author's notes ch. 3
author's notes
Chapter: 3 ((shizuka))
Type: Original
Posted on- 3/2/04 (ff.net short cut)
I don’t quite remember when I wrote it, but my poem to my dear deceased was crumpled in my hand. It was the original, and I brought it every year to copy it and leave it at the grave.
“To My Cake, On Wedding Day
The melissa tree drops single tears upon your aged brow
The rose bush with all it’s grace presents you with a crown
The cherry tree leaves its roots upon your resting feet.
And the softest bed on all of Earth becomes your throned seat.
I sit on the riverbank writing my epitaph.
I haven’t got a chance to finish, all you do is laugh.
And someday when I do complete, and throw it on the ground,
Please sing to me once more so I’ll again hear the sound.
A thousand paper cranes litter the sky.
A single one drops and cannot fly.
Without his brethren his number totals one too few.
And so I cannot wish for me to return to you.
And the river is rising, I haven’t learned to swim.
Even with umbrellas opened, I fear I’ll get sucked in.
But the trees break my fall
And all I can do is call
Call out your name.
I’m screaming, I’m screaming one more time
I know I’ve crossed the line.
A thousand paper cranes litter the sky.
A single one drops and cannot fly.
Without his brethren his number totals one too few.
And so I cannot wish for me to return to you.”
I think Suke’s going to try something tomorrow. That’s why I don’t want anyone else there.
I’ll have to bring some origami paper.
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‘It’s a simple matter, really. We have two options. If you were to go unconscious, I could take over without anyone seeing an aura- but when we need to switch back, it would be easy to see. Or, as it looks like nobody is here, we can switch places while you are awake. However, should, say, a janitor, walk in…’ Yú-kun was trying to think the best for me, as he knew that my reputation was very important to me. Maybe a little too important, but, hey- you are who you are.
“It- it’s fine. I want to see this, too. If someone sees me for who I am, well… well, let them see. It’s not like I care.” Liar. Flat, blatant liar. And we both knew it.
‘This is easy. Just concentrate on your breathing with your eyes closed. Keep your mind blank. And nothing else. Simple enough, Yen-chan?’
“Yes.”
I breathed in, slowly, tasting the air, trying to concentrate only on it.
I breathed in again, heavily. It tasted like books- paper, ink, with faint aftertaste of a tinge of cigarettes. My head began to reel. I tasted blood, slightly metallic, and bittersweet in all of the nuances; yet, I was quite sure I was not cut, nor did it taste like my own. It was… almost spicy.
Breathed in. I had a headache now. It felt like a year had passed between each inhale of air, and the atmosphere seemed to get thicker every time. It felt like I was trying to swallow pureed eggplant.
Breathed in. It felt like I was swallowing a steak. A gristly one. My breath faltered. I couldn’t swallow it! I couldn’t swallow air! I would suffocate… on my own breath?
Time discontinued. Suddenly, it felt like I didn’t need to do anything. I was filled with a warmth, wrapped in a million blankets… a feeling so familiar… I couldn’t move anymore, and my eyelids opened on their own to darkness. I was stiff and blind.
I was both frozen and warm, my eyes wide shut. I was reeling, but whether it was pleasure or pain, I was unsure. I couldn't tell where gravity was pulling me, or which way was up. I couldn’t even tell if Yú-kun was within me. I could always sense his presence, except for now. And within it all, I could still taste the blood like lump stuck in my throat. The air, now stagnant, was stuck there…
My throat drew it down of its own accord. My eyes blinked themselves once or twice, and my head shook off the residual feeling; I was breathing soundly again. I could feel Yú-kun’s presence.
‘What was that?’ I asked Yú-kun. It seemed like the transition had taken hours, and quite frankly, I felt a considerable amount of anxiety when I couldn’t feel my half, for better or for worse.
“What… was… what?” Yú-kun asked. It sounded strange; he’d paused after each word as if he was trying it out. He also had some inflection in the last word of his sentence, which for someone who talks so listlessly, surprised me.
‘That feeling… I couldn’t breathe. It felt like the air was too thick to swallow,’ I responded, a little shocked that he hadn’t noticed anything.
“You were breathing normally.”
I felt my eyes widen. Obviously, Yú-kun had noticed something, probably something he’d neglected to tell me before. Just what I needed to hear.
“I forgot you have never used magic before. Did it feel like you couldn’t tell which way was up, like your very existence was an oxymoron?”
‘Yeah,’ He’d described it to a T. Then again, he was a magic teacher. Hopefully what I’d felt wasn’t a bad thing.
“That is normal. Let it go. After tapping into your power a few times, that will not happen anymore. Actually, that’s a good sign. It means we both were performing the spell, not just me. Now, about that book?” He laughed. It felt odd, coming from my mouth, as I’m never the one to smile. I’m too pessimistic to laugh.
