Death by Water Read online

  That brings a cheerless smile to Kei’s face, wistful in truth. “Sobo Youko loved her dolls more than anything.”

  “More than anything but her family. Family was always foremost, venerate one’s ancestors, foster your heirs, and such.”

  “Except those who leave for new countries.”

  “That is true,” Oba Hana says with a laugh. “When I was a bit younger than you now, fifteen or fourteen, I stayed at Oba Youko’s house for two weeks. I’ll never forget how she dressed every day in those tsukesage kimonos. They’re very…modest.”

  “Because, heritage,” Kei and her aunt say together and giggle. Leolani inherited that giggle from her mother. It’s endearing.

  “Did your grandmother take you to the Ningyo Kanshasai festival?” Oba Hana asks. “The doll appreciation ceremonies?”

  “I’d go alone to watch the dolls burn.”

  “I’m surprised your grandmother let you attend alone. It’s not a place for children.”

  “Yet it’s filled with children giving funerals to their dolls. I watched them pay last respects to their toys and then set them to fire.”

  “Still, that she let you…”

  “Sobo Youko did not know everything I did,” Kei says with a wry smile. “She took her naps.”

  Oba Hana elbows Kei gently. “Hey, I take naps too. Should I worry?”

  “There’s nothing here to sneak off to, only the beach. At the festivals, I just found it…comforting to know one’s doll could surpass fabricated flesh. Weird, I know.”

  “The great dollhouse in the sky,” her aunt quips. “I remember Oba Youko believed dolls hold memories and are filled with souls. You cannot just throw one away, that would be like discarding a child. There are great spiritual repercussions for not disposing of them honorably, of course.”

  “Of course,” Kei says with a mock. It strikes her, not for the first time, that her aunt has lost all hint of homeland accent.

  A gust of wind howls outside, soft and sad, pushing through curtains of rain. Through the picture window the sea has blackened but for moonlit crests of froth, slobbering like the spit of fleeting mad dogs.

  “The festival is Shintō tradition,” Oba Hana says. “It provides homage to used dolls. Families share thanks for the joy brought by their toys, and priests give rituals to release the dolls’ spirits before cremating them.”

  “Sobo Youko never gave a funeral for any of her dolls.”

  “She’d never burn her own dolls, because they always had a place in her heart, in her house. Your grandmother wanted to save them all forever, as she wanted to save all her family forever, to keep everyone together under one roof, locked in old traditions, ancient customs. The world moves forward, but not for her.”

  “I’d bring her gifts of dolls sometimes, when I’d find them. That’d make her happy. Sobo Youko was not often happy.”

  “Oh, I know.” Oba Hana sighs. “She loved her kimono dolls most, like herself, the ones of heritage.”

  Yes, Kei thinks. Like the doll I found today…

  And a memory is triggered, a day in Japan, at the last Ningyo Kanshasai festival, when the priests had called forth those spirits from the dolls, ready to cast them into the furnace, to release them, and how silly it all seemed. Kei walked by the altar, looking at each, dreaming of their doll lives, the way she dreamed of her grandmother’s dolls; she spoke to them, played with them, watched them slumber, while alone in the large shoin-zukuri-style mansion as her grandmother napped or wrote letters to distant cousins.

  The kimono-clad figure with black hair and red eyes had whispered to her of a girl needing a doll, a doll needing rescue from the flames…Kei had taken it from the pile, while mourners bowed their heads in prayer. Once she’d got home, an uneasy misgiving began tingling in her thoughts at having swiped the strange porcelain doll with red eyes. But she’d presented it to her grandmother so as to curry favor; that was before the night of the tsunami…before the night that all she’d loved was taken by the sea.

  That doll was Obaasan…

  But Kei’s sensible voice, emotionless and rational, argues immediately that of course many dolls would appear the same: What is a doll but a replica of something real? And what is real, but has a million duplicates, a million ilk?

  What are we, but a replica of our own forebears?

  And the voice returns of her mother: Throw it back, Kei-Kei!

  And she wonders in reply: Do the dead mourn the living?

