Suzushina Yuriko opened her eyes to a familiar ceiling. Her room, she evaluated, with greater lucidity than anyone at sh1t-fuck o'clock should ever have. The same bare, moulding walls with their garish-yellow wallpaper. Mottled curtains that should have been changed years ago were bleeding sunset, and a globe spun on her desk with the steady draft from an open window. Her room. The only one she had ever slept in, and yet it wasn't the same room.
Something in the air had changed. No, something in the everything had changed. Everything had changed, but it was the same? There was a humidity that wasn't humidity to the early December air. A new form of pressure was exerting itself upon her. It didn't feel natural. Her body shivered under her thick quilt as she pulled the fabric closer.
Then, from the world beyond her window, a gust of wind rippled the curtains. It brushed past her, lingering like an insult and the illusion broke. The illusion that the world she experienced could only be seen, heard or smelled. That touch was the only way to know how fast the air had flowed around her form. She could taste the numbers of last night's meal, blinking like stars against her tongue. Her breath hitched as information travelled to her lungs. I invite you to imagine you are suddenly aware of all the capillaries and all the veins and all the arteries in your body; that you could feel and know the acceleration of your own blood in every stratum of your being.
Yuriko could tell that her weight pressing on her mattress, and she could feel it pushing back. Truly, feel. Force, counter force rationalised as arrows and equations.
She shot to a sitting position, and then she felt that too. Perhaps it was some long-forgotten appendage that her brain had finally reconnected with. Perhaps it was a parasite that wormed its way into every cell in her body. The feeling sat restlessly in her gut, twisting hot, like rage. It was every mewling promise that was ever broken; it was her father, eyes hard and militant. It was alive, and just as confused as she was, moving to the tempo of her thoughts.
Whatever this — was it too soon to call it energy — thing was, it certainly hadn't been there when she went to bed.
BEEEEEEEEP
It was ingrained instinct. An impulse. Her hand went flying a little faster than she would have liked. She expected pain. This wouldn't have been the first time she had hit her alarm clock a little too hard. Like stubbing a toe on a low table. She really did expect pain, but when her palm struck the snooze button, it burst. Like air rushing out of a balloon. The same way a slug scatters from a shotgun. A particularly loud number accompanied its destruction, then abruptly split off into smaller units. Arrows ran along plastic debris and with a sense of dread that was signed, sealed and delivered on time, she could tell where the shrapnel was heading.
There has been a moment in almost anyone's life. A casual kind of moment where they would reach out to the world and hope to change an outcome with their well-wishes alone. The kind lady at the market still fell. You still dropped your phone down the toilet. Dragonball Evolution was still produced.
No. Suzushina Yuriko cast that thought into the ether, and for once it responded.
A shard of plastic, sharp enough to pierce the world, swerved unnaturally around her globe and embedded itself into a wall.
"Huh," she said, looking down at her uninjured hand. "Wicked."
Chapter II (both this and the first were too short on their own): Bird?
Minimalism becomes less of a fashion statement when luxury stood beyond the household income. The Suzushinas, party of two, lived in a sparsely decorated apartment in the Miyagi prefecture. In the centre of the living room was a round dining table, bearing enough seats for three people. Naturally, at dumb-fuck hours, they remained empty but prominently placed on the table (in front of one of the chairs) was a picture frame. A man, ruggedly handsome in the same way a gorilla was sat next to a woman who radiated kindness, on a short half-life. There should have been a child between them. Little limbs, soft arms and legs; there was even some hair. But the back of the picture frame sat where her face was supposed to be. A tatami crinkled underfoot as Yuriko tiptoed through the dark. It took a lot to wake up her father, but it didn't hurt to be cautious.
First came the morning essentials. It was a Saturday, so all she was looking forward to today was cram school (she wouldn't need her uniform). Wait, no! The fan meeting was today as well, wasn't it? She had come to Sendai. So, after showering and brushing her teeth, Yuriko dressed in casuals. She collected the debris in her room and made her way to the kitchen. Only one half of the Suzushinas ever cooked. It was always the same half. The duty of the other half was to complain, and whinge and moan. 'Too hot' he would say about her hotpot and her ice cream sundaes were always too cold. Regardless of any of this, her father would never touch anything in the kitchen. That had been her mother's job, and now it was hers.
Yuriko prepared two servings of steamed rice, miso soup and tamagoyaki with a practised hand. After eating, she made sure to leave her father's servings on the dining table. She supposed the complaint today would be 'too cold', followed by even colder conversation. The girl pulled on her sneakers, opened the front door, then stepped into the cold. It was 5AM. She would deal with the fallout as she always had.
