Chapter Text
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
He eats noisily, crunching, slurping, sucking, chewing, biting, gnawing, snarling. Bits of sinewy tissue slip between his teeth, purple-red, which makes him pause from his meal in order to pick the flesh out with long, razor-sharp claws. He manages to spit out the offending tissue onto the thoroughly stained tatami mats, growling, then commences back to his meal, facing me, keeping me trapped in the main room with him physically blocking the exit.
Drip.
Drip.
The stain grows, unhindered.
He’s soaked nearly the entire half of the main room, now, with his meal. The tatami mats will have to be thrown away, with the flooring underneath scrubbed for hours. The blood might even trickle into the foundation at this point.
Drip.
He has skin the colour of parchment, lifeless and unnatural, shining like a dull moon under the flicker of the room’s dying lantern. I’m mutely surprised that his teeth, so angelically white and delicate in appearance, are able to pierce through anything at all. They look like little spider teeth, all sharp and spindly but weak and small. I winced when he took his first bite, munching through a layer of thick kimono and weathered skin both to reach the squishy organs underneath.
Now I remain still, desperately hoping that if I fade into the background he’ll forget that I’m here.
So I watch, silent.
The blood continues to pool, drip, drip, dripping away. Each droplet is in the shape of a spider lily bud, blooming, blossoming, painfully red, eerily reminiscent of an emotion in my chest that’s about to burst.
The scene is drawn as an impressionist painting; the light, flickering brutal white-yellow in thin pen strokes, enhancing the way the two bodies, two lovers in embrace, fall on the ground, gently lain in the lap of the monstrous man, plucking the flesh and bones from their bodies in the masterful way a cellist strums his instrument, mesmerising. I gaze upon the legendary works of Monet and Renoir themselves, I think, still watching, hooked into the haunting beauty of hideous greed. I watch this man, this monster, this demon, while I remain barely breathing, tucked into the shadow of the main room, helpless to it all.
I watch him eat my parents.
From the way he shudders, tremors, I see him finish off mum satisfactorily enough to move onto dad.
There’s an eerie noise in the air, distant from the eating noises. I hear the chirp of crickets outside, the whistle of pine needles thrashing, and the slight patter of rain, but those are all present in reality – true noises. Sometimes, when I stare too long, I begin to hear sounds with my eyes, and I call them fake noises. The demon looks the way nails against a chalkboard sounds. My parents’ corpses, fresh and ripe, look the way a thunderstorm pounds against the vast, unforgiving sea. The closed sliding door behind him, peppered with little splashes of bodily fluids, looks the way crying sounds – sniffling, sobbing, whimpering, with a smear of snot and the tears going drip, drip…
Drip.
A teardrop innocently slides down my face and onto the tatami mat below. The soft material of the floor absorbs shock and sound, but in this particular moment, between the demon and I, any sort of movement at all will be noticed.
Even the muffled sound of agony.
He looks up.
I hadn’t imagined that I’d die even quicker than before. My first life had been hectic, chaotic, trapped in a neon world of flashing lights, steel, glass – a concrete jungle. I died too young, on the cusp of adulthood, in a wreck of frothing white seafoam and in the hellish depths of the unknown – a slow, watery death. Then I started life over again by some cosmic wish (or joke, who knows), over a hundred years behind, in a different country, culture, and era.
The countryside healed the wounds sustained from death, and I happily absorbed every little bit of the simple life carved out before me. I learned a new language, traditions, religion, and more, helping out with the family business, tending to the shrines in our little village, and being an active participant in what I hoped to be a happy, fulfilling (if plain) life. My normalness detracted from the oddness of my eye colouring birth defect – blue! In Japan? – and I was set to be content for the rest of this second life, carefree.
“Your turn, little girl.”
This is no cannibal. This is a monster. This is the sort of monster parents make up to scare their children into behaving. This is a monster who prowls at night, subtly growing in size and power with every bite of human.
“I’ve been saving you for last.”
