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THE WORKMEN ARRIVE at seven o'clock Monday morning, and their knocking draws Hiroki quickly from bed, interrupting dreams of snowy mountaintops she tries to reclaim in the tying of a robe around her pudgy frame, to no avail. ^[1] The thud of the stairs against her feet brings some recall: they must be there to install the skylight and widen the door, all included in the price of the service, and the first step in the process, if she recalls the brochure correctly. Which is fine, but something of a surprise this morning, six months after she ordered the service, two months after being told to expect shipment "any day now."
 

Toshiro, the one who does the talking, seems sheepish about this. "Things aren't quite running smoothly yet," he says as his men unload their tools from the truck. "Sorry for waking you. You're one our first customers."
 

"It's all right," Hiroki says. "The little one would have woken me soon anyway."
 

Sure enough, Iku is rolling around in her crib with the hint of a scream on her face when her mother enters the room after leaving the men to their work. "Look at you," she says, touching the child on her forehead in an effort to still her. But she keeps rolling along. A diaper and a can of mushed peas later Hiroki is on the floor, trying to touch her forehead to her knees. After thirty, she grabs her thighs and glowers at the pea-stained face of Iku. "This is all because of you, little one," she says. ^[2] Iku looks at the floor, trying to figure out where the rumblings and bangings are coming from.
 

Later, Hiroki brings the baby downstairs and puts her in the middle of the living room to watch the men work while Hiroki goes upstairs to make them some lunch. When she returns with the tray, Iku is flat on her stomach, arms extended as she tries to pursue a screw, and as Hiroki deftly scoops her up, seeing that the baby is about to cry, she holds her child up to eye level and gives her a good hard stare, and the storm passes.
 

The men take the bowls and acknowledge their thanks, gruffly or shyly as the case may be. Hiroki sits on the floor with them as they eat, holding Iku as Iku holds a ball unsteadily in her swollen baby-hands. Toshiro apologies again for the intrusion. "It's not an intrusion," Hiroki says. Iku loses the ball, and it rolls onto the floor; the men juggle their bowls trying to retrieve it. Watching, Iku claps her hands but does not laugh. One of the workers, a stocky man with a bald patch fraying at the edges, snatches the ball and wiggles it in front of him. Iku slides to the floor and the man rolls the ball through the gauntlet of people. But Iku can't get her hands up and it bops her in the nose. She mostly looks surprised. ^[3] Hiroshi sweeps her up quickly, before it progresses, and the baby rests her chin on her mother's shoulder.
 

"This is excellent," says Toshiro. "Where did you get the recipe?"
 

Hiroki smiles. "From my mother." She pulls on her index finger and feels it crack. "I used to cook it for my husband all the time."
 

After lunch, Hiroki puts the baby down for her nap and wanders into the bedroom. The covers are still turned down, she sees--she never returned from rising so suddenly--and she pulls them up to the head of the bed. Then she picks up the telephone, and soon, on the other end is her mother-in-law. Hello, Hiroshi, she says.
 

"Hello, Mrs. Taki," says Hiroki.
 

"How is the new house?" Mrs. Taki asks. "How is Ikuko? How is the new neighborhood?"
 

"The new house is very nice, but I need some time to let it fit around me and the baby," she says. "And the neighborhood…well, no one knows who I am here."
 

"That's a blessing," Mrs. Taki says. "How is the weather?" she asks. "In the country, it is a clear spring day, and Mr. Taki is out on his tractor, planting rice. He is glad the cameras are finally gone," Mrs. Taki says.
 

"Yes, me too." Hiroki looks out the window. "It seems to be a lovely day."
 

The workmen are nearly finished by nightfall, but not quite, so they leave their tools in a neat pile in a corner of the entranceway and fasten a plastic sheet securely over the door before setting off. "Just use your back door for tonight," Toshiro says, leaning through a window.
 

"What about security?" asks Hiroki. "I don't want anyone breaking into my house tonight."
 

"We'll take care of it," Toshiro replies.
 

