Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

White Snow

When I open my eyes, I realize I had fallen asleep for some time. And for the first time in a long while, I had been dreaming of something. There was a vast expanse of stars above me as I stood on top of a hill. It wasn't just an ordinary hill but one that rose remarkably high and magnificently round. Round like a ball. The ground was dark and formless, no light or cities or any sign of civilization. I couldn't make out any details at all. It was probably the middle of summer and I could hear the cicadas chiming around, like Paganini's violin concerto. There are a lot of them. They are tremendously virtuosic, the air ricocheting, vibrating a million beats per minute. There's nothing else I could see but the night sky above. There's no moon, only stars. Billions of them, specks of magical faerie dust straight from a children's book. I could see the constellations and the galaxies painted before me, splashes of colour and light, churning and glistening, orchestrated by a greater power. They wrap around me, as if I am standing at the epitome of the earth, within a cascade of a great celestial waterfall, dancing on a black Stygian canal all the way to the horizon, where tinted black collides with pitch black. If I raise my hands up I might feel stars sprinkle over my palm.

I had never before seen so many stars in my life. Or perhaps I had forgotten. But looking up transports me to a different world where consciousness seems to reflect and reinterpret into pigments and spectrums, electromagnetism, infrareds and ultraviolets, gamma rays, microwaves, condensing into white hot orbs of energy; and then all joining up into conversation with one another. Each takes on a specific frequency and a unique hue. But I am merely an outsider, spectating a sports game at a stadium. I have no light of my own, I am part of the dark earth below. I begin to envy the stars which seem to laugh, elated, ecstatic, while I look on. When I look more carefully, I find Deneb, Altair and Vega. The summer triangle and the meeting of Orihime and Hikoboshi in Japanese mythology. The two deities are separated by the Milky Way, destined only to rendezvous once a year. It must be the Tanabata Festival.

I hear a voice but it is so soft I can't make out what it said or who it was. It almost sounds like a cat's meow, or some kind of timid animal. Somehow I can't turn around to look for the source: I am bound to the celestial bodies above. When the voice passes again, I strain to listen. It's like listening to something in the wind, barely above a whisper. I must have said something, because there comes a reply, more defined now, telling me to lie down. It vaguely resembles Shizuka's voice but I can't be sure if it's her.

I lie down but all I see is the sky. Even as I feel a pair of soft, gentle hands, warm fingers along my chest, I can't see who it is.

"The universe moves in predefined ways."

"Yes." I say.

I feel her hands slip lower and start to unbutton my jeans. The grass underneath is cool and brushes my skin. I can imagine this to be an enormous paintbrush that we are laying on.

"Do you see," her voice breathes against my ear, "that one there?"

I strain to see which one she's talking about. "Which one?"

"One after another, they blink out of existence." The movements as she climbs over me are strangely natural and a sense of calm fills me. As if this is right. As if this is what happens every night, only I had never remembered it. "One moment they're there, the next they're gone."

"Kind of like people. Some just disappear."

"Precisely. Of course, to us so far away, they appear to be eternal bodies. They shine now in front of us it seems, but yet they are truly billions or trillions of light years away. When one blinks out of existence, when one comes into being, by the time we see it, they have already gone." Her hair grazes my neck and I suck in air. "It's funny, isn't it, it's like time travel. We're looking at history, ancient prehistoric history. The record of something that had ceased to exist."