness. Ringing in her ears, engulfing her whole. Like she’d practised to finally make herself known, just for this occasion. Fujino steps, dizzily, in this fluid surrounding, squinting her eyes to look around for a familiar face, a beloved face,
And I've never seen you smiling so big
The mess of wild, untamable hair, from that sleepover night in seventh grade when all they had was a magazine Kyomoto liked, a pair of scissors, and a dream. The bump of her eternally rosy cheeks, her sweet-eyed smile, the mole on the right side of her chin. Somewhere in ninth grade, between all the beauty-perfection madness of the teenage girls around them, Kyomoto had stared at the mirror and softly rubbed on that little mole for the longest time, like she was trying to will it away. When Fujino decides that she’s had enough, she’d only grabbed her wrist and said: You know, my grandma once told me about this old belief that your mole is the place where you were kissed the most in your past life by your lover.
Kyomoto had only cracked a small smile at that, and the sight of it washes Fujino with relief like pool water in the scorching heat of summer. She continues, just to keep that little smile alive, Look at mine. And then she tilts her head to the left to show her own mole, on the underside of her ear, to which made Kyomoto burst out with laughter— I don’t know who you were in your past life, but your lover was freaky!
Her laughter followed Fujino now, as she stumbled forward, closer, reaching both of her cupped hands towards Kyomoto’s face like a praying man.
It's nautical themed, and there's something I'm supposed to say
She is so close—so close. There’s this gnawing ache of longing, like she hasn’t seen her face in such, such a long time, even though Fujino knows that’s not—oh, that’s not true, is it? It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t have been able to bear it. She’d just seen her, anyway, she knows that—in the morning, she’ll run back to Kyomoto’s house before dusk could get to her, and she’ll beg for her forgiveness. Fujino will hold her and hold her and tell her
Tell her—
Kyomoto is right there. Standing right there. There’s something she needs to tell her—something she needs to say, something Kyomoto needs to know, but her stupid mouth keeps failing her and her grasp on her face keeps slipping—
But can't for the life of me remember what it is
And if I could give you the moon
I would give you the moon
You are sick, and you're married, and you might be dying
But you're holding me like water in your hands
The suffocating dampness of salt tears pooling in her arms is what wakes Fujino, at first. She still has the throbbing headache, and the intense stinging of her sinuses, her throat making these loud, grating noises as she tries to swallow the ache all over her body. When the throbbing somewhat ebbs, the blur of tears in her eyes disperse into her surroundings; the hard, cold desk of her office in the middle of the night, the constant whirring of her computer, and the city lights out the window—gone. Every last one.
She remembers.
Now, throttled back into a world where the grief of Kyomoto’s absence gnaws eternally on her hollow ribs—she remembers. Now, thirteen years too late, she would have said— oh , she would have told Kyomoto that she didn’t know how empty she would be without her. Without her backgrounds to surround her, and she’ll tell her—should have told her, before it was too late, she didn’t know she would ever be too late, wouldn’t know that there’s a sort of emptiness so achingly large —a body of water so thick and dark that she couldn’t see the bottom of it, the salt filling her lungs, suffocating, pooling in the heel of her palms—
She would have told her about the future they both had dreamed of so desperately, under the stars in the backwoods of Kyomoto’s house. At fourteen, she told her they were going to become the biggest authors the world will ever know. At sixteen, she told her they were going to own eight cats and three Shiba Inus and take her to see the West Coast. At eighteen, she would have told her they were going to get an apartment in Akihabara after they’d graduated and work their way up a publishing house. Kyomoto would have asked, with the eight cats and three Shiba Inus, all in one place? And she would have laughed, and told her yes, forever, yes, even when the whole of Japan and the rest of the world didn’t know the word for it yet. Even when they both didn’t. She had always known she had loved Kyomoto intensely, immensely, with every drop of blood that her beating heart could hold.
Now, water in her hands, damn the world and damn herself. It’s the countless would’s that stung the most in the end, isn’t it? She would have followed wherever Kyomoto would go.
(That night, splayed out on the porch under the stars, Fujino knows that Kyomoto wouldn’t have said a thing. She would’ve just stared at her, with her sweet eyes, her eternally rosy cheeks.
She’d already known.)
“It’s—but it’s so small, it’s so tiny…”
Fujino just stood there, uselessly, wishing that she had the capacity in her heart to be so heartbroken about a dead baby bird they’d found between the swell of the oak roots, now resting on top of Kyomoto’s palms. She’s cupping it, like a praying man, holding back the threat of tears even as it made its way into the high-pitched crack of her words.
“There has to be something we could do to save it. We could take it to the vet in town, see if they could get its heart beating again…”
“Kyomoto,” Fujino just says.
She shook her head, wiping away the fresh fallen tears that dripped off her chin with her sleeve. “You—you don’t understand. It must have been shot down, someone must have killed it. It’s impossible, that it just climbed out of its nest and fell down. It had so much to live…” a painful, hitched breath—there’s these moments where the anger that Kyomoto carries writhes out of the little box she’d had so carefully kept locked. Fujino could see it, sometimes, battering in its cage, begging to be released through violence.
But Kyomoto wraps the itching pain again, and again, like an oyster layering the sting of shrapnel over and over until it forms a pearl, and she remains soft despite it all. Despite everything. It’s one of the many things about her that Fujino couldn’t understand. That kind of anger, beloved—where do you put it all to rest?
“It just begun to grow out its feathers. It was going to learn how to fly, far away from here…”
Fujino said, “I know.”
“You don’t understand… you could have never…”
When you saw the dead little bird, you started crying
But you know the killer doesn't understand
“I know.”