Confused, she nods, and after Toshiro leaves Hiroshi shivers a little and fetches Iku. The kid gets salmon stew, the mom gets some healthy rice noodles, and then they have a seat in the dusty, disturbed living room. "Are you ready, Iku?" Hiroki says. She retrieves a videotape from a shelf and wiggles it in front of the baby's face. Iku gurgles and bats at it, like an insect.
 

The image that appears is a man skiing downhill, goggles strapped to his face, cutting back and forth across the mountain. The camera follows him from right to left, and loses him behind a cloud of snow kicked up onto the lens. The screen is white until a mittened hand appears to wipe the field of vision clean.
 

"See, Iku? Dada," Hiroki says, but the baby is looking off to the side, distracted by a bit of light catching the wall, so her mother hauls the baby into her lap and points at the television. "Dada, Iku, dada." The man made by light is staring into the camera, goggles raised, red-faced. The man is lifting a mug to the camera. The man is saying, "And would you stop me if I tried to stop you?"
 

Hiroki puts Iku to bed once the baby finally settles down, and then she watches TV for a while before retiring to her bedroom. Enclosed by the covers, Hiroki looks at the space cleared on the opposite side of the room, and she takes up her husband's picture from the nightstand, and gives it a soft kiss, and goes to sleep. In the darkness, the impression of her lips slowly fades from the glass, first the moisture of the saliva evaporating, then the wrinkled stamps of oil hardening or running down the frame in tiny rivulets, and finally the covering of it all with a slow coating of dust borne on the stale air of a sealed-in house. ^[4]
 

IN TWO WEEKS, the construction is done, and this morning Hiroki is ready for the delivery, up early and dressed and smiling at the dim sun coming through the skylight. When the doorbell rings, Iku gives a bark--something she picked up from the clearly-audible habits of their neighbors' dog--and Hiroki goes to answer the door. ^[5]
 

"Mrs. Taki?" says the man on the other side.
 

"Hi, yes."
 

"Hello. Mrs. Taki, I am a representative of Forever Yours, Inc. Are you able to accept delivery at this time?" Over the man's shoulder, Hiroki sees Toshiro at the truck, trying to wave without waving. "You'll be allowed to perform an inspection, of course, before you sign for it."
 

"Yes, certainly," she says.
 

The representative waves at the waiting workmen. "Come on!"
 

First they bring in the stand, a heavy metal thing with wooden accents, and bolt it to the floor. Then they bring in the back brace and bolt that to the wall, and bring in the support wires, which they attach to the ceiling. Finally, the frame in place, everyone involved takes a deep breath and walks slowly out to the truck to retrieve the main cargo.
 

They bring the case out slowly, rolling it along the casters on the truck bed and taking it onto their shoulders as it emerges. Four men carry it, each at a corner, and here the widened doorway comes into play: the whole procession is barely able to fit through without breaking stride. They could have easily made it through the old door by turning their parcel sideways, but this would be, of course, horrendous. Hiroshi follows, three steps behind.
 

They take the stairs slowly, counting them off in unison as they go, and at the top maneuver their charge into the bedroom helped here, too, by a widened doorway. Finally the two men at the front place their end snug and lift it high while the two men at the end lower theirs slowly into the crook of the frame and, with a slight click, let it settle.
 

There is a short burst of silence; someone clears their throat. "You may, of course, remove the shroud," says the representative. The workmen stand off to one side, their heads bowed.
 

With a steady hand, Hiroki pulls the black cloth to the side and looks upon what she knew with certainty she would see: the body of her husband, Katsumo, pale and ghostly, with a trace of life running through him, but still looking a little like plastic, as they warned her he might be. She touches two fingers to the clear cover and then pulls them away.
 

"Is everything satisfactory?" the representative asks.
 

"Yes," Hiroshi says, chasing something down her throat with the ripple and wave of her muscles. "Yes."
 

"Our apologies, Mrs. Taki, for the absence of a priest," the representative says as the workmen file out of the room; Toshiro is last, and he throws a concerned look over his shoulder as he steps through the doublewide door. "None have yet accepted the positive aspects of our technique. We have every expectation they will soon, however, at which point we would be honored to provide one retroactively for Obon."
 