  The rain is falling harder now, battering their tin roof like taiko drummers pounding chū-daikos in epic song, all booms and peels. The waves crash in and out, adding to the cacophony, the rhapsody. The wind moans, echoes of ancient gods at eternal war.

  She almost does it, almost flees to Lani’s room to take the doll and hurl it back into the waves, but Oba Hana breaks the moment.

  “Hot weather storms are the worst,” she says absentmindedly, toweling plates with painted rose vines snaking along each lip. “Would you mind checking the windows? We don’t need water getting in tonight.”

  Kei does, and afterward the dread has passed, and she joins Lani and her uncle playing games in the den, where any one of six friends again plot to murder Mr. Boddy.

  That night Kei dreams of the dead, the drowned worlds of the spirits that dwell far beneath the waves, farther even beneath the muck of the seafloor, the worlds of darkness that the tides orbit, cold and soundless. They climb from their clamshell sepulchers, wearing funeral garb of the abyss, long white fingers like flitting tendrils reaching for her, surge by surge as the current pulls them along, and her, by equal measure, sucked down to meet their spectral grasp, down to depths without end. She knows it’s where she belongs.

  Obaasan is amongst them in all her ageless splendor, wearing the kimono robe of her realm, hued by wisps of plankton and swirling gyres. Each upward stroke of thin arms illuminates the darkness from which she rises with glittering brine like a universe of flashing stars. She is beautiful, she is magnificent. She is dreadful.

  The distance between Kei and the drowned grows less. There is no sound, her vision dims as she descends. A chill takes hold, a sense of arctic ice that has never known light. She is weightless, yet she sinks, while Obaasan rises, rises without form, like a bottle of myrtle-green ink dropped into water; the fluids do not mix, yet neither can they entirely separate.

  The distance grows less still. Grandmother Youko is behind, and there are her brothers, Oji Toshio, and Oji Bunta, and Oji Nori, all drowned, all taken by the sea. Grandmother’s mother is there, and her mother before, and their husbands and sons and their wives and cousins.

  We are all cousins, Kei thinks. We are all family to Obaasan, born from her womb, and she has come to collect us home, to our true home at the bottom of the ocean…

  Goddess, demoness, mother, it does not matter. A vision overlaps the dream, or perhaps it is the dream itself, of a drowned girl’s doll sunk long ago upon the silt. Obaasan clothes herself in that doll much as a hermit crab puts on new shells, for without form she cannot leave the sea to reclaim her family.

  A sound like crying comes to Kei, and she cannot understand, so deep are they beneath the waves that all is dead, even noise, but then she suddenly rises from the depths, faster and faster, and the cry is louder, a shriek now, and Kei wakes, damp.

  Lani’s late-night cries are something Kei’s grown accustomed to, but this is a different sound, a wail of terror, not of pain from illness.

  The house is rocking gently, like a ship on waves.

  She leaps from her bed, thinking only of the girl, and runs to Lani’s room, followed by her aunt and uncle.

  “Earthquake?” Oba Hana asks, out of breath, but no one responds.

  Water pours from under Lani’s closed door. The house rocks harder.

  Kei takes the knob. It is wet. She turns it, hearing the click of tumblers, then the squeal of hinges, then a monstrous whoosh as the door is forced open from behind, and seawater pours forth in an impossibl
y rushing, swirling green torrent.

  Oba Hana screams. Oji Tommy buckles from the flood, falling, dragged down the hall. Kei feels the pull too, but she holds on to the doorknob, grips it tight with both hands, and her feet are yanked out so that she glides atop the water, like a ribbon dragged skimming over a pond.

  Lani cries again, gurgling, while the depth of water falls away, the bottled surge dispersing through the house like the crest of a wave that has overturned itself and diffuses rapidly. Kei can find footing again. She stumbles in, splashing. Water pours down into Lani’s bamboo-and-velvet bed, filling it; the water falls from above, from the koa-shelved alcove. Lani’s caught under this deluge, unable to escape the bed, imprisoned by the frailty of her body, cornered by fear, ambushed by Obaasan.

