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If you lay still enough, you can feel the earth breathing beneath your stomach. If you are quiet enough, you can feel its heart sync with your own. It’s a slow, deep rhythm that can lull you to sleep in a matter of moments. A soft thing; golden song, warm, familiar, and all-the-more comforting. The feeling of an idyllic home, old childhood memories with dog-eared pages stained by the passage of time.
She closes her eyes and lets herself drift off into dreams. Dreams of fields with flowering dandelions and clovers, framed picture-perfect by the sunshine like a page out of a nature book. Dreams of red, yellow, and orange; swirls of papery leaves blown away by the wind in spirals of color, falling to crunch familiarly under her boots. Dreams of the mingled chatter of the older villagers and schoolchildren lingering in the breeze, peppered in between with the meen, meen of the higurashi. Somewhere in that dream, someone is singing; a young girl, innocent and naive, a childish song that she would soon forget as she tromped on through the countryside, one hand held by her mother and the other held by her father.
(In that dream, no one is crying. No one is sad. Everything is peaceful and nothing is out of place. But childhood eventually fades away, and with it, innocence, too; just as the higurashi come out in the summer to cry out the proof of their lives only to perish once the fall comes.)
The scenery shifts. Something sits heavy in her hands; she grips it tightly, like a lifeline. Sprinkled around her is shattered glass, broken windows and desks, metal tables that feel more like chains. Something is amiss, here; she cannot perceive the features of those around her nor understand the words that escape their mouths - she cannot understand, a buzz in her ears like thick static. Her neck burns, so she reaches up to scratch it, and from her throat pours blood, crimson, acrid iron in her mouth, and maggots wriggling in her hands.
It’s drowning and living her life again in a panorama snapshot of colors and stars and painful sceneries. The scent of cherry blossoms, petals fluttering about in the air and dying the world in pink. The bite of snowfall, frozen and frigid against her cheeks as she wades through knee-deep snow, watching the moon rise and the constellations blink. The crack of lightning, thunder roaring as rain pounds and pounds against the roof of her family home. Through it all, she still hears the meen, meen of the higurashi, screaming, pounding in her ears, reverberating through her very self.
Her eyes fly open and she takes the first breath after waking up. It feels as if she’s woken up from a month-long slumber, full and startling, lungs expanding and churning after days of relaxation. The dull chatter of the evening higurashi filters through her half-open window, the cool summer breeze bringing with it the smell of petrichor. It’s now she realizes her hands are trembling - no, her entire body is shaking, almost violently, as if every cell is threatening to separate from each other and she’s about to crumble into countless fragmented shards. Fragile, like a porcelain doll.
She rolls her tongue in her mouth and vaguely tastes blood.
“Won’t your dad get angry?”
Rena runs her fingers through her hair, the ends springing back into place with each pass of her palms. There’s a pair of scissors in Mion’s hand. Rena is sitting on one of those metal foldable chairs that Mion had found in the shed right next to the school. The seat feels hot against her thighs; it’s the thick of summer, and the sun is beating down on her shoulders. The skin along her arms will surely be burnt to red by the time she gets home.
“I don’t think he will,” Rena answers, and tries not to remember the look on her father’s face when she had first cut her hair by herself. She’d practically mangled it, so much so that her father practically dragged her to the hairdresser to have it straightened out. But anything was better than when she looked in the mirror and could only see her mother’s face staring back at her. Even still, in the cabinet in her room, there are countless presents of hair ties, ribbons, pins, clips; these expensive bottles of shampoo, silvery bottles of spray. “Besides,” she says, glancing up at Mion, “I like it when you cut my hair. I want you to cut my hair, Mii-chan.”