"Hatsubon," Hiroshi says. "It hasn't been a year yet."
 

"Yes…of course…"
 

"Could you explain again about the skylight?"
 

"Certainly--you simply attach the guiderope to the four side handles, then press this button"--he indicates a panel near the door--"and it will be raised onto the roof conveyance device, which brings it safely down a track onto the loading area, where you may place it onto a car or taxi as you see fit. If you have any questions at that time, there is always the manual we have provided." The representative brings out his clipboard; he seems impatient. "Now, if everything is satisfactory…"
 

Hiroki reaches hesitantly for the form. "I hate to keep asking this, but--you're sure he's been decontaminated?"
 

"We have taken every precaution, Mrs. Taki." Nodding, her eyes downcast, Hiroshi signs her name. "Our condolences to you in your continued time of grief, Mrs. Taki," the representative says.
 

As he puts his clipboard away, Hiroshi finds herself quietly saying, "Now it's true."
 

It is quiet once everyone has left, but Hiroshi does not immediately return to the bedroom, instead seized by a strange compulsion to touch everything in the living room. She brushes fingerpads over the television, the windows, the carpet, feels the slight measure of dust collecting between the ridges of her fingers' whorls, trapped by the oil secreted there. In a corner she finds a small pair of pliers the workmen must have accidentally left. "That's a shame," she murmurs. "I'll have to return it soon."
 

After a time, she makes her way up the stairs to fetch Iku from her crib and carry her into the bedroom. Together, mother and daughter face the tomb before them.
 

"See, Iku?" Hiroki says. "Dada."
 

The girl gives a whine of terror and amazement. She reaches out her hands, and Hiroshi does, too, and as one the pair brushes a space inches from Katsumo's face.
 

"See?" she says. "Dada."
 

AFTER THE UNPLEASANTNESS, there were the usual periods of chaos and family support and media attention, but somehow during all of this a lot of the widows found each other, through the hospitals, or the police, or simply through reading the accounts and using the phonebook. And somehow (details are still unclear) they managed to find a time to get together in a restaurant in Ginza to talk about all they had been going through.
 

There was a discussion of those who may have been responsible, of course, and of the government's response, and what could have been done to prevent it all, but eventually they all came round to funeral arrangements. Everyone was having the traditional cremation and ceremony, and so the talk was about where to store the remains (country or city), how to keep the media out of it, and so forth--except until Hiroki said,
 

"I'm not."
 

"You're not?"
 

"No," Hiroki said. "It sounds horrible."
 

The widow says, "It was very helpful to me. Being there with the whole family, passing around the bones, the Buddhist priest--I don't usually see much of them, but this once it was comforting."
 

Hiroki shivered. "Horrible."
 

"Well, what are you going to have done, then?"
 

Hiroki tapped her chopsticks on the table. "When he died, when they brought me to him, they wouldn't--they wouldn't let me touch him…they said he was contaminated, they said his clothes were soaked with the stuff and that if I touched him I could die too, but I didn't care, so I reached out, and strained forward, but they pulled me back…his mother, too. His parents came and they saw him and his mother tried to touch him but they nearly tackled her. And I just can't...how do you know, with the cremation, that you're getting his body? Or his bones? It could be anyone's. It could be just ashes from newspapers or furniture or food...you don't know. You can't. And I just want to touch him, just once..."
 

Hiroshi looked around the table and the other widows were all staring at her. She lost her voice for a second. "There's this new company, you see. Forever Yours. They contacted me..."
 

"Oh, Hiroshi. They contacted all of us. But you can't..."
 

"We were in America. Me and Katsumo, we both...we both spent some time in America. He would go there on business trips a lot. I think sometimes that he's there now. But there they bury the whole body in the ground. There's no room for that here, I know, so I'll just...well, there's this."
 

"It just sounds horrible, having him there, staring at you."
 

"I need to know that he's real," Hiroshi said. "I need to know--"
 

ON A DAY one week after the delivery is made, Hiroshi receives two calls.
 

