The Stained Man soon realizes the futility and sinks back to the ground. “Was it the girl?” he asks then, and in his piggish eyes, dreadful realization seeps through. “Was it the girl? I didn’t mean to…I never—I swear I won’t do it again, I swear! I won’t do it again!”
He is right. He will never do this again.“Please,” he croaks, lifting his hands as if they could shield him, and whether he is asking for mercy or wishes to be killed quicker, I do not know. “Please please please pleasepleasepleaseplease.”
Something gurgles one last time, and it is above him. He looks up. This is how the Stained Shirt Man now sees me.
He sees a woman on the ceiling. Her gray feet are bare, settled against the beams. She hangs down.
Her chin is jutted out, her head twisted to the side in a way that the only thing certain is her broken neck.
She wears a loose, white kimono spattered in mud and blood. Her hair floats down, drifting past her face like a thinly veiled curtain, but this does not protect him from the sight of her eyes. There are no whites in her eyes; they are an impenetrable, dilated black.
Her skin is a mottled patchwork of abuse and bone, some of it stripped from the edges of her mouth. And yet her mouth is hollow, curved into a perpetual scream, jaws too wide to be alive.
For a long moment we stare at each other—he, another girl’s murderer, and I, another man’s victim. Then my mouth widens further, and I de tach
myself from the ceiling to lunge, my unblinking eyes boring into his panicked, screaming face.
***
Sometime later, the other girl comes to stand by my side. Silently, she holds out her arms, knowing what comes next. The braid around her wrist dissolves. At the same time, the rope on the dead man’s arm shatters like it was made of glass.
She is free. She is smiling at me with her gap-toothed grin. When the dead are young and have once known love, they bring no malice. Something glows inside her, something that flares brighter and brighter until her features and form are swallowed up, obscured by that blessed warmth.
Yearly festivals of chochin were celebrated in my youth, paper lanterns lit to honor the dead during older, younger times. In dimmer recollections I remember grabbing at those delicate fire-lit paper lanterns and the excitement that coursed through me as I held them aloft. I remember running along the riverbanks, watching dozens of chochin afloat on the water, bobbing and waving at me as I struggled to keep pace, until they drifted off into larger rivers, into places where I could not follow.
I remember straining to see the lanterns floating away, growing smaller until darkness enveloped the last. I imagine them in my memory like tiny fireflies hovering over the river’s surface, ready to find their way into the world. Even then I found the word fitting, soothing.
Fireflies. Fire flies. Fire, fly.
I remember my mother’s voice, warm and vibrant before the sickness crept inside her. I remember her telling me how chochin bear the souls of those who have passed away. It is why we light these representations of their essences, she said, and float them in rivers—to allow the waters to return them to the world of the dead, where they belong.
The dead girl, like many other dead girls before her, resembles these chochin. When she begins to shine so very brightly, I take her gently in my hands, the soft heat suffusing my being with a sense of peace I am unaccustomed to. It is only for a few seconds. But when you have resigned yourself to an eternity filled with little else but longing, a few seconds is enough.
I release her soul outside the Stained Shirt Man’s apartment. By then she is nothing more than a glowing ball of fire cradled against my withered form. I close my eyes, trying to absorb every bit of warmth I can take from her—to bring out and remember during other colder nights—before lifting my hands to the sky. Unbidden, she rises up, floating briefly above me as if granting benediction, before she continues to soar higher and higher like an autumn balloon, until she becomes another speck of cloud, another trick of the light.
Fire,fly.
I am where dead children go. But not even I know where they go when I am done, whether to a higher plane or to a new life. I only know this: like the chochin of my youth, where they go, I cannot follow.
I stand there for a long time, just watching the sky. But nothing else moves in that darkness, and in this wide expanse of night, I see little else but stars.
The city wakes to the rhythm of daylight. They first arrive in ones and twos. Lone boys with bicycles and newspapers, waging war against doorsteps. I count them: four, five, six. Men and women running down streets, singing aloud to music no one else hears. I count them: seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. A portly official thrusting important papers and packages into every other mailbox. I count him: one.
Then they arrive by the dozens. Men and women hurrying down sidewalks, a few in dark business suits, but the majority dressed simply in plaid or jeans. Some glance down at their wrists with an impatient air before boarding the horseless carriages they call buses or the smaller ones they call cars. (Twenty-seven.) Others saunter down the road with less urgency, with dogs of various breeds and sizes scampering ahead, restrained only by the collars around their necks. (Fourteen.)
A few dogs see me and growl, baring their teeth. I bare my own teeth and immediately they are off, tearing down the street in fright
like hell has come nipping at their tails, their masters helpless in their pursuit. I have little regard for animals, and I imagine the feeling is mutual. Their leashes remind me of my own. Collars are as much a form of slavery whether they encircle necks or wrists, whether they are as heavy as lead or as light as a ropestring.
Finally, they come in droves. People in rich suits and richer tastes hurrying along, their minds immersed in the petty affairs that consume their lives (thirty-eight). Children squabbling in cars on their way to school, mothers and fathers behind the wheel (sixteen). They have no reason to see me—an unavenged spirit, a nothing-more. I am not a part of their world, as much as they are no longer a part of mine. They have the rest of their lives before them, and I do not.
I often spend the passage of days in a strange haze. When there is little to attract my vengeance, I lie in unusual states of hibernation.
Some days I curl up in attics and abandoned sheds. I do not sleep, so instead I exist in a period of dreamlessness, a series of finite instances where I think little of things and dwell on the wonders of nothing. It lasts for hours or days or years, or the time it takes for a bird to flap its wings, or the time it takes for a deep breath. But soon the rage curls again, the quiet places inside me that whisper, whisper whispering find more find more and so I rise, driven to seek out, to devour, to make to break to take. I have ridden on ships and sails. I have taken to the air on steel wings. I have schooled myself in the languages of those I hunt,
their culture of contradictions. I have burrowed into the skins of those who know the dark ways, those who welcome the trespass of body. I have crawled out from the thickness of blood, from the salt of the dying.
I can possess, however briefly, those close to death, or those who have known death intimately and escaped. I have learned to move among people in a hundred different ways, to linger in numerous places at once and still keep my sense of being. But today I am drifting, aimless in this moment, basking in the afterglow of the night before.