***
Even at the twilight hours of the day, the city of trees was full of life. And life was movement. Today, Suzushina Yuriko experienced Sendai in velocities and momentums. Displacements fell at her feet as she covered ground on a pre-trodden path. She knew exactly how far she was from home; she could hear how fast (fifteen km/h in the opposite direction) the cyclist on the other pavement was based on the clanging from their rusty chain. Sure enough, when she looked, the metal was discoloured. She couldn't make it stop. The information flowed unbidden. As her frustration bubbled, the energy within her roiled.
"I've been reading too many light novels," but even as she said this it rang hollow. Light novels didn't make clocks explode. "Not enough light novels, then."
The path led to and exceeded a gate. Beyond it stretched a verdant park. Locked. As it should be at this time. Yuriko climbed over the fence and dropped. A crime was only a crime with witnesses, and this was a victimless crime. What was the worst thing a judge could do to her? Community service? Any time spent outside the house was time well spent to her.
Sendai Port Park was her happy place, and a mouthful. There was something about the air. It didn't quite reach a certain memory she had of pastoral fields, and farmers plucking weeds from their crop, but it was as close as got in a major city. There was something about the bird song that brought her a little closer to the days when she woke up looking to seize the day. There was something about reading at the crack of dawn that evened out the wrinkles in her brain. This was all to say that she really did love the park.
"Morning, Mr Hokaze," she shouted.
Whether or not the old jogger was there, it had become a habit to greet him. The grouch preferred the park to be pedestrian free, so he wasn't averse to a little fence-hopping either. She wouldn't ruin his peace if he wouldn't ruin hers. When she heard a series of barks, instead of a "shut up, brat," Yuriko decided she was alone. Almost alone. That sounded like the stray that frequently snuck in the park through a crawl space. Try as he might, not even Mr Hokaze could hate the friendly puppy.
The Suzushina girl found herself at the base of a tree facing the horizon. She kicked a patch of disturbed dirt and began the process of unearthing her reading material. It was nothing scandalous, and in fact, she had already found the novel on a torrent website and caught up to its latest volume. She just kept things that were important to her outside her home. They tended to be safer that way.
Time has taken a lot, but it has saved for her the clarity of this memory. She is back in the kitchen, years away. She is not the only soul in the room, but she is alone. One, two, three. Her trading cards become confetti in his hands. One, two, three. Her doll loses its head, plastic turning into slag on the induction stove. She wants to look away, tries to, but a hand drags her by the head until she can watch again. There is laughter; hollow, disinterested laughter. She sees his smile through her tears.
Yuriko blinked the recollection away. 'Not this', she thought, looking at the novel in her hands.
Volume three of A Certain Magical Index came loose from the soil, still in its resealable laminated sheath. The 'Sisters' arc. The same volume her favourite character was introduced. She had peeled a little money away from her emergency savings to buy it.
As the morning sun baptised the park in its rays, she beat the dirt off the laminated sheathe. It was the kind of sun a gun slinging cowboy would ride into the distance on. It really was a lovely sunrise. Lovelier than it had been in recent memory, so perhaps Yuriko could be forgiven for not noticing that the park was a little redder than it should have been.
Ping.
There it was again, that blistering resentment. That rage, that envy, spitting heat like a thermite reaction. There it was again, that effervescent sadness. That woe with lungs. And then it spoke, in a singular voice that Staccato'd. "Bird—crap!"
"Bird! Bird? Bird?!!"
In a cartoon, it might have been funny. The hulking mass — was that flesh — that bubbled against its frame, like it didn't know which state of matter to belong to. The creature stood quadrupedal, but it wasn't a dog, and it wasn't a cat. It wasn't a bear and wasn't a deer. It wasn't anything she had ever seen or heard of in the animal kingdom. And though it stood without fur, the very last thing it could have been was a man. Purple skin, with a texture near human, stretched tightly around its bulk; it contoured in regions where one might have expected muscle. The creature radiated power: like it could exert more force than its musculature suggested. But what drew Yuriko's eyes the most were its teeth, all canine, and dripping red like they had been clamped on the throat of the horizon. No, an actual throat. A dog was whimpering to death in its maw. Besides the fading pup was a wizened man laid prone against the grass. There was a bleeding stump where his left leg used to be.
"Bird..." spoke the thing, and when it turned to face her, it stared her down with two sets of eyes. There was little intelligence between all four of them, but just enough pattern recognition to see her for what she felt like in that moment. Prey.