The first: she is cleaning downstairs, and watering the plants, when the phone rings in the study, and she rushes in to catch it.
 

"Hello?"
 

"Hiroki?"
 

"Yes?"
 

"Hiroki! It's Shizuko. I'm so glad I found your number."
 

"Shizuko," Hiroki says, sitting down in her desk chair. "Hello."
 

"How are you doing?"
 

"Oh, I am OK..." She casts about on the desk for something to fiddle with but finds nothing. "The new house is nice enough."
 

"Are you working at all?"
 

"No...well, the money I got from the government, and the insurance, it's taken care of me pretty well. And Katsumo's parents, too. They've been very kind."
 

"Would you like to do some work?"
 

"Hmm, I don't know...I really do need to stay home and take care of the baby."
 

"How about if you could do it from home? Some freelance design work?"
 

She hesitates. "What's the project?"
 

Shizuko seems to hesitate, too. "An atomic bomb memorial. But a nice one--"
 

"What about the one in Hiroshima already? The ruined building?" And she thinks: why did you bring this to me?
 

"They're thinking of having another one in Tokyo, with a kind of different theme. That's one's, you know, that one's kind of there to remind people of the destruction and just what happened and it could fall down at any minute and, you know, like that. This one is more like a monument as a message to the future. A warning to people about what could happen who might have forgotten what already did."
 

"Oh, Shizuko, I don't know. What's the budget, the site..."
 

"I'll fax all that over. We just want some ideas, some rough designs, we're still in the pre-planning stages. What do you say?"
 

Hiroki brushes the empty desktop with her palm and knocks on it, twice. "All right. I'll give it a look."
 

After lunch, Hiroki hooks up her machine and does about half an hour on it while watching television in the kitchen. Her machine is basically an exercise bike hooked up to a swing by means of two metal beams; Hiroki gets on the bike after strapping Iku in the swing and rocks her in a current of air while she naps. Sometimes she stirs and pokes her head up, but Hiroshi puts her finger to her lips and the baby drops back down.
 

Just as she's finishing up the workout, the phone rings, and she is able to reach over to the counter and snag the portable. She stops pedaling, but remains on the seat. Iku looks up curiously.
 

"Hello?"
 

"Ma'am, hello, I would..."
 

"Who is this?"
 

"I'm a writer with the Weekly Bunshun, and..."
 

"Who are you? How did you get this number?"
 

"From just...I...from Forever Yours, ma'am, I'm doing a story on their service, you see. They said you were one of their first customers and that I could call you to see what you thought about it all."
 

Hiroki hesitates. "I can't give my name."
 

"And we will certainly respect your privacy. We'd just like to know what you think about it--why you decided to go with them for your funeral arrangements--"
 

"Oh. Well." She wipes her forehead with a paper towel and slides off the seat. "The manner in which my husband died, it was very...sudden. Very sudden. It was not like the situation with a parent or a grandparent, where they are ill for some time and you start to mourn them even before they die, and then the doctor calls you one morning or you are there and they say 'he is dead' and you walk into the room, eyes downcast, and see the body, and touch it one last time before they put it on a cart and take it away. His body...his body was there, his body had been there, lying beside my in bed that morning, and the pillow was still warm from his head when they called me, and before me there was just this thing, this picture I could not touch, this famous painting that was not mine to feel. So I could not stand the thought of passing around his bones without ever feeling his flesh. You see? And I could not let him be everyone's, out in a public vault for everyone to breathe in as they passed by, let him mix with the ashes of others. He was still mine, my baby's and mine. We wanted to keep him here, with us." On the other end of the line, the reporter coughs. "Does that answer your question?"
 

THAT NIGHT EVERYTHING is still. The baby has been put to bed, wrapped in a series of blankets like a toga or a monk or a shroud, and the house, too, sits wrapped in the silence of the neighborhood, in the unblinking, unbeeping, untired night in which all drift. At three in the morning her bedroom feels like an open plain under a blanket of stars, the edges reaching out infinitely far beyond the grasp of her feet and arms and hands and eyes and ears. Hiroki has prepared for this moment with a trip to the store and a careful rearrangement of the furniture and the commitment of a poem to memory which she will not recite, not tonight. The plans for the atomic memorial sit in a neat pile on her bedstand.
 

