Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

Field of Flowers

- Field of Flowers -

It turns out I've made it outside somehow and I'm now under a blazing sun overhead. Its strange warmth envelopes my body. Sweetly singing, birds sit nearby. There's not a single door around. I have no recollection of how I had made it here. Or how long I had been unconscious. It might have been a few hours or a few days for all I can tell. The sun above looks to be at about two or three o'clock. But it keeps no record of days. Instead, a sea of flowers swishes and brushes against me while the wind dances euphorically with them. The only thing still, is me, on my back, looking up at an infinite azure. It seems to change in intensity and hue the more I watch it, like a piece of gently shifting fabric.

I lay there for a little while longer.

Then I sit up and realize I'm alone. All around me are flowers. Not what I wanted to see. There are azalea, hydrangea, irises, some other kinds I don't recognize, herbs in between, all blooming together, an army of clowns in bright clothes. They stare at me and I stare back and a pungent aroma assaults my nose. I have a feeling azalea shouldn't be able to bloom with hydrangea in the same season. My head seizes up in severe pain.

"Shirayuki?" Barely any sound comes out.

I try again.

"Hey, Shirayuki!"

I expect her to say something from behind and startle me out of my skin, maybe telling me how horrible I look at the moment. My lip is bleeding.

But there's no one around. For a flower farm, it's impossibly abandoned and overgrown. There's not even any form of a shack or building as far as I can see. Only a tree nearby with some birds. In the distance, there are some green-ish mountains like two dimensional cardboard cut outs, and perhaps a glint of the ocean, just an abstract line of grey and blue. As the surrealism catches my breath, it dawns on me that I might actually be dead and this is some kind of afterlife scenery available for lost souls. As an eternal mockery of what I can no longer experience. If I walk towards the sea, there might be nothing but a mirage waiting.

I struggle to stand. My legs feel like they haven't been moved for years. It's as if I'm trying to heave bricks attached to the bottom of my feet. I inspect my clothing and find that everything is intact. There are no holes or wounds as far as I can tell. Yet I feel like I've been torn apart and stitched back together, or have been thrown into a laundry machine and wrung out to dry in the sun. Everything is aching. But it isn't as bad as I had thought. I could have sworn the last thing I remember was feeling the blood dripping down my body. I must have been shot somehow. But even now, the memories are fading away like chalkboard drawings. I struggle to capture them but they only disappear in the distance.

I search the surrounding vicinity for Shirayuki. At first there are no signs - no signs that she had existed at all. But finally, after a few minutes, I come across a flattened clump of flowers and large plastic frame glasses that I nearly step on. They come as a violent jolt to me, almost like finding a piece of myself in a place that I had never been to.

Then not too far away, I find a shock of black hair, spread out on the ground in between the flowers. They gaze down on her body, swarming closer to feast. I brush them all away.

She's dead.

"Oi, Shirayuki!"

Silence.

"Wake up, get a hold of yourself!"

No response.

"Hey, it's me, Naoki Maeda!"

I already knew she wouldn't reply but I tried anyway. I had to try. My voice is hoarse. How can an abstract concept be dead?

"Kozue Sato!"

But there's nothing. Nothing left. She's definitely irreversibly dead. She's unable to reply, not that she doesn't want to reply. Perhaps somewhere else, she is trying to call for my attention but I can't hear her. I can't help her.

I call her name a few more times until I slump down in exhaustion next to her and look down at her and take her hand and hold it and realize how cold it is. The sun is warm. I sit like that for a very long time. I don't know how long and I no longer care, but I don't move and wait but she doesn't move. Her face is ashen. Her eyes closed, as if she's sleeping. A broken flower herself. There's a single red circle in her chest, where her heart would've been. Under her, the grass is stained black, maybe red. At this point I can't tell what I'm seeing. If it's dream or reality, whether anything had existed in the first place. It all blends together like opening my eyes and seeing light bend through water.

She had been laughing about the chocolate bar just what could have been earlier in the day. Telling me to loosen up, live life a little. Offering some with a big grin. Bright eyes. Seventeen. She's only seventeen. She just wanted some company, some attention. I had always treated her as a ghost. What if she wasn't? What if she was real? What if she was only hiding painful secrets within her, wearing a mask and I had never paid attention to her, only brushing her off? I had never held her hand like this. I hold her small hand tighter. Her seventeen year old face is asleep. Without her glasses, she looks older, more pitiful. Like a little wounded creature. I had never taken a good look at her. She somehow looks a lot like Shizuka now. Maybe just a fragment of her. Then it also looks a lot like myself. How did I look when I was seventeen?

I lift her body, her tiny pale body, as light as feathers and cradle her in my arms.

"You're pretty small you know."

She doesn't reply of course.

"The rest of the chocolate is melting, you should wake up."

I look up at the sky and sit there with her.

"Sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland," I say. But it feels like something she would be saying. "Hey, hey Alice, wake up."

She says nothing.

"Don't fall into another dream. This dream here is enough isn't it?"

There's a cry of a bird, long and melancholic far away. It's barely audible.

Holding her in my arms, I listen for it. But it doesn't come back.

I feel nothing. Only this vast expanse within me, that open hole of nothingness. There's nothing within me. I am nothing. I look around the flower field and there's nothing. The colours, like the night sky in my dreams, part of an alien world, have nothing to do with me. And there's nothing within me. I search the sky and the field and her face. But I've lost what I can no longer retrieve. Shirayuki has gone. And with her, a part of me.