  Obaasan…

  Oba Hana pushes past, seizing Lani from her bed and they stumble away, as Kei stares at the doll.

  The pink panda, the Zen child, the others are gone, swept away, there is only the porcelain doll she found washed up on the beach, its eyes twinkling red like jewels lost from a sunken galley, its hair black and long, snaking out like tentacles rising up from the depths, its kimono pulled open to release the jet of water, pouring out where a mother’s breasts would be.

  A roar comes from the doll, while outside the house there is a roar, too. Obaasan’s slight, knowing smile is grotesque, somehow turned upward to reveal hints of shark teeth. It is no less strange a thing than the torrents gushing from behind its robes, the doll calling to the sea, and calling, too, for its children to come home.

  The house shakes more, Lani stumbles. The storm has worsened. The wind shrieks, the rain smashes their roof.

  “Kei!” A voice yells for her. Dimly she recognizes it as Oji Tommy. “Where are you?”

  She reaches to seize the doll and is almost buffeted away by the force of the ocean. Obaasan still feels fleshy, how Kei first found it, but no longer warm. The doll’s chill stiffens her fingers.

  She holds the doll outstretched in front of her like she would a yowling cat.

  Her aunt and uncle’s voices run over each other.

  “We must go— ”

  “We’ll flood!”

  “—up the mountain!”

  The floor seems to fall from under her as water rises, the walls of Lani’s room pull apart. The salt of the ocean splashes in her face, stinging her eyes, mixing with tears, or perhaps it is also seawater she cries, cries for her loss. Regret and sorrow and fear are all sharp sensations, and the sting of each is the same. The pull of each is the same, tugging us down into its dismal riptides…She breaks free, escaping the room.

  The voice of her dead mother joins the others, prompting her escape: Keep running, Kei-Kei, you must flee!

  She ignores them all. Kei has long grown weary of others telling her what to do, even if such a demand were coming from some instinct within herself to get away, to gain safety. It is her fault she took Obaasan from the sea, her fault Obaasan is pulling the sea back to it. There might be time, if she hurries.

  Yes, run, that sensible voice says. Run to me…

  She races down the hall through water that rises to her knees, across the house, the roar louder and louder in her ears, and she reaches the front door and wrenches it open, and she makes it outside where rain strikes her face so hard it is like a hundred hands trying to slap her into submission.

  She sprints through the screen of satin leaf trees and expects the ocean will come into view, and then she’ll go down three carved stone steps and across the pigweed-lined banks to the shore, and it will be over…

  But she is stopped, for the ocean in all its might is already running to her. A tsunami wave grows, rising a hundred feet into the air, or perhaps higher, reaching for the stars as if to drown even them. And there upon the water’s crest is Obaasan, in all her beauty, her great kimono robes twining through the foam and swirls of green and black waves.

  Kei has time to wonder—to hope—that her aunt and uncle and Lani may reach higher ground, but she doubts it…doubts it very much, and for what does it matter?

  It matters not at all, whispers that emotionless and sensible voice in her head, the voice of Sobo Youko and the voice of Obaasan; they are very calm, very curt in such a matter. It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us mothers and daughters…

  And no greater heart is there than Obaasan’s.

  The doll opens its arms to the sea, to accept its return, and so the sea takes it and its children, and Kei wonders at the leavings of her own existence that will someday be cast back to land, fragmented and mysterious as tsunami wreckage, while she churns downward, swirling and spinning amongst the currents forever to the home she has always known.

  ANTUMBRA

  by Lucy Snyder

  I woke in the afternoon gloom to the sound of my twenty-year-old stepsister Lily dragging something heavy and wet up the back patio steps through the kitchen door. The smell of blood and brine smothered me the moment I sat up.

  I swore to myself and called down to her: “What did you do?”

  “You’ll see,” she sing-songed.

  “Pleasant mother pheasant plucker.” I lay back on the sweat-stained sheets for a moment to gather my focus. Four hours of sleep wasn’t enough to keep my head from spinning, but it was all I could seem to get these days. The cells in my body kept waiting for the moon to move, despite all my meditating to try to tell them that the big rock blotting the sun wasn’t going anywhere.

