A Kingdom of Cold and Quiet

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PAST THE ROWS of people huddling against the Kentucky cold, past children crying and dashing through the crowd at break-neck speeds and the luggage belts and metal detectors and the stench of sweat, cigarettes, grease. Elise didn't really notice it until she was seated on the airplane, clutching onto anything near her. She was rocked backward, overcome by that stomach-dropping feeling of descending in an elevator, multiplied by a hundred.

Everything—bottles of water, luggage stowed overhead, the very walls of the craft—rattled and seemed to tilt upward, and then the roaring sizzled back down to the normal sounds of the basic economy selection on the flight. An infant was sobbing. Someone had their feet on the back of Elise's seat; another passenger was taking a heated phone call via a bluetooth curled around their ear. When she looked out the window, her hometown was disappearing under white mist.

"First time flying?"

The voice beside her was sympathetic, kind. Releasing her death grip on the armrest, Elise looked to her neighbor. The woman reminded her of summertime, with a warm smile and floral perfume, whispy hair like clouds drifting lazily across the sky. Elise nodded, words failing her.

"My son always hated flying," the woman said and laughed. "Now he lives on another continent and expects me to visit him there. I don't mind, though."

The woman chattered on, not minding Elise's quietness. Her name was Bethany, she said, and her husband was long gone. She lived alone, but couldn't make up her mind to actually move where her son lived in Japan. Bethany had grown up in a small, isolated town in Kentucky, similar to Elise, and she couldn't fathom leaving it for good.

"If nothing else, the raccoons would miss me," Bethany said fondly.

Day faded to night and the sounds of life going forward on the airplane died down, but Elise stayed wide awake. She took out her phone and reviewed her notes, the bookmarked pages and rows of comments and reviews on Google for where she was headed.

Jukai; Sea of Trees; Aokigahara--it had many names, but it all seemed to boil down to one thing.

The perfect place to die.

Elise paused on that comment, afraid to really think about what it meant but not able to look away.

The reviews steadily grew worse, straying from comments on the beautiful scenery to insensitive remarks and flat jokes that had disgust curdling in Elise's stomach.

Great place to hang.

Fun for the whole family!

10/10 would kms again.

The glow of the screen began to hurt her eyes, and though she felt it was a signal to anyone awake that she was also up and doing something that shamed her, Elise kept reading. The worst kind of curiosity had grabbed ahold of her and forced her onward.

Do people really do suicide here?

I hear this place is haunted.

Something Elise's mother had said came back to her then. It had been a few weeks after her father's passing, after all the post-funeral service cards were sent out and the bouquets of flowers were wilting and the baskets of food were rotting, untouched on the counter. By then, the mourning period was expected to end and her mother was supposed to return to work, but instead had stayed back in her small little house, surrounded by the memory of what she lost. Elise had come home to find her away from her usual curled position on the couch, instead using the computer.

Marie Newman had a page open on Aokigahara. Elise vaguely remembered from some scrap book that her parents used to love travelling before she came along, and that they had taken a trip there. She couldn't get up the nerve to ask about it, and didn't want to dig out any old photo books when even the framed portrait of her parents on the mantel was turned to face the wall. Marie sensed her daughter's discontent and murmured a few words as she quickly shut off the monitor. "No matter the stories, it's beautiful there. It's not haunted, it's just a sad place."

A sad place; a scary place; a forest that stretched for over 13 miles and had the reputation of having one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Elise didn't know what had drawn her parents there all those years ago, but now she herself was making the journey.

But she wasn't going there to die; she was going there to find life.

A single shred of hope seemed to be on Elise's side; in her research, she found there was an upcoming search annual walk-through of the forest for authorities and volunteers to help find bodies to give them a proper burial. People seemed to be very superstitious there, with rituals of what to do with the bodies afterward even to keep the spirits content. Elise skimmed through the information, not entirely on-board with the idea of tromping through the woods with a bunch of strangers, but seeing no other option.

Bethany shifted and mumbled in her sleep, causing Elise to nearly drop her phone in panic. Steadying herself, she shut off her phone and stared into the darkness. Where was Jack now? He had a tendency to get home late, so he must not have noticed Elise's absence yet. And what would he think when he found the (literal) mess she'd left in her wake? Sweeping like a tornado across the room, not giving herself the time to think it through, Elise had ransacked the closets for a spare change of clothes and the rainy-day money that was hidden in a coffee tin. It hadn't been easy to come by, nor was it meant for a cross-continental trip, but now the wad of cash was stowed in her carry-on.

It was a necessary evil, Elise reassured herself. It had been two days since her mother had disappeared, leaving everything in its place except for her own stash of money and a depleted account. Though Elise had insisted it wasn't like her mother to run off, the authorities would have no part in her mother's rescue--they were certain she didn't even need to be rescued. She was a grown woman who left of her own accord, they told her.

But she was a broken woman who had barely left her own couch in weeks, too. When Elise went back through the history on the computer and revisited the pages on Aokigahara and flight informations, she booked her own soonest flight and was gone just as fast as her mother.

Maybe her mother just wanted to be back somewhere she'd gone with her father, somewhere the two had been happy.

But Elise was terrified that her mother didn't plan on returning, and as the plane touched down in Tokyo, she wondered about her own intentions.