Mion’s face turns a little pink, and Rena can’t quite tell if it’s because of the summer heat or the casual words she just spilled out of her mouth. A smile spreads across her lips, and Mion lets out a bright laugh. The sound pulls sharp and familiar on the strings of her heart; it’s a complicated thought, but it eases right off her shoulders when she ties a long cloth around Rena’s neck. With the ease of a barber that’s been working for years, she begins trimming around the ends of her hair, ginger strands falling around them into tiny piles on the ground. “Ok, dear customer, close your eyes, please~! I’ll be clipping your bangs now,” Mion chirps in a sing-song voice in an imitation of the barbers in those hair salons in Okinomiya as she circles around the chair to stand in front of Rena.
Mother had always loved playing with her hair, playing with her perfect daughter. Those old gifts are still lined on her shelves and sometimes she stares at them, tucks her hair behind her ear and glances at the old mirror sitting on the table next to the cabinet. Her mother used to say she was pretty. Dresses still feel itchy even now; they scrape at her knees and thighs, strain against her ribs and chest. Draws her breath short. It’s strange, how these things have a way of falling over her. It starts in this way, the only way she thinks it can.
Where will the bows go? How will her mother make her little girl look pretty again? There are not enough dresses in the world that can hide the fact. Settling into this, whatever semblance of normalcy she thinks she may have known how to define once, is more difficult than she knows how to explain. The hallways of her house don’t feel like hers anymore, and the roads she walks down every day all have phantoms clinging onto their corners. This semblance of normal she thinks she once understood. But life cruelly goes on regardless, and she watches everything turn to strangers another time, the world lean and splintered and broken.
(Do bad children, children that can pick what to be grateful for, deserve all of the punishment they can get?)
“Ok~ you can open your eyes now, dear customer. How is the length?”
When she opens her eyes and looks in the mirror Mion holds in front of her, all she sees is ginger hair and blue eyes that she despises, wants to tear out and burn until nothing is left. If it was up to her, she would dye her hair a different color. Maybe a dark blue-black, like pretty little Rika-chan or blonde, perhaps, so she could match with cute little Satoko-chan. Either would be kyute , she vaguely muses, fiddling with a strand of her hair.
But when she twirls her bang around her finger and thinks of what color she should dye her hair, vivid green flashes in the back of her mind, a head of beautiful hair the hue of clover fields in summer and emerald eyes; eyes that shine so bright and strong, unfettered by whatever might impede her path. Eyes that look at her with fondness and excitement, full with overflowing confidence. Eyes that tug at her heart and fill her stomach with chittering cicadas fluttering about.
(Eyes that were right in front of her, staring right at her, but still would never look in her direction.)
“It’s just right,” she says, swallowing something she can’t quite pinpoint. It tastes like blood.
Rena doesn’t quite remember the bits and baubles of how it happened, but as it goes, Mion is sitting in a chair in front of her, her eyes closed and her chin jutted out just so. Ah, right. In exchange for cutting her hair a few days ago, she’d suggested bringing some of her cosmetics at home to help do Mion’s makeup. Mion had sputtered an awkward refusal, her face slightly flushed (from the hot summer sun beating down on their backs or from the embarrassment from being girly, she couldn’t tell), but ultimately acquiesced when Rena insisted.
No, it definitely wasn’t that Rena wanted an excuse to sit and stare at Mion’s face like this. Absolutely not. She was just paying back a friend, right?
“Just hurry up and get it over with already,” Mion grumbles. “I’m gonna explode if I have to keep sitting like this any longer.”
She really shouldn’t laugh at this, but the disgruntled expression on Mion’s face right now makes it almost impossible to resist. She manages with only a small giggle coming out. “It hasn’t even been a minute, Mii-chan,” she answers, giving a light pinch to Mion’s cheek as she rummages through her school bag for the makeup set she put in there earlier that morning. “Be patient, okay?~ Rena will make you nice and kyute!”
Mion shifts a little bit, leaning against the back of her chair with more muttered complaints under her breath, but still staying even though her mortification showed rather plainly on her face. Mion was just like that, Rena knows; she’ll complain and protest about it, but she’ll still do whatever her friends ask her to.
