Human for a Day (9781101552391) (24 page)

With a pang, Kiyohime recalled the day she had written it. Seated beneath the sakura trees, each brushstroke crafted with devotion, each character imbued with longing.

Anchin began to read:

The ember in Kiyohime's chest flared, hurtful and sharp. “Quicker,” she whispered.

 

A claxon of bells and a burst of light scoured away sight and sound. When she could see and hear again, morning had yielded to afternoon. Anchin kneeled before their letters, opened and neatly arrayed—his and hers in tidy piles. A band of sunlight picked out fragments of text from his stack:

“Quicker!” she cried.

 

Between glaring brilliance and strident bronze notes, afternoon turned to dusk.

Anchin gave a hoarse yell and flung himself down, his hands scrabbling at violently torn paper strewn like fallen leaves across the floor.

“Quicker,” Kiyohime gasped. “Quicker, quicker!”

The crashing light could not blind nor the booming bell deafen her fast enough to blot out the raw anguish. It didn't matter. When the serpent consumed Anchin's spirit, this pain would end too.

 

In the storm-thrashed darkness, Anchin staggered, his arms aching with the effort of plunging the heavy striker against the temple bell. His breath came in ragged gulps, laboring in his too-tight chest. He was glad for it, glad he had insisted on ringing the bell. It was a token of penance, this final effort.

Bronze notes thundered to the skies, summoning the gods and spirits to come and bear witness. But it was something else that heard and came, not a god or spirit, a smoldering mote of rage. It coalesced, drawing shape and dimension from each stroke of wood on metal.

Kiyohime recognized it, this mote. It was herself reflected in a mirror shaped like a serpent. She called out a welcome and felt the rushing reply:
Soon, soon. I am coming.

Anchin fell to his knees, panting. A nacre vial slipped unnoticed from his sleeve and rolled beneath the bell's rim. He dragged himself up, clinging to the striker, and hauled it back once more.

But Kiyohime had seen the pearly glint out of the corner of Anchin's eye. “What is that?”

A scroll of memories unfurled, mislaid before in a run of “quicker”s:

Descending a cramped stairway into Dojoji's neglected cellar. Fashioning a brittle posy from dusty jars and pots, desiccated flowers that had once been the deep red-purple of twilight; a spray of shriveled berries, green as envy; a gray root bulb shaped like a baby's hand curled into a fist. And steeping these into a milk-white elixir drained into an iridescent vial—the same vial that rolled, empty, beneath the temple bell.

“What did you do?” she cried. A princess's knowledge of herb lore could not match a learned priest's, but it was enough to recognize the nightshade and the moonseed, enough to know death when she saw it.

“I was already coming to you.” Silvery notes chimed in her head. “You only hastened me along.”

Her chest ignited to blazing agony. She writhed, burning but unburned, brimful of fire. The fire demanded release, like she knew it must, the same as before. It breached the cage of her body, another verse reprised. But when it crested and broke, there the script changed. It didn't singe off her limbs and flay her skin, didn't remake her into armored scales and sinuous coils. It streamed from her eyes in a scald of tears.

Kiyohime wept. For herself, for Anchin, for their squandered lives. And most of all, for every lost moment of their love.

The bell pealed, a sonorous crash of sound.

A fragment of memory stirred, echoes of a duplicate bell. Buried and somnolent, Alan awakened, resurfaced. The tolling in his head, the bell only he could hear, it rang out in a trio of unisons—the bell of the future, this one from their past, and the inescapable din in his head. He recognized it now. It was Anchin, his voice, his spirit, finding Kiyohime's spirit, returning as he had promised to do.

A thought away, the serpent sundered apart the temple's gate, rushing toward the
shōro
.

“Stop! Go back,” Kiyohime-Alan, both of them as one, implored it.

But it was mindless, heedless of all but its terrible purpose.

“Why can't I stop it? Why is it still coming?”

A trill of chiming notes sounded as Anchin crumpled beneath the bell's rim. “We are spectators of a tragedy already played through,” his spirit-voice replied. “The events are set; only the repercussions may be rewritten.”

The serpent arrived in an inferno gale, pouring over the
shōro's
topmost stair.

“How can I bear to watch myself kill you?”

“What transpires here has been and must be, but you are not obliged to stay. Say ‘quicker' and this moment will end.”

Alan felt their malice wind around the bell, saw through Anchin's eyes the glow of its fury redden the bronze. One word and he could escape the coming horror. It was ready on his tongue.

But that was the reckless impulse of a bygone life. Must he squander another thousand years reprising the same lesson? He listened to the memory of sound still trembling in the air and found the conviction he had lacked before.

“These moments are the dregs of a precious cup wretchedly spilled,” he said. “Even if they are bitter, I won't waste them again. I won't leave you.”

Within the blistering cage of metal, Anchin lifted his head. “Kiyo?”

She stretched her hand to him, a reflected echo of a moment yet to be. “Forgive me. I should have trusted you.”

Without hesitation, Anchin took her hand. “There is nothing to forgive.” They came together as the bronze bell flashed white-hot around them.

Reunited at last, they did not notice when the end came in a molten cascade of metal, when Anchin's body blackened and turned to ash. Their union was perfect, one heart, one spirit joined. But though it was perfect, it was not endless.

The wheel turned, inexorable, and its next pass sundered them apart. But even in parting they were joyous. Though it might take a thousand years, they knew they would touch again. And this time, it would be forever.

 

Ryoseki sat in the darkened
shōro
and pressed the illuminate button on his watch. He knew without having to consult the glowing display that it was almost midnight, but he found it soothing to watch the timepiece's measured movements. The twelve hour cycle was etched into him, noon and midnight, in the rhythm of his pulse, his breath, each blink of his eyes. The bell had tolled for him, a steady, predictable cadence to mark the days of his life.

