Tsuneo’s indications succeeded on his second visit—his arrogance reintroducing Hikari to echoes of a scarring trivial flesh. One they’d both experienced indifferently now became a personal secret curiosity, yet for her also a reminder of the restrictions outside Kyoto.
A calm, whispered phone call becomes a memory of disappearing sunlight, full of floating clues for conversation within a certain company. Finally little fragments pulled into twos and threes satiated an older jealousy, “Tomorrow, before dawn, Marble Beach.”
Hikari’s fingers acted slippery, but her voiced answered, “My sister died of drowning.”
Tsuneo rubs beneath her eyebrow, gently touching her dirty hair while sinking behind her. Avoiding her knee, an extraordinary white births from her shadow on the sand and folds until it becomes itself.
A Clovis jaw movement, “Because she was pregnant.”
The waves no longer invent perfume but lick at the smooth grays of the shore as if erasing something that had never been.
Grey Sparrow Journal 