Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

Fifteen years?

What was her mother talking about?

Masako stared down at her ravaged hands.

The skin was slightly wrinkled. Diamond-patterned, with a crisscross of lines. The skin was not fine and smooth with the elasticity of youth.

Hand trembling, she grabbed her hank of long hair. There were white strands in among the black.

Fifteen years .

She tottered to her vanity, which was covered in a dusty blanket. She ripped it off, the clatter of items knocked off the stand as the clouds of dust were caught in diagonal lines of golden light.

Fifteen years.

Three stripes of light fell across her face.

A tormented overweight girl did not look back at her.

The person looking back was a woman. Grime and years etched into her skin. A mass of knotted and filthy hair surrounded her face. Her mouth an open pucker of newly lost teeth.

The floor tilted to one side and she staggered, grabbing hold of the stand with one grubby hand.

What had happened to her? What had been done to her? Masako’s lower lip wobbled.

How could she have lost so much?

So quickly?

Fury roared inside her ears. It burned her throat and filled her maw.

She lurched to her bedroom door and wrenched it open.

Her mother, back curved with age, hair white and bedraggled, raised a trembling hand to her wrinkled mouth. Her eyes were wide with shock.

Masako stared back. Disbelievingly.

Everyone. not just her.

“Masako-chan?” her mother croaked. “Masako-chan. you’ve opened your door. After fifteen years. After fifteen years,” her voice quavered in a low wail. Of relief, of sorrow.

A strong odor. Sharp. Sweet.

A second person, slightly behind her aged mother, stepped

forward.

The woman, dressed in a navy blue skirt suit, looked like any middle-aged government employee. She even had a name tag clipped to her chest. MORIYA. Her eyes. They were filled with myriad emotions. But strongest of all was respect.

The neat nondescript woman gracefully knelt to the dusty hallway floor without a hint of distaste or self-consciousness. She placed something at Masako’s feet, then bowed low.

“Thank you, Masako-san,” she said, her voice throbbing. “You have saved my life. I am in your debt. I, and all of my kin, will always be here for you should you ever need assistance. We will never forget.” The woman rose. She did not wipe the dust off her knees. Moriya-san’s eyes blazed, and Masako lowered her gaze with fear and confusion.

“You succeeded when everyone else failed,” Moriya-san said softly. “You are truly remarkable.”

Masako blinked, rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.

The thing on the floor.

It was a length of tattered rope, gray with lichen and years. The air in the hallway was filled with the biting sweet scent of pine.

Moriya-san held out her hand.

Masako, after several seconds, raised her arm waist high, palm facing upward.

Yes. She wanted to return to the forest. Let her leave human life with its pain and disappointments. She had never felt so alive as she did in that night forest. She wanted a pine seed with every cell of her body. Let it take her back to that place. She did not care that time passed more quickly for rats if she could live so vibrantly.

Moriya-san wrapped her fingers gently around her hand. There was no seed.

“Come,” Moriya-san said softly. “You may return to the forest when you come to your life’s end, but you still have much to do in this world, my Guardian and Hero.”

Masako slowly raised her head.

A roaring filled her head, a thundrous waterfall.

To leave her sanctuary without the cover of night—

To leave her sanctuary in the company of others—

She would self-destruct, she would fall to dust. She would be a mortal, exposed, naked among strangers.

Moriya-san’s eyes shone with a golden light. “Come,” she said firmly.

Masako closed her eyes.

She stepped over the threshold.

Her mother gasped.

The floorboards of the hallway were cool beneath Masako’s aching feet. She could feel her heart pounding in her palm. Moriya-san squeezed her hand with gentle strength.

Outside a small bird trilled, liquid, melodic. A distant train’s clatter punctuated the tofu seller’s scratchy nasal recording as he peddled his wares in their neighborhood. The sound of the plaintive horn on his small truck receded as he turned onto another street.

Moriya-san slowly led Masako toward the stairs that descended into light.

Masako did not burst apart into atoms.

She lived.

HIROMI GOTO was born in Japan and immigrated to Canada as a young child. Her novel The Kappa Child was the 2001 winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was on the final ballot for the Sunburst Award and the Spectrum Award. In the same year she also published a children’s fantasy novel, The Water of Possibility . Her first novel for adults, Chorus of Mushrooms , was the recipient of the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book, and was a co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Award. Her first collection of short stories, Hopeful Monsters , was published in 2004. Her latest novel, an epic genre-bending fantasy called Half World , was published by Penguin Canada in 2009 and will be published by Viking in the United States.

Her Web site is www.hiromigoto.com

Currently I live and dream in British Columbia. Every day, I read, rather compulsively, several online newspapers, one of them the English version of a Japanese journal. I like to have a window open, even if it’s not a “neutral” framing, into the happenings of the country and people of my cultural heritage. And I can’t help but see how despair manifests in different ways in different cultures/countries. Long-term acute social withdrawal wreaks devastation upon the sufferers and their families. It has taken a particular form in Japan, but the triggers to the withdrawal are experienced the world over. Excessive social pressure, rigid parental expectations, school bullying; sometimes, hiding away is the most rational thing to do. But the retreat can turn into a prison sentence. and the hikikomori can lose the capacity to reenter the world. But I believe. I believe in the power of transformation, both literal and symbolic. Before we can change we must be able to imagine it. And if there is no spirit left inside you to begin this journey of the imagination, turn to the earth. The forest. The stream. Touch the bark of a living tree. See the flit of a chickadee. The perfection of the dragonfly’s flight. The loyalty of rats. Leave the concrete and the walls. Enter the living. Breathe.

(And a really good counselor is also capable of bringing light to a darkened path — so I have found.)

Acurious event happened this morning when I read the latest news from my brother, and it caused me to cast my mind back some twenty years to the spring of 1908. That was the spring when Mary had to sell off her father’s farm, and most of the folks in the _________ Valley had rode up for the auction of the farm tools and possessions and whatnot, and I suspect many of them were bidding high ’cause they felt kindly toward Mary.