Sakuragaoka

There was no one home and the doors of the private room were open to her. The granddaughter secreted the key from her pocket and twisted the iron lock, pushing the door aside, piecing steps into the must-addled atmosphere of the room. A bed sat made and untouched against the wall, its fibers frayed and spun out by age and neglect. Amidst the dense walls, hard materials from an era before it was all hollowed out with foam interiors, she grappled with subtle mechanisms of the cabinetry adorning against the walls.

The collection was careful, possessions prized and placed in individual positions like pointillist blots. A comb inland with gold and little insets where tiny arms of metal reached out to cuddle tiny gems into themselves. A jade mirror polished within carvings of mythological stories and epics long forgotten. Hollow porcelain from an era of Chinese wealth. A wooden box of British import with velvet cushioning lining it as a miniature coffin.

The old woman was careful, quiet about her life beforehand. She had lived through the turbulent century and secreted away from the whirlwind of violence safe and in some form of profit, the details of which she refused to disclose. The generations postceding her descended under a strange cloud of prosperity, the origins of which were only known in whatever occult stories lay behind the trinkets she kept locked away in that collection of value, a collection curated as a representation of a royal hoard moreso than an old woman’s precious heirlooms. The secret was kept by subtlety, inter-marriages too distant to have sprung from her unaware of the faint air she held over the children of her own womb, an air even they count only halfways detect in the quietest hours of reflection and memory.

The old woman was asleep, back to guard her post. The granddaughter wrapped the plastic coat tighter around her shivering body. It was grey, the air nipping sharp with the solemnity of late November, a deathly emptiness swollen with the potential of winter.

The convenience store was yelling at her with an array of options from overseas, descended distantly, impossibly cheap, products of a heaven of plastic. She selected one, a small electronic box that promised something to her. She wrapped it into a pocket, walking home uphill with it nestled within her warmth beside batteries promised to it.

The grandson had taken the box from her in the ensuing days as they both departed for and returned from school. He was captivated by it. The granddaughter had walked in on him time and time again in deep study, back arched C-shaped over his lap, staring into it, headphones jacked in to silence all outside it. She ignored him and it, moving on through December without his attentions.

A diagram of a circuit had taken up the table as they had their morning breakfast. She ignored him as he pulled his hair, eyes wretched and red over the schematic he mocked up himself. The device was in pieces, the guts of five of them scattered with an intact sixth as the centerpiece of a strange altar. He kept writing in a notebook, using a pen to feverishly scribble ASM. She ignored him. The old woman kept watching him, as if lining him up in her sights, a predator meeting a peer across the steppe.

The grandson had disappeared for weeks. It was high April, flooding rains, snow more than melted, deep blue skies the color of cold yet to fully dissipate.

The grandson met his end on the raised trail across a ricepaddy. The farmer ignored them as three suited men took turns circling. Guns were a rarity in Japan. They fired a dozen times, shots no one heard or acknowledged.

The old woman spoke little of him. The granddaughter and the old woman drank as the sun set on a June afternoon. The old woman spoke the grandson’s name quietly, letting it whisper into the sky. The granddaughter cleaned out his room the next day, piling the trashcan high with the scribbleball of engineering that traced his demise.