The plastic cover slides off easily, and she leans it carefully against the wall, not making a sound. Then the body is before her, held in place--how? She examines the interior and finds four snaps that press the corpse against the back of the coffin, four snaps unsnapped one-by-one, unhurriedly, until the body begins to loll with the force of gravity pressing down upon it. Hiroki takes it under the arms and eases it towards herself, towards the floor and the bed. It is heavy, and she struggles under its weight to maintain a steady rate of fall as it descends into her grasp.
 

The body now under her control, she lets it settle onto the floor, and she sits under it, and arranges it in her lap as if sleeping. She rests the head on her chest and strokes the hair, which has not grown for nine months.
 

"It feels so real," she murmurs.
 

From beside her Hiroki draws up a box of pins, and places them on her thigh, and from it plucks a single pin. With her other hand she takes up the hand of her husband, rough on the palm, tracing briefly the smooth creases that run like valleys through the plains of his flesh, finally stroking her way up the pointer finger and grasping it between her own thumb and forefinger. Something rumbles from downstairs as Hiroki slides the pin smoothly into the fleshy fingerpad, not a jab, not a caress. Just a little pinch. No one moves, no one cries out. "This is where you would touch me on my cheek," she whispers, as if into his ear.
 

She places one pin in each finger, whispering its purpose. "This is where you would turn out the lights." "This is where you would scoop out a bit of food from a jar." Hiroki continues to the hand, putting a pin in the bulge at the base of each finger, a row in the muscle down the outside, one directly in the center. "This is where you would grasp the steering wheel. This is where Katsumo would put his hand on my belly." The wind outside bows to the ceremony inside, stopping silently at the windows.
 

She continues around his whole body, placing pins in the muscles and the flesh, avoiding bones, reciting a litany of activities that eventually become a series of gasps and gulps, a throaty moan at every piercing of the skin. She stops looking, throwing her head back and closing her eyes and operating by feel, reading the topographical map of her husband's body with her tiny hands, feeling the words that he said in the pockmarks of his flesh, teasing out the moments of his death by rubbing the stiff joints, making him limp in her arms, making his whole frame into rubber.
 

Finally she comes to his mouth and opens her eyes and seizes up a handful of pins, scattering them on the floor and pulling the still-firm tongue from his mouth. She pulls the tongue out and begins sliding pins in, one by one through the nubbled muscle and soon through the other side, holding the tongue in place outside the lips. "This is where he used to kiss me. This is where he would breathe on my neck at night," she says, running her fingertips over the ocean of pinpoints now marking his flesh, and she moans, "Yes, yes, yes."
 

THAT MORNING, Hiroki struggled with the skylight in an attempt to get Katsumo's coffin out of the house and onto the waiting taxi. Iku sat in the corner, playing with a doll. "Shit," Hiroki grunted. The hooks wouldn't go on the handles, maybe because they were disturbed when she removed the body previously, and the winch kept starting up, so she had to retract it and start over every time. "You have any ideas, little one?" she asked Iku, who bopped up and down a little, but otherwise didn't respond. Eventually she got everything working and the coffin proceeded slowly through the ceiling and along the roof, where the driver was shepherding it along. Despite some disturbing noises from the machinery, it made it down onto the platform and then onto the roof of the taxi.
 

That lunchtime, the taxi pulled all the way into the train station, up beside the train, all the way to the baggage car, so the handlers could slide the shellaced surface off the roof rack and into the depths of the train.
 

