#less jarringly short sections slightly better rhythm

[dirtbra1n]

hanzawa masato doesn’t like sundays.

the shrine won’t be performing any exorcisms today. to be more specific, the miko that greets him feels his forehead with a warm hand and decides that he’s in good health.

he doesn’t want her to know how little he values her judgment, so he bows to offer a prayer instead.

—

he’d woken up this morning without having had any dreams. he went out of his way, on a morning that was over-bright and unsettlingly still, to make a trip to the shrine. because he hadn’t had any dreams. for all intents and purposes, a full night’s rest.

a monument to the places his mind has been lately, that this was cause for alarm.

barring that, lack of dreams notwithstanding, masato woke up just before the sun rose. the statements made about darkness before dawn are wrong, but his house is old and construction in the neighborhood leaves it eclipsed by increasingly taller buildings that are increasingly growing occupied by increasingly unneighborly neighbors.

the statements made about darkness before dawn are wrong, but when masato wakes up his room is dark and somewhere between too cold and not cold enough.

he doesn’t think it’s particularly scientific—knows this, truthfully—but he’s become familiar with the following pattern:

open your eyes first thing in the morning; you don’t want to be alive. throw the sheets from your legs and feel as the warmth is leached from your body. roll onto one side and feel as your ribs resist the desire to cave in. check the time and feel as the numbers rattle hollowly, meaninglessly, in your brain.

your name is hanzawa masato. you don’t feel tethered to any of the unkind physicality happening to “you”.

you want to die more than anything.

and then he stands, finally, and moves to go about his routine, and if he wasn’t put through an especially brutal wringer overnight, he’ll forget his ideation and go about things the way he always does.

if he was put through that wringer, he can forget. he’ll make himself forget. he’ll learn how to make himself forget.

—

he doesn’t intend to die, is the problem. that simplicity would be a blessing.

the shadows cast before him were inky, stretched long. the trains rattle near-silently on the tracks, low rumbling swallowing the impact of his own footsteps. the footsteps of other people, though sparse, jab like sharpened stones into his ears.

days like these feel fake. days like these make his dreams feel real. days like these make masato feel a little less than alive.

he would feel stupid saying so out loud, but he’s starting to believe that no one’s as haunted by ghosts as ghosts themselves.

he doesn’t know what brought him to this conclusion.

(a lie, mostly. if he had to hazard a guess: an answer lying somewhere between his exhaustion and reluctance to fall asleep, his wishing to die but fear of death, the restless shifting—currently absent—river.)

the thing about all of this is that masato doesn’t actually believe in ghosts.

not real ones, anyway. if anything—anyone—is going to drift aimlessly through the halls, holding a lantern or candlestick or knife, reflection held in its edge tortured and gaunt, it’s going to be him. an offhanded, deeply involved joke at which to have a sadistic laugh.

he has his obligations, though. of course, the knife would be fake—the edge of it dull and without character, not reflecting much of anything, harmless.

he thinks tashiro would think it’s funny. after the shock and fear and flustered anger wore off, at least.

—

real or not, the house he grew up in—the house he lives in now, the house currently, on only this day once a week, occupied by only him—is haunted.

—

he hasn’t forgotten. if it matters. he’s never been very good at lying to himself, and this one was an awfully slow sort of deal. the sort of deal that is just as much a pain to forget as it is to remember.

there was very little tenderness. he couldn’t quite stretch his legs all the way out, couldn’t reach his arms out over his head. his fingers were cold and useless, deadened, slow. the air pushing in and flowing out of his lungs seemed to whistle through the puncture wound in his chest.

he wishes that he could learn; there was no tenderness, in truth. time moved slowly, if at all, abandoning him to sit stiff in the water, soaked to the bone. abandoning him to finish dying in isolation.

he woke up, a few hours ago now, sweaty and splayed out, drowning only in his sheets, and it was an awfully slow sort of deal, but it couldn’t make him forget.

masato’s never been very good at forgetting things, either.

try as he might to toss them out, two facts cling like hooks to his skin:

1.    hanzawa masato is a still-living human being, and

2.    he doesn’t want to die.

(if he had to hazard a second guess, like he was on some sick introspective game show, masato would say that all anyone ever wants is to live, but living’s hard, and it hurts. it never stops hurting.

he figures—reluctantly, he doesn’t want to spend as much time as he does mired in unwinnable existential debates—that if it’s going to hurt living and hurt dying, he might as well live.)

—

masato doesn’t know where that puncture wound in his chest even came from.

—

I’m at the shrine

Like… for fun?

spiritual enrichment

Of course. Silly question.

Mom says to buy yourself a charm.

which one

…Health?

she said love. I’m buying YOU a love charm

I DON’T NEED IT.

—

poorer, he walks home as evening settles. the clouds that had been crowding the edges of the sky have hung themselves low over the city; no moon.

masato navigates mostly by bleeding sunlight and does not grieve. though his eyes insist otherwise, there is no river.

he carries three charms. good health for his mother, love for his older brother, evil warding for himself. he doesn’t know what compelled him to buy the third.

worn through by the prickly feeling at his skin, he turns his head stiffly to check—there is still no river.

at present, there isn’t anything worth his grief. one pocket lighter, the other heavier, but as insistent as his older brother was that he not buy the damned love charm, it’s not like masato doesn’t know that he’ll just as stubbornly insist on paying him back.

tomorrow, though. they’re not back until tomorrow.

abandonment, maybe. if he was grieving. he both had a dream worse than usual this morning and he didn’t. he was alone in that house and he wasn’t. it’s haunted when he’s there and not when he isn’t, but his mom insists that he house-sit every fucking sunday like the house would be the one pleading “how could you leave me here alone?” and not him.

but it’s not grief, and he’s not pleading. because he won’t let weird dreams count, no one even died.

it’s a pedestrian street, glossy shimmering concrete. everyone but him is walking right where the water would be.

there is no river. his chest aches. he knows better than to entertain the idea.