As a child it had troubled him, the incessant ringing that no one else could hear. But then he had come to Dojoji and the bell had spoken to him. It told him of the karmic debt he owed to remedy the course of three wayward fates: his, Anchin's, and Kiyohime's.

The second hand swept to the apex of its circuit. Midnight. It seemed to linger for an extra beat, a prolonged second, before starting its next circuit. And for the first time in his life, there was no ringing, no peal of bells to mark it.

Ryoseki closed his eyes and listened to the silence.

Jody Lynn Nye

 

 

 

 

T
he first thing people noticed on the busy New York street was the broadsheet newspaper clutched in the small man's hand. That was odd, because his costume would surely have set him apart anywhere outside of Lapland, or wherever winter ruled. It ought to have stood out on a fine day in September like a sore thumb. His coat, which reached over his round belly nearly to his knees, was made of fur, russet red like a deer's hide, and lined with longer white fur. A hood with a long peak lay on his shoulders, revealing wavy white hair worn very long and a shining white moustache and beard that seemed as if they had been growing for centuries, if not decades. His boots of black leather shone like mirrors, as did the silver buckle of his black belt. Normally, they would not expect to see a man dressed as Santa Claus sooner than December, but today everyone in Manhattan felt a bit indulgent and nostalgic.

“Nice outfit,” the man in the newspaper kiosk said, glancing up. “Giving the suit an airing today?”

“Why, no,” “Santa Claus” said. “This is what I wear all of the time.”

The newspaper vendor shrugged. A harmless nut, but he looked like the real thing, and that made him feel good. He pushed the flat wool cap back on his head and scratched his scalp. Like a boy again.

“Just in town for the day?”

Santa slapped his chest with his hand and looked up at the tall buildings—the tallest in the world. He felt a thrill to see them. “Why, yes! It's a fine city. I never do get to see them in daylight. Always by moonlight or starlight.” He glanced down at the paper in his hand.

The vendor nodded toward the newspaper. “Nice piece of writin' there, ain't it?”

Santa nodded. “Truly. I would be convinced, if I were a child.”

Something in the way the old man said the last word sounded disappointed. The newsman gave him an encouraging grin. “Everyone was, if you ask me. Wanna copy of today's paper?”

“No, thank you,” the old man said. “I haven't finished with this one yet.” He folded it up and put it in his pocket. Then he eyed the newsman, counted the gaps in his smile. “You should take better care of your teeth, you know.”

The newspaper vendor felt his face go red. “Don't you make personal comments to me, geezer!”

“But you promised me,” “Santa” said. “In your letter. If I brought you that stuffed leather horse, you'd clean your teeth every day, just as your mother asked you.”

The newsman's mouth dropped open. “But that was forty years ago!”

“A promise is a promise.”

“Yeah.” He ran his tongue over the remaining teeth in his mouth. “I will, Santa. I really will. Thanks. And thanks for the horse. I really loved it. I gave it to my first daughter when she was born.”

“You were a good boy, Louis,” Santa said, offering his free hand for a shake. Louis clutched the leather glove.

How absolutely marvelous that he knew everything there was about a child just by looking at him, Santa thought as he turned away from the wondering eyes. Then he paused, confused.
How did I know all that?

What was going on inside his head was not nearly so amazing as what was outside it. New York was a place of wonders! Santa gazed around him in wonder, taking it all in. Men and women wore clothing made of the most exquisite fabrics, soft and evenly woven and dyed in colors that had heretofore existed only in rainbows and spring meadows. Gentlemen in brilliant white linen jackets tipped their flat straw hats to ladies whose long, shining hair was piled up in a pumpkin shape on their heads. The streets themselves were surprisingly clean. Men pushing barrels on wheels stopped to sweep and scoop up refuse deposited by horses.

He had expected to be overwhelmed by the odor of sewage and rotten vegetation on top of the smell of coal fires that filled the air. Instead, there was a new scent, a sharp burning scent. Horses drew carriages through the streets as well as on narrow metal rails, but over his head and in the windows of the many, many shops, tiny lights encased in glass shone. They were not candles, they were light bulbs. The smell was that of
electricity
. Such things did not exist in many places yet, that he knew, but this was a city that had to have everything new as soon as possible. He walked between tall, stone buildings with shining bronze doors. Fantastic, swooping designs were pressed into them. Art Nouveau, they called it. Beautiful. New World, new art. New music poured from the doors of clubs.

From a point at the very tip of the island, he saw in the harbor a magnificent statue, a woman facing away from him, with a torch in her hand raised in welcome. He did not have to see her face to know that she was Liberty herself. She had been a gift. Santa had not given her, but he knew when something had been tendered with love or respect. He felt as if
he
had been given a present, to see something that represented such an ideal.

Children who had been looking out into the harbor noticed the small man in their midst. They broke away from their parents and came tearing toward him.

“Santa!” “Santa Claus!” “Sinterklaas!”

They danced around him, laughing, and he shared their delight. Little girls in bows tied on top of their heads, boys in knee pants, urchins without shoes. They hugged him, tugged on his coat, tried to clamber into his arms, though he was scarcely taller than they were. They felt in his pockets and came up with handfuls of hard candies wrapped in bright cellophane. Their eyes were alight with happiness.

“What are you doing here?”

“Where are your reindeer? Can I say hello to Dancer?”

“Mama said you would bring me a train for Christmas if I am good. Will you?”

“Well, well, well, we will see!” Santa said, chucking a chin here and offering a hug there. “Are you helping your mother with the chores? She needs help now that your new brother has arrived.”