The graveyard and I

(1)

"Little girl, are you sure you want this spot?" The staff member looked young, like he had only just started working here, and asked me to confirm again and again.

I nodded firmly.

He bent down and lifted the thick stone cover beneath the headstone, revealing a fairly spacious underground chamber. Perhaps this was his first time guiding someone on his own. After lifting the cover, he instinctively glanced beside him and opened his mouth to ask something, but when he saw only me, he swallowed his words.

I guessed he wanted to ask his senior colleague what to do next.

Through my actions, I answered in place of his absent colleague.

I carefully placed the urn inside the fairly spacious chamber, then used both hands to check that there was half a palm's width between it and each of the chamber's cold walls.

This was to keep the porcelain urn from touching the chamber's inner walls, so that Japan's frequent seismic activity would not cause the dirt on those walls to scrape its surface.

Once I had finished, I took the stone cover from him and carefully fitted it back into place. Finally, I used my sleeve to meticulously brush away every trace of dust, then laid down pansies still beaded with dew.

"I'm so sorry, little girl, I..."

"It's all right." The words slipped out before I could think. I said them even more readily than hello, goodbye, or thank you.

I had always thought those words made a useful comfort.

The badge clipped to his collar bore his name. The young man, Yoshida Tadashi, still looked guilty. Perhaps my age made him think I was harmless, because he began complaining freely to me about his work that day.

"Well... I really am sorry, little girl. It's my first day guiding someone by myself, so I'm a little nervous. And you picked the most out-of-the-way spot in the most remote section of the cemetery. I don't know what your parents were thinking, choosing somewhere so far..."

"I chose it."

It wasn't Toji's fault. I had done it deliberately.

Getting from the cemetery's main entrance to where I stood now took an hour, including the climb up the mountain. Even setting aside the time it took, this plot was surrounded by nothing but dense woodland. It was the sort of place where a gust of north wind would fill the air with ghostly wails.

So I understood why Yoshida Tadashi had kept asking for confirmation, and why he had looked so frightened escorting me up the mountain in my black dress, my face pale. Anyone would instinctively feel afraid.

Besides, there really were "ghosts" around us.

"Huh? Why did you choose it yourself, little girl? I remember you listed a father and a younger brother under family on the form, right? Where's your father? Is he at work? What kind of job keeps him so busy he sends a little kid here alone?"

Perhaps because they were dealing with children, adults always let themselves get carried away. It was as though all the courtesy they normally had to maintain, all the curiosity they had to suppress, could be cast aside in front of a child.

They probably thought a child wouldn't have any sense of privacy anyway. Then they seized the opportunity to dig up gossip they would never dare ask the child's parents about, before turning it into an opening line for break-room conversation.

It really irritated me. Both this eight-year-old body and the man beside me, waiting for gossip as though he was certain to get it.

"Yoshida Tadashi is your name, correct?" I deliberately glanced at the name badge I had already seen.

"Yes... why?" Yoshida Tadashi paused, instinctively rubbing the badge beneath his collar with his right hand. He seemed unprepared for me, silent until now, to initiate a question.

"Are you married?"

Yoshida Tadashi sounded a little dejected. "Not yet."

"Do you have a girlfriend, then?" I continued.

Apparently, I had touched a sore spot. He poured out complaints about how terribly materialistic women were, then even asked me why all us girls were like that.

Only when he was attacking women did he treat me as an adult rather than a child.

"I know why."

"What?"

"Because you're really unpleasant when you can't keep your mouth in check, Mr. Yoshida. I imagine a man who keeps prying into other people's private lives will have a hard time finding a normal girlfriend for the rest of his life."

I watched the young man's face flush red. "Freak," he spat, then turned and left, abandoning me alone in this cemetery deep in the wooded mountains without the slightest sense of responsibility.

Honestly, my plan had worked. I hadn't wanted him standing reluctantly over me in the first place.

Once his figure had completely disappeared into the distance, I sat in front of the headstone and wiped Reason's grave marker with my sleeve, over and over.

-Reason, look. See how clean I've made your headstone.

I took the letter I had written out of my pocket. After much hesitation, I burned it in front of the grave. Reason couldn't see it; logic told me that much. And she had once taught me that any document containing your feelings could someday become leverage for someone else to dig up and use to lay your life bare.

The flames quickly consumed the paper. With nothing left to burn, they gave way to drifting ash that rose before my eyes. Unable to reach the sky, it could only settle loosely on a branch nearby.

On the seventh day after Reason's death, I finished taking care of everything she had left behind. The next stage was to end my own life.

