Espresso Love (A Dystopian Japan Novel) #Wattys2014

A Woman Without A Uterus

- A Woman Without A Uterus -

We say nothing for a long time. There's nothing we can say. We both know there's too much to say and words would do no justice like watering a dead shriveled up plant. I simply hold her tight and her fingers dig into my clothes and skin.

I can't see her, but I know it's her. This is not an illusion, I convince myself again and again. This is not a psychological game. But it's hard to grasp on to consciousness in the dark. Eventually, the warmth and the weight of her body on mine, our limbs tangled together, fuses like melting plastic. She feels like an extension of myself and I start to lose all understanding of the situation. Where my hand is, where my head is, where my leg is. All I feel is a bleeding, sagging mass of emotion.

I can't imagine what had happened to her. Had she been in here the whole time? Perhaps since she had disappeared. Things come rushing back slowly, dripping in from a leaky tap.

What had they done to her?

I trace my fingers up to her neck and her cheek and I lift her chin and she presses her face against my chest.

"Are you okay?" I say.

She's still shaking.

"I'm sorry." My voice breaks. My tears are drawing my skin tight like dry, cracking ground. Sorry for what exactly, I'm not sure.

She says nothing.

If she would blame me and say something, it might have been better.

But she doesn't speak.

There's the sound of darkness. Like a subtle whisper that fades in and out, and surely is my imagination. But no longer could I tell what actually exists or not.

"They've been tapping, I don't know when it will come back," I say to break the quiet. "What have they done to you?"

"Have you ever skipped a rock over a pond?" Her voice is barely a whisper. She doesn't move. I wonder why that is something worth mentioning. Surely everyone has had done that before.

She doesn't bother to wait for my reply. "No matter how many times it skips, it'll sink and disappear beneath the surface and become nothing. Along with all the innumerable amount of rocks, eroded into firm little round shapes, blending with the riverbed dirt."

"Even if you sink, you're not nothing. I know you." I say.

"You don't know me," she says.

I shake my head with as much conviction as I can, rocking her against me. "I know you, Shizuka Kaneko. I know you. I've known you for many years. I remember. I know you. I know you now." But it all sounds frail, like the fantasies of a small child.

She exhales as if in scorning laughter. "You. You don't know what they can do yet. You'll have your turn."

I squeeze her tighter against me. Her body is limp and in complete surrender such that I can't tell if I'm only holding a corpse. "Do you remember anything?"

My question hangs invisible on my breath. It doesn't travel through the Stygian ink.

Then she says: "It's all like a grainy film now. Something far away. About someone else. If it had been any longer, I would've lost it all, completely. I wouldn't know your name. But yes I remember still, at the moment. For now."

I don't speak yet.

"I had held on to it for so long. I fought for so long. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to hold on to something you could never attain again and would never see again? How much it hurts to feel your heart splitting open, two sides of your soul in opposition? And both gets torn apart. How much it hurts to -" she's crying. I hold her. "see you, who I would never see again, killed over and over again. It became reality. You were dead over and over again in my mind. I watched it over and over. But I tried to hold on. I tried to tell myself it's only an illusion, but eventually, you give in. You can't keep it up for long, not when there's no other possibility. If there's no other possibility to confirm, it is the only reality you come to know. Once you're here, there's no getting out."