Yú-kun plopped the book upright on the desk, touching for a moment, the tanuki cover seal. He exhaled deeply, and attempted to wrench open the cover. No luck. The book was practically bursting at it’s seams, but it was nonetheless locked shut.
“This may hurt a little,” Yú-kun mentioned, as if I could do something to prevent it. “I have no idea where that lettuce head of a friend of yours is at the moment to ask for the key, so…”
He lifted my left hand, pointer finger outstretched, and stuck it into the keyhole. My finger did begin to hurt, but the pain was very far off, as if it was happening to someone else. He turned my finger to the left, as one would turn a key, and to my surprise, I heard a ‘click’, and the lock popped open. He pulled out my appendage, and I noticed, for a split second, my pointer finger was key-shaped- before it quickly melted back. Weird. Weird, yes, but extremely useful.
“No, I will not pick the lock to your mother’s jewelry box for you,” Yú-kun said, stronger this time. It was as if he was learning to speak all over again. The fact that he was ‘dead’ for eight hundred years or so, then jammed up inside me for sixteen more, probably made him lose the ability to talk. Not losing the ability to comprehend the meanings of words, no, but rather, losing the ability to associate emotions with them.
The only thing he really remembered was how to laugh, probably from teaching the younger generations. Spending nearly two hundred years of his life selflessly to pass on knowledge to children, now that I thought about it, made him act more like one than an adult. He was quick to blame himself for everything, and it seemed as if he was also very fearful. He called it apprehensive, but it seemed more out of naivety than knowledge. Anne may be a ditz, but she’d never wish death on anyone, even as a joke. And, being that Yú-kun has been with me the whole time, he was aware of it, too. Yet, as I watched him flip through the pages of the ink splattered book, he was shaking with fear, because he’d always thought that whoever opened the book would have to have done it for malicious reasons, and no more. To him, nothing was an accident, and he, like all else, was a slave to the gods and goddesses. There were no shades of gray to him, either- it was a yes or no, good or evil, and so on. Only a child has such reasoning, possibly that… or Yú-kun was no longer truly a human, by my idea of moralities.
I paid closer attention to what Yú-kun was actually reading now. It was covered in splotches, but parts were still legible. It was mostly kanji, the Chinese pictographs used in Japanese, but I saw no sign of hiragana- or ‘ladies’ writing’ used in Japanese particles, verb conjugations, and certain words like desu. Instead, there were certain symbols I definitely couldn’t decipher. Yú-kun hadn’t taught me these.
‘Why are there those bizarre symbols where the hiragana should be?’ I asked, then realized I’d made a very stupid mistake.
“Hiragana didn’t exist when I was alive, baka. I learned them when you did. And these…? They’re mahou writing. They are not readable, not in a normal sense. They are the actual spells. If they are written out again, the incantation can be performed. But, as you just saw, not all spells need to be written to work. Most are a simple problem of mind-over-matter, as in some kind of physical action. But these… these are very potent. They must be written out and performed at the exact same time. Some also can only be done at certain times of the moon or sun cycle. Any spell from here can simply be copied onto another sheet of paper and it will be nothing more than words. Most of these are covered with ink in some part or another, and are worthless without the whole thing. But, there’s one here that is very interesting…”
‘Oh?’
“Not only that, it it so simple that I’m surprised I’d never thought of it before. And another… I think I could do this one…” He pulls out a pen and a sheet of loose leaf from my backpack, feverently scribbling down a very long illegible phrase, then, leaving a few lines, writes down another phrase consisting of only two symbols, both that I could easily copy myself. “What is odd, here, though, is that there is no sign of why. Why would this book produce demons? It’s only an advanced conjuring book, but not once is it for evil intent. The only thing that would separate this from any of my own conjuring books, or any of my father’s other ones- are the stains. I can’t see anything wrong with it, or anything to give us a clue.”
‘Then how did you know that the demons will listen to whoever opened the book?’
“When it was sealed…” Yú-kun started, then paused, probably remembering the incident, as he closed the cover. “When it was sealed, two or three demons did not fit inside. The idiot child’s mother… I gave the book to her without knowing this until it was too late. Her anger for me surviving and her son not was why I died. When a demon fells a person, they just freeze. All time stops for them. It isn’t like a normal death… but it is painless, at least, as long as you are willing to accept that you are dead. if not, you die slowly and painfully and may even become a fiend yourself. But, in all intent and purpose, I might say I was already dead the moment the ink was spilled… so, thanks to Amaterasu, I was spared the pain. ”
‘We should return the book, you know, since it’s useless keeping something that can’t be read.’