If our bond hadn't been severed, if Reason and I could still meet in our next reincarnation, today would actually have been a good day.

I would have eagerly ended my life today, here in this remote spot I had chosen, where whoever found me was less likely to panic, then rushed impatiently to see her.

To listen to her tell me about the extraordinary life she had lived before giving birth to me. Then I would start imagining where she would take me once I could walk, and what sights we would see. A journey that needed no one else, just the two of us.

Sadly, that would never happen again.

When the family bond I had thought would last forever suddenly ended one day, the pain of that sheer drop was even harder to bear than never having had it at all.

So I decided to find the place where it had all begun, the place that recorded our names and caused us to reincarnate together again and again, and erase my name completely. Then I would disappear from this world.

-Reason, I can't live on alone, lifetime after lifetime, carrying all those memories.

Once I had composed myself, I slowly retraced my steps.

The path down the mountain was steep, forcing me to spare some attention for the trail growing indistinct in the fading light. This cemetery, which encompassed the entire mountain, had no streetlights. I would probably have to feel my way carefully through the latter half.

(2)

Sometimes I wondered whether the colors humans saw in plants were bestowed by light.

It was completely dark now. The vegetation, so green by day that it brought appetizing vegetables to mind, had become one heavy mass of darkness.

There were no streetlights, and the trees blocked the moonlight. All I could see were the pale graves in the distance and the stairs before me, where every step felt like stepping into an abyss.

Walking down stairs without being able to see where I was going gave me a peculiar sensory impression: the feeling of falling from a building, as though my foot might miss a step at any moment.

Speaking of falling from buildings, Reason and I had nearly experienced that in one of our previous lives.

Reason was nothing like the conventional mothers I had read about or observed. Most of the time, she possessed a wildness and impulsiveness that went beyond every era we had lived through.

For instance, she once took me on a motorcycle and jumped from one rooftop to another. Then, after landing smoothly, she told me that flying cars could fly much higher than that.

I asked her what a flying car was. She paused, then asked what I wanted for dinner that night.

I never pressed Reason about anything she didn't want to answer.

I said I wanted fried meatballs. I liked watching the round little balls drop into the oil one by one, then bob up and down together as though they were dancing.

At that thought, my foot suddenly missed a step. I tumbled down the stairs, and my back slammed into a tree that probably hadn't seen a human fall in its hundred years of life.

It seemed the tree was lucky today. It had me to put on a show.

I struggled to get up, feeling a dull ache as my bones creaked. But it was all right. I was good at enduring pain. When I tried to use my hands to check my back and the back of my head for open wounds, I discovered that I couldn't lift my left hand.

It was awkwardly stuck in a hand-on-hip position, leaving me at an impasse. I could reach neither my stomach nor my back.

I had probably twisted it. Maybe wrenching it back would fix it. With that thought, I used my right hand to give my left arm a hard tug. My left shoulder made a crisp sound, like a bone snapping.

I had broken my own left arm.

Fuck! I cursed inwardly.

I should have realized sooner. When I could easily carry a five-kilogram urn of ashes for five hours, I should have understood that, in this life, I was just a little more absurdly strong than ordinary people.

My left arm was completely useless now, dangling at my side like an empty sleeve that could sway. With every step, gravity made it swing, and the pain forced me to clench my teeth.

No amount of medical knowledge could help me find something to use as a splint while I was feeling my way through the dark.

I was utterly helpless, and I couldn't stop thinking how wonderful it would be if Reason were here. If she were, she would surely have grabbed that irresponsible young man by the collar the moment he turned to leave, beaten him senseless, and shouted all sorts of curses she would later tell me never to repeat. Then she would have pulled her favorite Quasar Pistol out of my void space, pointed it at his head, and forced him to guide us.

Once we reached our destination, if he tried to call the police, she would stuff the gun back into my void space, then hide behind me with an expressionless face and have me argue her innocence.

I wanted so badly to laugh, and so badly to cry. Unfortunately, I could only finish walking this road alone now.

Holding my left shoulder with my right hand to keep it from swinging, I became even more cautious. If I fell again, I really might die here.

After planting my foot securely on the next step, I bitterly regretted not putting a flashlight in my void space. If only I had a flashlight...

A beam of light suddenly illuminated the path before me. Then I heard someone calling my name.

"Yuanli! Is little Yuanli here?"

The voice was unfamiliar. It wasn't anyone I knew, nor was it Yoshida Tadashi. I answered loudly and waited for the rescuer who had appeared out of nowhere.

The distant beams converged, illuminating me completely. Squinting, I made out the police uniforms behind the lights.

I figured something had happened.