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“Remember, girls,” their mother said, “if you get blood on your clothing, rinse it out right away. It’s much harder to remove the stain after it’s set.”
Shinobu, her cheeks still sticky with tears, was not interested in a lesson about laundry. The cut on her arm throbbed sullenly beneath the bandage, and her lips were still trembling with the shock and indignity of being swiped at by that mean cat when she was only trying to pet it. Kanae, however, was listening attentively, leaning forward to watch as their mother dipped the sleeve of Shinobu’s stained yukata in a basin of water. Kanae always attended dutifully to their mother’s instructions about housekeeping, and Shinobu already understood that her big sister would make a good wife and mother someday. But adulthood seemed impossibly far away, no more real than the fairy tales their father read to them during long winter evenings.
Like a hand around her neck, a sob constricts Shinobu’s throat. It was a fairy tale after all, she thinks, a hazy dream that dissipated the day she saw their parents die. Instead of growing up to shuffle about in a tidy kimono and obi, chasing after children and managing a household, she donned a uniform and learned to mix poisons and wield a lethal blade. Her mother taught her to sew hems and mend tears, but now she uses a needle only to stitch together ripped flesh. The tea she brews is infused with bitter medicine, coaxed between cracked lips into a dehydrated body, not artfully prepared and offered in her finest ware with a delicate turn of her wrist. At least the laundry lessons were useful, she thinks ruefully; week after week, month after month, she scrubs blood and sweat and worse from hospital bedsheets, pins them up to dry like fluttering white flags, then whisks them down to ready a cot for the next patient.
But even when her parents and her future were taken from her, she still had Kanae. Kanae, who despite the callouses worn into her palms by years of gripping her sword, still had the gentlest touch when she cupped Shinobu’s cheeks and told her not to cry.
Now she kneels over a tub of cool water, hugging Kanae’s bloodstained haori to her chest. It’s been two weeks since her sister died in the street while she clutched her hands, and the stain has darkened from an obscene crimson to rusty brown. It reeks with an unmistakable iron tang, and when she runs the crusted material between her fingers, it’s stiff; powdery flakes crack free and mark her fingertips.
She’s spent most of the past two weeks in her bed, curled up beneath Kanae’s haori. She’s still small enough that when she pulled in her arms and legs and tucked her head, the garment enveloped her entirely. Inside that dark, warm cocoon, she hid, never more than half-awake, feeling herself harden into something brittle and sharp. Then one day, she pushed back the haori, squinted against the burn of midday sunlight, and sliced her way out of the thick mass of her grief. Kanae was gone, but Shinobu could still stand, which meant she could still move forward, which meant she had to keep going. She’ll relearn how to put one foot in front of the other, even if it feels like her bones are made of broken glass. And to bind the shattered pieces of herself into something that looks whole, she’ll wrap herself in Kanae’s haori.
But first, she must clean it, of her sister’s blood and her own tears and sweat. What would their mother think, she wonders with an aching twist of her mouth, to see how poorly Shinobu has treated this beautiful garment?
She presses the haori to her face, the cool fabric soothing against her tear-bruised eyelids. Despite its state, it still smells sweet around the collar, where the familiar perfume of rose oil lingers. One last time, she inhales Kanae’s scent. Keeping her eyes closed, she lets herself imagine, just for a few more moments, that her sister is still alive and has just passed by. She can almost feel Kanae’s palm resting on the crown of her head.
Then she plunges the haori into the waiting water. It billows up briefly around her hands, like a bud bursting into bloom, before collapsing down on itself.
She can’t deny that a part of her is hoping that she’s waited too long, that the stains will never be washed away. Besides her ashes and charred bones, this blood is all that’s left of the body that belonged to her sister. Maybe she should have left the haori just as it is, folded it up and laid it to rest in a paulownia box on the household altar.
But as she rubs the material gently between her hands, she sees the stain start to release. A faint ribbon of red twists, then dissolves in the water. Tears blur her eyes, and she scrubs blindly, biting her lip as she works the soap suds into the fabric. When the tears start to sting too intensely, she wipes her face with the back of her arm, and blows her bangs up and away from her eyes. Pulling in a shaky breath, she surveys her progress. The stain is still obvious, but paler now, and the washwater is the dilute brown of weak tea. She lifts the haori out of the water, struggling a little under its sodden weight, and heaves it into the second tub she prepared.
Her tears roll down her nose and chin to drip into the water as she works, joining the ghostly cloud of what’s left of Kanae’s blood. She hears cautious footsteps to her right, and looks up to see Kiyo approaching, her hands twisted in her apron. “Shall I…” Kiyo murmurs. “Shall I empty this basin, Shinobu-san?”
Staring down at the water, she nods, her jaw a tight line. “Pour it out over the flower beds,” she says.
When the sun is high overhead, she sits back on her heels, pushing her straggling hair away from her face. A trickle of sweat rolls down the back of her neck, and her fingertips are deeply wrinkled. She looks down at the haori, floating just beneath the surface of the water. All that’s left of the bloodstains is the faintest shadow, like a dissolving afterimage, halfway between remembered and imagined.
Shinobu pulls the haori up, cradling it into a careful bundle and squeezing. Bit by bit, it grows lighter as it relinquishes the water. Then she walks it to the drying pole and delicately slides the smoothed wood through the sleeves. Droplets spatter her arms and the tops of her feet as she adjusts the haori; when she steps back, a brief cascade of water trickles down to dampen the grass beneath like a sudden rainshower. The sun flashes against the white fabric, and even though she knows where to look, Shinobu can’t see the traces of the stain anymore.
A breeze swells behind her, caressing the back of her neck as it passes, and then it catches the haori and tugs it, flaring it wide like the damp wings of a butterfly readying for its first flight.