That afternoon, Hiroki took the train to the country, to the mountains. She sat in a seat on the train and read magazines in newspapers, gulped information about the situation and the troubles as the outside galloped by. She gripped the pages too tightly and too eagerly and the edges ripped into her skin, digging under the surface and slicing up little bits and bringing up blood that would mix with the newsink and the dry paper absorbed it all. She brought the fingers to her mouth a little and tasted the blood a little and wiped it on the window, just a bit, in a heart shape, to mark where she'd been. From her seat she would put the words down and look around the car and see many others heading to the country for Obon, many others as families or couples, one member clutching the jar that contained the ashes of their loved ones. But many traveled without a jar, waiting to arrive on the land where the tombs stood. Hiroki turned back to the window, watching the blur outside turn slowly to green.
 

That evening, now, Hiroki sits in the house of Katsumo's parents, drinking tea, and waiting for the body to arrive.
 

"Did you have a pleasant trip?" asks Mr. Taki.
 

"It was a little strange," says Hiroki. Mrs. Taki has Iku on her grandmother's lap, bouncing her gently up and down while the baby drifts in and out of sleep.
 

"How is the farm?" asks Hiroshi, and, thankfully, there is a knock on the door. Mr. Taki answers and tells them to bring it into the kyakuma. Neither of the parents says anything as they look upon their son's body; from her grandmother's arms, Iku strains towards her father's face.
 

The morning of the 15th is bright, and Katsumo's brother, Kozo, arrives early with his wife, who joins the women in preparing the food for the day. Mr. Taki and Kozo fetch the urns of Katsumo's grandparents from the family crypt, and then try and figure out how to arrange it all around the coffin. Hiroshi thinks she hears some yelling, but is not sure.
 

The shouryoudana is almost ready by the time the priest arrives: Katsumo in the middle with his grandparents' urns on a high shelf on either side, two lanterns with the family crest, flowers, incense, and an eggplant in a bowl to feed the spirits. There is no picture; none is needed. The priest and Mr. Taki argue for a few minutes, but in the end he performs the chant, maybe a little quicker than he's supposed to, and leaves.
 

Friends begin arriving after that, flowing through the doorway to eat the food and talk with the family. Hiroshi speaks to a few people, quietly, who she knows from the months she spent with her in-laws. Everyone avoids the body and no one speaks of it, but Iku gets a lot of attention. Mr. and Mrs. Taki and Kozo and his wife leave for a while to visit friends themselves, but Hiroshi always stays.
 

At night, they bring Iku down to the river, where the banks are lined with families. Hiroshi thinks she recognizes some people from the subway, but she thinks she's probably wrong. They all lean down and watch Iku bump a lit lantern with her chubby hands enough to send it downstream, and clap for her. The baby keeps crawling into the water; Hiroki grabs her up, but lets her legs feel the current's flow for a little while, which puts Iku at ease. Hiroki stares at the procession of lights and thinks, for a second, that she has grown to giant size and is looking across a country, seeing the lights, each one a building or a town or a city, all moving away from her, more coming from behind.
 

Iku is a little too tired to eat watermelon back at the house, so the adults finish it off for her. Kozo doesn't speak much, and never looks at Hiroshi. She's not sure if she should feel awkward or not. She thinks that maybe she should have told them about the funeral arrangements a little earlier.
 

"Hiroshi," Mrs. Taki says, "it's so nice of you to come."
 

"Yes," Mr. Taki says. "But perhaps tomorrow would be a good day to leave." ^[6]
 

THE DOOR of the study is closed tight and the stereo is on and Iku is nowhere to be found, sent off to daycare some days, or a nanny other days. Hiroki sits in her desk chair, reading books and doodling on sketch paper with a small-barrel black pen. She scratches out doorways and mountains and birds with the sharp point, and sometimes, later at night, she sketches bodies lying naked on the ground, like a bored teenager in her notebook. Then she gives the bodies goofy cartoon faces and writes names on their chests.
 

But mostly, she reads. From anthropology books she learns different ways that civilizations communicated, with pictures or with words, and which of these messages are still there for us to read today, and which have been lost, and which we can still understand. She closes her eyes and sees a trail of words struggling and digging its way out of the ground and floating across the land, horizontally, able to be read. She traces, too, the history of anthropology as a science, the way it first noticed big things and has only recently begun to study the smaller things, and which artifacts were most easily identified as intentional monuments with an implied meaning. A warning, she thinks--Hiroki wants a warning.
 