Sitting just like this, the pale golden sunlight filtering through the classroom windows and the smell of summer on the breeze, Mion looks picture perfect: a princess from an old book of fables, a doll cut out from the pages of a catalog. There’s something about it that pulls sharp and painful against the strings of her heart; it’s a curious thing, warm fire through her veins. Something she doesn’t want to name burns at the corners of her eyes, but she swallows around it and does her best to shove it down deep where it’ll be forgotten.
She brushes her thumb over Mion’s closed eyelids, gently, tracing her brush along their edges. Her hands are precise and practiced, methodical with their movements. It’s when her gaze shifts down to her lips that she pauses. For a second the distant cry of the summer cicadas fades away and there’s nothing but the familiar rhythm of her heartbeat pounding in her ears, a quiet cadence that still threatens to drown out everything else. It’s now she realizes just how close she is to Mion, close enough to feel her breath whisper against her skin, close enough to see the curve of her jaw and the flutter of her eyelashes.
“You’re so beautiful, Mii-chan,” she whispers, the words tasting almost forbidden, as though her saying them is a curse, binding her in ways she will never escape. Her heart is straining to be released from the restraint of her ribcage, and it feels like any moment now it’ll burst free from its shackles like a flower in bloom. Her blood feels a hundred degrees hotter in her veins, thundering with the pulse echoing in her ears. The position is too close for comfort, she realizes far too late. It’s painful, it hurts, it’s as if this tiny distance between them is tearing the skin off her flesh, and she’s thinking if only she could snapshot this moment in eternity, sitting like this, if only she could die like this, together with her.
Another moment passes, and Rena realizes her lips are on Mion’s. She smells of old books and sunbathed cypress. It’s forever and it’s an instant; it’s eternity and it’s no time at all. Surprisingly, she’s the one to draw away first, and she almost thinks Mion sighs as her lips leave hers. It’s quiet in the classroom, save for the low hum of the higurashi in the background, and Mion simply looks up at her, neither condemning nor judging, her cheeks flushed a bright pink.
There is an adrenaline burst of panic, and then shame, guilt; all of the horrible, sickly sweet feelings she’s kept locked inside her chest pour out like a waterfall, and before Mion can say anything, Rena has already snatched up her bag and is running, running from all of this. Tears well up from somewhere unknowable inside her and she’s laughing, she’s sobbing, wildly and violently. She wipes at her face furiously, refusing to acknowledge the painful, nauseating sensation or the emotion behind it.
It’s selfish to think like this, but the feeling persists nonetheless, a merciless emptiness carving the base of her stomach and reminding her of how stupid she is, how she’s ruined everything again, that she is and forever will be alone. Thoughts of her mother’s face come into her mind uninvited, tearing their nails into the still tender hollow of her old memories, clawing at the walls of her bleeding heart and carving out flesh and bone anew. She’s really just like her, selfish and stupid, and the thought makes Rena want to vomit.
She stumbles to the bathroom and flicks on the switch, the light above her flashing on and buzzing as she throws up in the sink. It tastes bitter and acrid, metallic in the back of her throat; her heart is about to burst out of her, aching and stinging, pounding louder and louder until it’s too loud to hear anything but impulse.
She looks up to the mirror and sees not Rena but Reina, a foolish, foolish girl. Distantly, someone is crying; screaming without a beginning or end, and the sound hurts more, ripping and tearing at her from the inside. She curls her body inward, a pathetic, childish attempt to ward off the throbbing rawness in her chest, stop the tears from falling from her face. Footsteps echo from all around her, deafeningly loud, and for a brief, terrible moment she feels a hand press against her own. She swings her head up, desperately looking if someone was there, whether Mion had come to her house to check in on her or her father had heard her, but-
Only empty silence greets her.
Vaguely, lingering on the back of her tongue, she can make out something metallic and harsh.