Dear Reader,
Listen please.
He was six years old. With a sister that returned home, dirt shoved into her pockets and excited to show their mother the bugs and rocks that came with an excavation in the woods. They had been always reaching for the fabricated norm society constructed about what a boy and girl should be. That image came with edges under excited hands, and Daisuke learned being interested in fairy tales and animals was what pressed worry into his father’s expressions. His sister escaped the views of an older generation by a thin thread of an instilled idea.
She’ll grow out of it.
He never realized how deeply it cut beneath her skin.
“Look at this.”
The frown on his face turned to disgust once he realized what rattled was the bony remains of a skull toppling over his storybook. She was quick to call it a rabbit, now blocking all words aside from—the end.
“Don’t want to.” He shook it out onto the floor.
She stomped her feet and stole one of his favorites. Voice fading because she knew he would not fight her for it.
“You’re so boring, Suki.”
Boring. A tag that would stick to his back standing in his sister’s shadow. There was nothing to fear after it and he was cowardly child. So he flinched when his mother smiled and said, “you are just like your father.” No longer a man in their lives, and he did not want to become a ghost of a stranger.
So he tried it. Painted the outer shell no one else could accept with what they could stomach. He teased girls that were pretty because boys will be boys (and never connected that to his mother’s sadness). He returned home filthy from the street or soaked from the sea. It started to feel not so painful to seal away the other one that could not survive. Not now. Not yet.
Hide. Hide. Hide.
The day had been clear, but heavy. His grandmother had always claimed he had that sort of ‘gifted sense’ when he would scratch at his head, wrinkle his nose, and say it was going to rain. Some of the fishermen even started to listen to an eight year old’s premonitions. His sister never believed in that sort of thing.
“You’re going to get wet,” he warned her, head still ducked toward a book, eyes nearly parallel to words he struggled to repeat under his breath.
“So don’t come.”
Except it felt wrong, and Daisuke was no longer wrong. He was different, and his sister had become so much further apart from him. He followed her. But weak lungs were never kind, and he had sat for only minutes by the twisted tree. Lightning split its trunk from roots before he was born and his thin legs seemed so pale slung over its hollowed out skin. Head thrown back as he tossed pebbles at birds and called her name again and again.
Asuka. Asuka. Asuka.
Then it was hours later. Light had begun to fade, shadows crawling across feet that ached as he traveled parts of the forest they were not allowed in. Eyes only found a necklace on the ground. White string soaked not with ruddy water and snapped in half. Fingertips grazing a silver pendant returned red and trembling.
He was eight years old and found the remains of his sister before anyone else. Saw her face turned down into the mud and leaves scattered around her head like a halo. Rain-washed skin sucked free of the deep brown their mother shined from. There was blood dried on her neck and in matted rings of dark hair he had combed days before, then complaining as he dragged through curls and now silent.
He was eight years old and ran in the opposite direction. Branches swiping a face running wet with tears, cry caught in a voiceless throat. Knees bloodied by the end of tripping against unfamiliar ground. He could not bring himself to scream for anyone.
Asuka would know how to find the way home. Asuka would know what to do.
He was eight years old and found his sister dead.
The secret that burrowed deep after one year of shock-instilled silence. Became too dangerous for his mind to consider remembering. Locked up and never recalled. They all assumed he had lost her in the woods and fallen asleep. Not a sight he should have had to see. Calling it fortunate. And after three years of the same story, he believed them, too.
Now he is twenty three years old and writes under her name. Unaware and living because of it.
This is feeding a caged demon, and the bars are far too thin.