“True. We sill switch again, no? And you still have ten minutes left of lunch. If you eat fast…”
‘I think my stomach can handle.’
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We returned the book without a problem, scarfed down lunch, and ran through the rest of the day. Yú-kun remained quiet the entire time- he never helped me in school to begin with. Well, how could he? He knew as much about United States history, British poetry, Spanish literature, and chemistry as I did. Alchemy he knew, but he and I were both too afraid to correct the teacher when the topic of spontaneous human combustion came up as the day’s class topic. Sewing was his forte, however, as living alone made him an excellent house, err… husband? but he’d always told me that it was something I just needed to learn for myself. That, and the fact that he was seriously phobic of sewing machines was the cause that I did so poorly. I’d only seen the clothes he’d made in his memories, but they were something else- I’d die for pants like that. One day he was going to teach me, I swore, as he still needed to find a way to pay his rent.
And it was eighth period at the machine when I was rubbed by something furry on my leg. Furry and bushy. Furry and bushy and squishy and…
“AIEEEEEEEEEEEE!” Leslie Norman screamed. Loudly. And girly.
Instantaneous panic. Justin burned his and on the iron, Nellie got her long hair caught on a backstitch and had to pull the safety switch on her machine, and about half the class was running around the room trying to catch it.
“Ew, I think it’s rabid or something!” Lisa yelped, clearly panicking (and standing on her chair with one leg in the air like a little girl).
Chaos insued; Miss Kestler intercommed the janitors while I joined the boys in an attempt to see exactly what dastardly creature had invaded the room. It froze for a moment, and Yú-kun had his two cents in.
‘Kohaku-kun! Oniichan!’
And without warning, I’d accidentally blurted out the exact same thing. As if time had stopped, everyone and everything froze. Lisa looked like a ballerina on pirouette, Justin stopped shaking his burned hand to the air, Nellie stopped clipping the fabric from her locks, and the boys in chase just held their ground. The scruffy, brownish animal simply looked up at me, as if to say, “Come again?”
“Ko… kon’nichiwa? Watakushi wa Yú desu.” I blurted. Thank the Earth that nobody in Sewing took Japanese, or I'd have some serious questions later.
Everybody stared. Thank the Earth further that a tanuki was a Japanese dog.
“Nani? Err, I mean, what? Hey, it’s a Japanese dog. I’m trying to calm it down here!”
Lisa was mortified, probably because she suddenly realized that the thing that was running around the room was neither rabid or a mouse. “But in Japanese?” she asked, a little perplexed, getting down from her awkward position.
“Hey, hey, hey! It worked didn’t it?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“So?”
“I have Animal Control! Everybody stand back, we’re going to sedate it!” Miss Kestler was back.
‘Sedate? Yen-chan- we have to do something! I was telepathing to Oniichan, and he says he just woke up; he won’t know what a sedate is, or even where he is!” I’d never heard Yú-kun speak so feverently before. He and I both knew that his brother would be sent off somewhere without his knowledge. There was only one thing I could do. I ran to the window, opened it, and as the AC men walked in, I yelled,
“Deguchi des-yo!”
And with a flash of brown, he was gone.
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‘I feel bad about the ex-post-facto,’ Yú-kun mentioned, to kill time. We were walking home late (after a central detention, mind you). There was nothing in the school code involving central detentions for the releasing of animals out of the school before this blustery December day, but there was now.
“Ex-post-facto laws are banned according to the Constitution. I can’t believe I got a central! Penalties for a law like that aren’t supposed to happen until after it’s passed! And that goes on my record!”
‘That was no law, that was school code.’
“Then I’m going to go to court!”
‘No, we are going to go look for Kohaku. Oniichan’s not stupid, but the has no idea where he is. I told him to get away from the men wearing the blue and white shirts, and now he is too far away to contact. He could have ended up anywhere- or worse!’
Yú-kun was right. But there was no way I’d be able to search at that point. I was the living dead. It was almost six, I had homework to do, demons were on the loose, and I’d used magic for the first time today. I just wanted to sleep.
Yú-kun calmed down slightly and sighed. ‘You can’t do this now, can you? Go home then, I think I’ve pushed you much too far. Forgive me.’
“I want to help, but I can barely think at this point. I’m really tired.”
‘This is turning into a great American novel.’
“Heh. The sea was filled with angry monkeys, no?”
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I was barely awake. I couldn’t think and my mom knew it when I tried to stuff a burrito into my forehead instead of my face at dinner. I quit trying and simply went to bed.
‘You need to eat.’
“I need to sleep.” I sighed. I knew I needed it, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t sleep. “Yú-kun? Do… you want to borrow my body while I’m asleep? To look for your brother?” Amaterasu, I truly regret saying that.
Damn, I’m starting to sound like Yú.