  I kept having nightmares from everything I saw in the months after the Coronado Event. In the worst dream, I was sitting in my bedroom when an earthquake hit. The walls would crack, revealing not drywall and wood but rotten meat, and cold blood would pour in, flooding everything. The red tide would sweep me off my bed and press me up against the ceiling. My stuffed toys turned into real animal carcasses floating by my head. I’d be struggling to breathe in the two inches of air between the gore and the plaster when I would feel something grab my ankle. And then I’d wake up.

  I was a high school senior when it all happened. Back then I was so focused on prom and graduation and other such bullshit that I didn’t notice the first reports on CNN that an astronomer named Gabriel Coronado had spotted a large, dark object hurtling toward the Earth at barely sublight speeds. But the science geeks at my school started talking about it, so the rest of us finally paid attention. Some of the religious kids said it was going to be the end of the world. But everyone else figured it would be like one of those big-budget movies where they send a heroic team of astronauts up with good old American nukes to blow the comet/asteroid/spaceship to smithereens before it reaches the Earth.

  I think NASA and the Pentagon tried to pull some kind of mission together. Or at least that’s what they told the media to try to calm people down. Their astrophysicists told them the big black object out there was going to pass by, so they probably figured they just had to keep people from looting and committing mass suicide.

  And it did miss us by half a million miles. But it was so huge and moving so fast it jerked the Earth and moon in its gravitational wake like a couple of hobos spun around in the wind from a speeding semi. When the storms and earthquakes and wildfires from meteor strikes passed, the Earth and moon were locked in a new static orbit.

  Our city was in permanent lunar eclipse, which was far better than the relentless daylight some parts of the world suffered if you didn’t consider the massive flooding we got from being stuck at high tide. The ocean invaded our city, and Cat 5 hurricanes blasted us every spring because of all the hot air blowing in from the lightside. But at least we weren’t broiling.

  After ten years of living in the antumbra, my body still hadn’t adjusted to the new normal. All my cycles were screwed up. Sometimes I’d bleed twice in a month, and then half a year would pass before I kicked another egg. At least I had my life, which was more than about four billion people could say. And I mostly had my health, even if I was turning into a bona fide lunatic.

 
Lily, on the other hand, was thriving like apocalypse was that special vitamin she’d been missing as a kid.

  “Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, sister June? Sister June?” she sang off-key from the kitchen. “I got something for you, I got something for you, yum yum food! Yum yum food!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming.” I crawled off the bed, pulled on a T-shirt, and stumbled downstairs.

  Lily stood peacock proud in gore-soaked clothes beside a massive hunk of something that she’d dragged in on a sled of black trash bags and flattened cardboard. The coppery smell of blood and the bay stink made my eyes water. It was cylindrical, maybe four feet long and two feet in diameter. I didn’t see any bones in the ruby-red flesh. The black skin of the thing was covered in fur, like that of a seal or otter, except for where it had a double row of naked purple suckers as big as saucers.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked her, frowning down at the massive hunk of tentacle.

  “It didn’t come from a people!” Lily exclaimed, as if that was the alpha and omega of all my possible questions. “Will you cook it? It’s all bitter raw.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t a person.” We’d had a long talk when she was nine about how it was wrong to eat people. I’d mostly done it to convince her to stop biting neighborhood kids she didn’t like. Later, she saw a TV show about dolphins and decided that anything that could communicate was a person. Cats and dogs became people to her, and that was just as well. She got hungry for meat and bones a whole lot during her growth spurts and I couldn’t watch her all the time. “But where did you get it?”

  “It came up from the sea.” She shrugged. “Hungry. Tried to eat people. I helped the Robichaud guys kill it.”

  I frowned at her. “And what were you doing with the Robichaud brothers?”

  Lily crossed her sinewy arms behind her and rocked side to side like a guilty preschooler. She licked her lips with her impossibly long tongue, running it briefly over her chin. “Just helping.”