SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Talk, you useless slut is not spoken, but you all hear it anyway.

She mumbles something. You see Taichou’s hand quiver on her chin and this time you take a step forward. Her eyes slowly slide to yours, hold you in place. She’s not scared of him, you realize. She’s not afraid of any of this.

“What was that?”

“Oni,” she repeats. “Oni came, Taichou. Quick as lightning, with blades for fingers. It all happened so—so quickly. It’s these mountains—please, believe me—” her breath catches. “We’re not safe.”

They search her belongings, scour your tent, but there is no tool that could possibly inflict such a wound. She was naked; there was nothing on her person to conceal. Someone came and departed, then. She acted so well, appearing dead; or her beauty stirred the killer to pity, and she was spared. You have no way of tracing whether the murderer is independent, or one of the enemies’ assassins. Nobody knows much of Kazushige’s past—any number of grievances on his name or his family may have finally caught up with him.

That is not so unusual. The she remains breathing, however, is.

Taichou, ever the noble, has Kentaro strike her instead. On her knees in the snow, covered in a crust of blood, she is a pitiful figure—but she doesn’t let her head drop. She coughs and spits red, keeps her cries to a minimum. When Kentaro is finished, she merely wipes her lip and lowers her eyes.

Taichou has no such qualms about beating you. The bruises feel like weights beneath your skin. If you were not useful to them, you might be dead. “If anything else happens,” Taichou says, “Be assured that I will not let either of you off so easily.”

They do not trust you, have never truly seen you; but they have never feared you, either. They will not start now.

She cannot explain anything beyond her belief that it was oni. They decide she is crazy. Women from Yoshiwara sometimes are, driven to drink and delusions from the misery of their existence. Maybe it was a long time coming; or maybe she was so rattled by whatever it was she did see. Some start calling her yuki jyoro —snow whore. Still, her words have an effect: the decision is made to head for a different checkpoint. Murmurs throughout the camp are uneasy and angry. Before leaving the next day, they dispose of Kazushige’s body—the camp’s first the whole past year.

You wash your sheets in the river, waiting desperately for them to run clear, your hands icy in the water. A small, additional punishment.

When you look up, the oiran is seated a short distance from you. The bruise on her left cheek is painful to look at, and her eyes raw from crying. But there is serenity in the way she waits for your accusations, your questions.

“I’m not,” she says.

“Not?”

“Not lying.” I’ve seen one , she once told you. Oni. Winter not thawing quick enough. Snow piling on the mountains, soft and downy as bird feathers. A man with his entrails spread, his face missing.

She watches you, lips trembling as if she wants to say more. Everything about this moment is a terrible idea. Above all, you have the strongest urge to lay your lips on hers, just to keep her quiet.

You have never thought this before. She has changed things.

“Akira-kun,” she says, pulling her legs up so that her knees are against her face. “Can you keep a secret?”

Don’t undo this , something tells you, not for her, you don’t know what she is —

But you recall that first smile she gave you, and how it cut. How her songs wear down your soul. How she turned, so slowly, last night. You cannot change the fact of things; you can only open your eyes wider.

“Yes,” you say, and wait, and breathe.

She explains it the way one would tell a fairytale. You never hear about the gods who bled all over the snowcapped mountains, who cursed the earth and all things in it. It may be pretty to imagine, but the oni of these peaks are anything but pretty. They are terrible. Terrifying. They do all the things you hear in stories, and some things you don’t. They like the taste of human hearts and eyeballs. Their manners of killing are varied, but always violent.

Oni are banished to the earth from the next life over, for sins so terrible not even hell wants them. The most powerful have plenty of dark magic, and can take on the shape of a man or woman; they go into villages under their human guise, slaughter the men, rape the women, resume their true forms and eat the children.

They don’t feel, she continues. Not the way humans do. The concept of a feeling means nothing to them. It’s a void. A set of characters limning the air. Smoke curling from a burning villge, the gasping between a child’s cries, the blood running from a woman’s thighs as she leaves Yoshiwara with no worse hell to descend to. All forms of emptiness, drawn in different lights.

The oni don’t feel. This is the one thing that keeps them alive, the one thing that keeps them from living. They understand sensations, thrills, pleasures—but not their consequences.

Once upon a time, she says, oni entered a village. One encountered a farmer’s daughter. She was not the most beautiful woman in the village, but she might have been the most unlucky. The oni buried himself inside her. The woman lived with shame and terror for months. Her death in childbirth was a blessed one.

Children of oni are not born once. They are born as many times as they are killed. With the blood of terrible gods in their veins, they are unable to truly die; the closest they can get to that satisfaction is bringing death to others. There are countless ways of doing so, but the best is using human methods. Humans are inventive like that. They love to dispose of each other. So there are oni that learn trades, speak human tongues, use human weapons with the speed and strength they have gained through the years. Humans need only supply the reasons. Killers and assassins are always wanted; a war just makes it easier.

“Do you know the tale of Ikkaku Sennin?” She stands.

“No.” You stand with her.

“He fell in love with Sendaramo, and lost his magical powers. But my bastard father didn’t do that.” She clenches her fists. “Someday, I’ll find him. I’ll make him suffer what I’ve suffered; I’ll make sure he understands.” The hate in her voice ebbs away. “My mother was human,” she says, as if this needs saying. But if not for that mother, she could not possess such a look of misery; she wouldn’t feel at all.

This time it’s you reaching for her, not cupping her ears or her chin, just holding your hands out, waiting to see what reaction this will elicit. She stares for a moment, then moves toward you. You pull her in, and her arms curl around your back, her chin rests on your shoulder. Her chest against yours rises and falls, steadily, and you can feel her heart like a hummingbird. The demon blood thrumming inside it.

“Aren’t you afraid of me?” she whispers.

You shake your head. You can’t say why this is true—perhaps because she has a beating heart, just like yours, and she has suffered through so much more. You are no longer afraid of her, of what will happen. But there are many things you wish to ask her. Is the demon you’ve seen the one leaning against me now, lovely in the lake’s reflection? Who has bought you, who has sent you to our camp to kill us? How long have you been circling these white plains? How many men and women have you murdered this way, in Yoshiwara, in Edo, in the war? Before the war?

What do you think of when you see snow falling? What do you think of when you smell winter?

“What is your name?” Your mouth is against her ear, closer than you’ve ever been to another person since Kaoru lay beside you, trying not to let you hear his weeping; no—since they pushed your face into a pillow and forced themselves inside you, groaning—