From books about archeology, she looks, first, at the pictures--she makes a list of those things viewable in museums (such as, for instance, the Greek temple represented in its entirety, inside and out, in one small room of the British Museum) and those things that were left on site; she reads accounts and checks old, black and white photos to see those digs that encountered undisturbed interiors. She is looking for permanent things, undisturbable things, protected and scary things where no human wants to sit, sleep, farm, store, or wander. Anything in these books obviously had the capacity to draw in, but she is looking for those things that just as quickly send away, those things that convey an effort made not in honorarium, but as curse, as commemoration of blight.
 

As she reads, she begins to understand what she never did before: why, for instance, anyone could ever think that the threat of cartoonish gods could ever be a deterrent, or why anyone would take easily-avoidable dangers as serious threats. But the practical threat is never the point, she realizes: it's creating the feeling of dread, the need to escape, the same one that makes horror movies about imaginary monsters still frightening, or the one that makes the statistically unlikely rapist into a palpable threat in the dark, in the concrete-covered parking lot or alley or street. Maybe she can't find anything that will really last. But she can, at least, send a message to the present from the past.
 

Finally, she reads children's science books on those subjects relegated to light entertainment: mummies and dinosaurs. She justified it at first by saying that Iku could read them once she got old enough, but Hiroki was now genuinely fascinated with them, and their frail, delicate pages are marked up beyond recognition. The mummies appear as either fleshed silhouettes wrapped in paper, seemingly hollow inside like the unknown soldier, or baked humans, human-puppets, human-dolls. The dinosaurs are now just bones, arranged in rough estimations of what they may have been, the rest left to the reader's imagination.
 

Hiroki becomes fascinated with one picture in particular: a specimen residing in the Museum of Natural History in New York. It is one of the most perfect fossils in existence, so perfect that even the scaly impressions of flesh remain, pressed and hardened into rock, a death letter sent from 6 million years ago and received now, today, every day by hundreds of children walking by, and by, and by.
 

ON A TUESDAY, Hiroki finds herself rubbing her eyes, shocked at the sunlight, shocked at the size of her own living room, the width of her own front door, and she decides that that night might be a good one to go out.
 

She takes the subway into the city, riding against the flow, looking out onto platforms crammed full of men and women in suits, restlessly waiting. She passes by cars stuffed with people like pastries with an insect filling, wriggling to get out. She rides in a car with three other people, and she can't help but gasp a little every time they pass from the light into the darkness of the tunnel, every time a door opens or the wind rushes through, thinking of what it could carry.
 

Hiroki disembarks at Ginza, and when she emerges into the world above she finds herself smiling, somehow, smiling at the lights, the smoke and the activity, the girls in their clothes like bird feathers or car bodies. She finds herself strolling the streets, undisturbed by the crowds pressing past or the sudden intrusion of noise and busyness. Stopping in a store, she picks through the clothes, but doesn't really see anything she likes. Still, it looks like it might rain, so she picks up an umbrella, just in case.
 

Holding her new acquisition vertically in front of her, she plunges crosswise into the crowd charging down one of the main streets and starts jostling bodies with her small frame, ducking to and fro to avoid wayward hands, but still bouncing like a piece in a pachinko board, hearing flirting, girl talk, cell phone conversations, knocking down men in sweat-soaked business suits but proceeding without halting. Eventually she seesin a bar and thinks, hmm, a nice drink might be nice right about now.
 

When she gets her drink, and takes a sip, and turns around, she sees, to mild amazement, Toshiro, the workman who helped install her new door.
 

"Mrs. Taki...uh, Hiroki!" he says. "What are you doing here?"
 

"I never did return your pliers," Hiroshi says. ^[7]
 

WHEN THEY ENTER her house, everything is dark and still, and Hiroshi leaves it that way. "Be careful on the stairs," she whispers.
 

"I remember," says Toshiro.
 

She takes his hand as they walk to the bedroom. "Iku isn't here," she says into the hallway. They fit side-by-side through the door.
 