For the first time of the night, I decide to close my eyes and stop watching. My sight, my greatest gift, is a useless weapon against a glooming and inevitable death. So instead of seeing, I hear, I feel, I smell, and I taste.
I hear the drip-drip-drip of both tears streaming down my face and of hunger salivating past the demon’s spider-like teeth, slow and grisly. His footsteps thud softly, long legs bounding across the room in a moment’s notice, his heaving breath already just a metre away in the time it takes for me to count to five.
I feel my arms shaking, hands quivering, knuckles painfully clutching the edge of my kimono – a pretty pink dress, a recent gift from the neighbourhood boy who fancies me – crinkling the fabric, possibly cutting half-moons into the seam with my nails. I want the soft mats under me to swallow me whole, to let me sink down into the earth itself, to immerse myself in the serene dark, away from the possibility of my throat being ripped open, of my spine shattering, of my beating heart imploding within my little-girl body.
I smell the waft of iron and human excrement from the open corpses. Sometimes when I stare at anything long enough, I begin to see what it smells like – but now, I have no need for imagination. The scene smells like dread because that’s what it is.
I taste the throb in my throat and the salt in my mouth. There’s bits of leftover aubergine stuck around my teeth from dinner – I hadn’t been able to finish eating because a visitor knocked on our door. When my dad went to investigate, there was a boom, a crash, and a waft of dust obscuring the uninvited guest. The monster had muttered under his breath about wanting to taste our juicy meat, to pop our eyeballs out of our skulls, and to lick the tears off our faces before cracking our necks.
It’s black, the colour of peace, the colour of fertile soil, home to new life and hope itself, behind my eyelids.
It’s black when the unthinkable happens.
I open back to the harsh light, suddenly watching the ice-white demon fade away in a shimmer of dark ash. A man with a tengu mask wearing a cloud patterned jinbei kimono stands in place of the demon, then coming down to a crouch, shielding the gory scene behind him. The man sheathes an ocean-tamed katana and reaches out a wrinkly, calloused hand.
Sometimes when I stare too long I begin to see how something feels.
Soft. Warm. Inviting. Every line, nook, and cranny of the tanned, elderly hand screams of the wonders of this man, this abrupt departure from horror and terror, of the kindness and compassion this man exudes.
My own hands, clutching the edge of my dress, shake.
“What’s your name?” He asks gently.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Name. Name? In Japanese the family name goes first, then the first name. I try to say it out loud, but I get stuck on the part where I’m supposed to open my mouth and vocalise.
I can’t say my family name because there is no family left.
Just me.
Drip.
Drip…
In open, unhurried motions, the man with the funny mask reaches into a sleeve and brandishes a square of cloth – a handkerchief. I let him reach forward to wipe the tears and ugly snot from my face, following the movement of the muscles in his hand, wiping.
They bulge up, down, left, right, and out. I’ve never met anybody this old with such muscle definition before. The man is also vaguely familiar, in the way that I believe I’ve seen him before, but definitely not in this life – I’d remember anybody with a strange get-up like that.
I breathe in, then out.
“Makomo,” I whisper. No family name. “I – I’m Makomo.”
The air tastes of blood.
I don’t know how I can tell, but there’s a general shift in the man’s demeanour, something indicating relief. He almost looks bigger now, broadening his shoulders and puffing out parts of his kimono, further hiding the mess on the other side of the main room. “Really? That’s a pretty name! It’s nice to meet you, Makomo-chan. Could you please close your eyes for me? I’m going to take you outside now.”
Close your eyes.
I take his hand but I don't close my eyes. Not again. Not anymore. If he’s worried or disappointed, he doesn’t show it, and instead guides me around the corpses, to the fusuma walls. He forces the fusuma open and we depart through the backroom, the last shoji doors sliding behind me with such finality that I sink down to the damp engawa and think about everything that's happened in the past nine years of this life that has made me deserve such a wretched night.
The old man plops down right next to me.
