Kazuryu

Just after six on a grey, wet morning Raharu sat on a stool absently twisting herself side to side, her hands lightly drumming the island countertop in front of her. On and off, she played with the sleeves of her thin, loose sweater. A Toshiba something-or-other stood open on top of the laminate. On screen, The Incredible Shrinking Man fought his way past stray cat, flooded basement and bad rear-screen projection. 

The rented cabin where she was doing fuck-all this sleepless morning was nestled on the upper slope of a thickly wooded mountain above lake Kuzuryu. Spring showers beat a constant white noise, passing as they did through branches raised high above the roof of the cottage.  

Mists rolled over the lower foot paths. Still coming off the winter thaw, this place had a sorta frosty clarity to it.     

Peering over the screen, a small white thing caught Raharu’s eye. 

She tapped space, froze the on-screen image, slid off her stool and walked around the island. Her feet barely made a sound when she padded across paneled flooring, stopping in front of the kitchen sink. Above the sink, a small glass ashtray partly stuck out past the edge of the windowsill by a fraction of an inch. The top layer of ash was soggy from an open window. Raharu snatched a damp and creased and partially burnt fag from the clumpy sludge and made her way back to her seat and smoothed and set the fag by her hand, waiting on the cigarette to dry. She tapped space. The Incredible Shrinking Man wrapped up with Grant Williams shrunk down to nothing, his corny voice-over carrying over stills of the cosmos.     

With the cabin’s single toilet, half the time you flushed, it did that thing where the tank kept making the refill sound - shit, Raharu didn’t know how to explain the damn thing. Her pops would open the tank and give it a quick fix, but she knew fuck all about what it was that made Thomas Crapper’s claim-to-fame tick. Raharu needed to take a quick squirt, and with no one around, thought it easier to go on the grass. She hopped through the sunroom, the wooden door banging behind her as she went, pulled down her shorts, squatted and took a leak on the ground where the grass thinned a bit. The clouds above Raharu’s head formed a solid white mass pressing low barely above the treetops. Drops of rain that came fine and less often than they had all that night pelted her hair and the nape of her neck. She tugged up her pajama bottoms and as she did, heard this distant roar from an engine somewhere on the lower slope. Judging by the sound, an old rust bucket on its last legs; the sound fading in, out between tree trunks. Though she’d be hard-pressed to say why, that engine hum came with a creeping-shit menace that kinda unsettled her.  

With the back of her hand, she wiped a small scattering of droplets from her forehead and hustled inside. Back in the kitchen, Raharu shut the door on the sunroom. The sunroom’s own door, what with the bolt drawn, wasn’t worth the meager wood it was cut from.    

Raharu’s mum and Raharu’s dad, I mean, where the hell are those two? With the door to the sunroom shut, Haru left the kitchen and peeked into mum’s bedroom. She checked the house. Glanced through every window. I mean, where can you possibly be at six in the morning?   

The smoke, which would have to be dry by now, wasn’t where Raharu had set it. 

She ducked below the empty spot where she’d left the damn thing and searched low. Damn thing rolled off and fell on the floor, right? Doubled over with her ass up and her knees bent until she was finally down on all fours, she kept her eyes peeled for a slim white shape. When she did get to her feet, the smoke, one of the more popular brands in Japan, was like, Here I am. Right where you left me, dumb bitch; as though it hadn’t been anywhere else and Raharu were getting herself set to be declared mentally unfit. Whatever.  

She plucked the roll of tobacco, now bone-dry and set it between her lips. Standing in front of the sink where she had fetched it, she rummaged through a drawer and found a box of long matchsticks. She thought it ridiculous, lighting such a long stick for such a tiny smoke. She struck the match and - pffft - sure that the fag had been lit, dropped the burning match in the kitchen sink. Like a little dragon, smoke streams out her nose. “Pretty little things like you shouldn’t smoke.” Raharu whipped her pretty little head to the living room where the voice spoke up from, but as you can guess, no one’s there. She thought the voice to be her mum’s, but sorta fucked, like you hear in those stupid-ass possession movies. Buck up, Raharu. You’re, what? Fourteen? No, fifteen. Or are we sixteen? You’ve had sex, stepped foot aboard a UFO, you’ve been the subject of inquiry, both scientific and psuedo-scientific. You’ve had a rich, er- move, just move your ass, girl. Do we hear heavy footfalls on the stairs? No. We don’t. No eerie faces peeking over your shoulder. No sinister truck the color of rusty nails, a mad thing behind the wheel like what you see in High Tension or Jeepers Creepers; none of that sorta shit crunching up your driveway or pulling into your yard. Careful, pet. Lower your guard, and that’s when the jumpscare springs. Raharu braced herself, but the climax never came.  

As though this were a horror pitch and it was the horror pitch that got the axe. 

As if to say, Tell you what, pet. The world is more interesting with you around. 

And so it goes and so it went. These things happen. This dumb little spastic episode of hers played out over the course of less than half an hour. She crept over the stairs for a third time that morning. There’s the parentals, the sheets crumpled around them as though they had never been gone. As though the door to the Twilight Zone had swung wide and hit Raharu on the ass; a devilish wink from Rod Serling and nothing more. From its place on the kitchen counter, a radio tuned to an FM station was on low volume. The easy math-rock sound of nineties Modest Mouse gave over to the laid-back swag of Austin Lace. Had this been a movie, “The Unknown” is what the credits would be set to. 

About an hour passed before a tear in the storm clouds threw a gash of light on a strip of spring wood; there a moment, only to be covered again not a minute later as heavy wet clouds regrouped and rolled on.