Shoes off, Hiroki does not let him speak, but kisses him over and over, covering his mouth with hers, swallowing his words and putting his hand on her stomach so Toshiro can feel them as they are spoken, an echo in her rib cage the only answer. She clutches his large, rough hand with her small, smooth one and uses his digits to remove her shirt, her bra, puts it on her breast and rubs it softly, hitches a finger to her panties like a clothes hook and pulls, presses the heel of his hand to her clit like a pillow and rubs roughly, jerkily, as if she's keeping down an unpredictable animal.
 

With a surprising force, Hiroshi presses Toshiro to the bed and touches two fingers to a spot on his forehead, preventing him from moving. Then she strips off his clothes like she's ripping the lining off a sofa, climbs up his body like a convict over the prison wall, and as she takes him inside, Toshiro sees the moonlight through the bedroom window reflecting off a plastic plate, but he does not see what's inside.
 

THERE IS A ghost in the house.
 

The ghost, which dimly reflects light, floats through the rooms upstairs: the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, and lingers in Iku's room for a while, spreading itself over the crib and enveloping the trashcan full of diapers and ruffling the plush fur of Iku's dolls.
 

The ghost, which smells like sausage, floats bumpily down the stairs to the living room, and stops in front of the front door, and wonders for a moment how it got there, how it got inside or upstairs or anywhere at all.
 

The ghost, which feels a little like moss, finally arrives in the study, and stops there, and looks at the designs on the walls.
 

The ghost sees the site from above, a mass of concrete, with an outline that, when viewed from a certain angle, is unmistakably that of a bird, but what kind of bird--dove, vulture, hawk, sparrow--it is hard to tell. Most of the interior, which stretches across twelve acres, is taken up with what looks like junk, except for one clear area where the heart would be, in the upper right side, with a small dot in the middle of that clearing. A closer view reveals, first, that the stones comprising the exterior are tall, 20 meters, and are carved in rough rock to the forms of coffins set into the concrete, and that the converging points block out the sky above, but a human can slip through the resulting gap; second, that there is a gap in the outline, in the mouth of the bird, and a series of markings drawing intruders in; third, that the junk is actually a mass of bomb and missile casings, in whole or in part, scattered at random but bolted to the concrete, and a time-lapsed view shows this area rotting, rusting, and broken in 100 years; fourth, that the dot in the middle of the clearing is a narrow cylinder made of a reflective artificial substance called Rokkartan that is nearly indestructible and which holds and reflects light, and that it is hollow; and fifth, that a side view shows that the cylinder widens as it enters the ground and ends in a flat base thirty meters in diameter, thirty meters below the surface.
 

The ghost finds itself inside the cylinder, looking and trying to see what it looks like and what it feels like--seeing the drawings of clouds and sky and islands and cities inscribed with a manic hand into the rock, seeing the floor below, made of an utterly clear substance which is completely solid and fills the space outlined by the subterranean extension, and seeing, finally, the two things set into that clear cone: first, a body, perfectly preserved, eyes open, nude, male; and second, an impression of the body, a plaster cast split into two, floating in the solidity, bearing each fold and hair of the body from which it is made.
 

The ghost, which can't quite remember how it got here, closes what it thinks are its eyes and tries with all its might to sleep, but feels rippling through its substance the echo of something it can't quite hear.
 

j_moody: this is excellent work. I'm not familiar with the author you referenced in the desc. but regardless of your influences, this is some very evocative stuff. Hiroki's voice is dreamy and introspective and our glimpses of other characters are just substantial enough for us to feel their presence, which i like. most of your stuff has that slightly titillating hyper-reality to it. very cool. and very completely imagined. eppy: Thanks, Joel. My roommate's questioning about the pins ceremony has led me in this whole other (possibly unfortunate) line of thinking, so we'll see. Anyone else? j_moody: cool. the ceremony is definitely strong enough to stand some tweaking. hypothetically it could sustain the reader's attention for pages and pages, I'm thinking, if you want to really get into it. anyway-- I have faith that you'll do something worthwhile regardless. Add comment