“My name is Urokodaki Sakonji and my job is to hunt down demons,” he says, breaking the silence, cracking the rose-tinted glass of my final reality. Then he apologises for not being able to arrive in time to save my parents from this said… demon.
Because of course.
Demons.
And this is Urokodaki Sakonji, the former Water Hashira. A legendary demon slayer in a land of demons.
Because demons are no longer fiction, just like the fiction of books and television from a life long ago, with words now flying off the page and transforming into bloodthirsty, soul devouring, parent-eating monsters. Demons. Murderers.
Fiction. Reality. Fake. True. Not real. Real.
When he offers to train me to become a demon slayer under the light of the waning moon amongst the quivering pine trees in my quaint mountain home of this peaceful village, I foresee a future of pain and death. Many students under Urokodaki’s tutelage perished during the Final Selection, and I’ll become one of them, only to exist as a spirit to help the important people later on. But no, I don’t really care all that much about people I’ve never met. It’s phenomenally stupid of me to choose a dangerous path with a high chance of death, especially a foreseen death in the world of fiction, but I have nobody left at this point.
Nobody but an old man with a sword, offering me a place in his home.
My family is dead. I lost a father, a mother, and an unborn sibling. What gives?
When I agree to become his apprentice, his shoulders slump down minutely, the fabric shifting ever so slightly, the clouds dancing to reflect the movement. Then he straightens back up, the weather scenery still, making me doubt if he even displayed any sort of reaction at all.
“Wait here,” he says, then disappears back into the house.
I sit there on the engawa, unaware of time. Little weeds sprout through the ground below the raised wooden platform so I swing my feet down and let the grass tickle my soles. I wonder what it would be like to be a plant. Life would be much simpler, then, only worrying about sunshine and rain. I’d be able to bask in the beauty of the world without pesky things like human emotions and painful deaths. And maybe if somebody steps on my fragile green stalk, they won’t have to clean up a massive splattering of viscous dark liquid and fleshy pink and purple bits. I won’t have crunchy bones scattered around making a mess, the shards clattering like beads whilst rushing down a waterfall of red.
Then if someone steps on me, crushing my stem, smashing my petals into a paste, I’ll be easy to clean up and forget about. I won’t be a lying corpse on a tatami floor, engulfing the entire room with the stench of human turmoil.
Urokodaki returns, saving me from my musings. He carries a small basket of my personal belongings and a pair of sandals, both of which he gives to me. I pull on the sandals and sling the straps of the basket over my back, letting the weight of familiarity ground me.
And then we depart.
I’ve never travelled this far from home before, is what I think every time I witness a new marvel. The never ending rice paddies, the crystal clear lakes, the rushing rivers, the rolling hills of grass, the shadowy thicket of willow trees, the fruit orchard towns, the luscious and rich beauty of an untouched countryside. But, of course, in my nine year old glory, this is just an over exaggeration of my shock and awe of a world outside of my sheltered little life, for it’s all but a two day walk from my village to the base of Sagiri Mountain.
Perhaps it’s my age, the fresh trauma, or an old man’s weakness, but he treats me gentler than what I remember of his tale from years past. We settle into his small mountain home, we eat a simple dinner, and he explains to me the entirety of the demon slayer organisation, all with a firm, guiding hand.
Demon Slayer.
I’m going to be a demon slayer.
I’d be giddy at the prospect of being in a fantasy world, of magic and dramatic treachery, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m now stuck in this position because of my parents’ murder. I catch myself smiling too much when I run my fingers down the wooden blade of my tiny practice sword, wondering at the mystique of epic combat and lightning-quick movements. It feels like punishment, then, when I realise I’m not being serious enough in the face of my precarious position as a future dead-girl.
So I train.
Because there’s nothing else for me to do in this world except chase down hungry, hungry demons, slashing, kicking, sparring, punching, clawing, ripping, brutalising, attacking, fighting. My desires are ugly but I am not ashamed, for I will live and see to a future where I thrash against the forces that took away the simple happiness I carved out in this second life.
And live.
