Posthumous Cartography of the Unspoken
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
She first noticed them after the funeral, these translucent shapes that bloomed from people's throats like glass flowers whenever they said "I'm fine" and meant something else entirely. They were beautiful, in a way. Wrong, but beautiful. She’d made the wrong things in the right way, hadn't she? Not for the corpses that stood phlegmatic and quiet beside her, but for herself, the ones that were stuck inside and refused to move on. She stood in the rain before she was aware of her own helplessness – hair wild, chest damp, eyes bright, listening to Nigou scream for vegetables in the background and feeling nothing.
It calmed her, after a while. That he cried out for food instead of for her, that he mourned her in silence without her knowledge. That he cried for her, that he did not cry for her. She was proud of him for that. Even though she knew he would never forgive her for leaving him.
Of all the people in the world, Nigou had never deserved that. Takumi deserved it more, in fact, and she owed him at least that much.
Unexpected things were said in the elevator, in passing. Shino managed not to make a bigger deal of it than necessary, and kept her head bowed in silence. When they were outside again, he touched her arm, and she stiffened. It snapped with the force of it – it pulsed briefly, like the sting of a mosquito bite, before jumping away to settle somewhere on her back. In the cramped minute it took the elevator to reach the East Wing Reanimation Laboratory, her mind had changed from one of action to one of screaming horror when she realized what the marks meant. Slid your palm across your kidneys like you're checking for tumors.
Now that the fear was overtaking her, the familiarity of it surprised her. Shino had touched her twenty times before. Twenty one, in the wrong order. But that was a breakdown, wasn't it? The part where all the bad things come rushing in?
“Takumi,” she started, and her fingers reached to clutch his processed arm until she was certain it had returned to flesh, “ I -”
“You're strong, Fumie,” Shino said, scooping her off her feet and carrying her to the elevator, “You're sm-”
“Takumi, I'm a ghost.”
He stopped. He set her down, and turned to look at her. His face was composed despite the terrified look on her own, and he said, “I'm rather fond of them.”
The statement was just dark enough to make her dismayed, and she still didn't know what she had meant to say in the time since, but the look on his face made her hesitate for a moment. “You are.”
He looked down. “Of course I am. They float at my shoulder sometimes and-” Here, he looked up, “Do you really think I'd only have one?”
There was a long beat, between them, as Shino thought of her words and Takumi tried to decide whether he wanted to say them.
“What are ghosts?”
There, she'd said it.
For what felt like the first time in decades, Shino's eyes widened. That hadn't been what she'd meant, the tone hadn't been right, but it's what you get if you try for poetry. “Let me show you,” he said, and reached for her warm hand. His skin was soft. “Couldn't we learn together, perhaps?”
For a brief second she forgot everything she meant to ask him, forgot that flames would burn away her◆ About the ending
❧ About the title