Volume 2 · She Goes Looking
Written by Luke Rhodes · Translated by Haruka Aoki · Art by Kagumi Nishijima
Draft (Final)
bleedingcherub.neocities.org
The Hollow Within
2022 · Yokosuka, Kanagawa
There were two funerals in two weeks.
The first one Riko arranged with help from the hospital liaison — the same woman who had stood at the desk with her the night Baba died, who had said, I hate to ask at a time like this, and then asked, and had been kind about all of it. She knew what she was doing. The second funeral Riko arranged mostly alone, working from what she had learned the first time. She was seventeen years old. She did not think about that part until much later.
Saki came to both.
She was dressed correctly. She said what needed to be said. She stood beside Riko at the incense and did not disappear, and Riko watched her across the smoke and thought: she is trying. She is trying in the only way she knows how. And then the funerals were over and Saki tried for two more days and then she was gone again, out the door with a bag and nowhere named, and Riko stood in the entry hall and listened to the house settle around her.
Very quiet. Very still.
There were papers on the table she had not finished reading — estate documents, a letter from a lawyer explaining that Baba and Jiji's estate passed first to Saki as the legal adult daughter, and would transfer in full to Riko upon reaching the age of majority. Eighteen. She filed the papers in the folder she had started for this kind of thing. She started to put the folder on the shelf then paused for a moment.
She stood there for with her hand on the shelf.
They had arranged it this way on purpose. They had known how their daughter was. They had known Riko, and trusted Riko, and had chosen — quietly, legally, in writing, witnessed and filed — to make sure everything eventually came to her. She had always known she was their favorite. She had known it the way you know the things that are true before anyone says them. But there was something about seeing it in formal language that made it land differently.
She put the folder on the shelf. She made tea. She did not use the good teapot because that still felt wrong.
Jiji's lamp was still in the small room — the crossword lamp Baba had always said was too dim for reading. Riko had not moved it. She turned it on some evenings and sat in the dim circle of it the way he had, not reading, not doing anything, just sitting. It helped. She did not ask herself why.
Three weeks after the funerals, Saki came back.
Her eyes were wrong in a way Riko had learned to recognize. Not glazed — Saki was never sloppy about it, not at first — but removed. Present but not quite here, like a signal coming in from a long way off. She hugged Riko at the door and said she was sorry, and she meant it, in whatever capacity she was currently capable of meaning things.
She stayed.
The first day was manageable. It seemed like this could work.
The second day she was gone for four hours and came back further away than she'd left.
Riko cooked. Riko cleaned. Riko picked up the phone when the lawyer called again with a question about the estate and wrote down what he said and said “yes, I understand.” Saki sat at Jiji's table with a glass of water she didn't drink and looked at the garden.
The third day was worse. Riko watched her from the kitchen doorway and understood that whatever Saki had come back to do — repair something, try again, be present for once — she had already lost the thread of it. The thing that had been her mother was somewhere further away than Riko could reach, and falling further.
On the fourth day at 2 in the morning Riko found her on the cold linoleum floor of the bathroom and called for an ambulance.
She carried two funerals on shoulders too thin,
and learned where the grief ends and living begins
The First Sighting
2022 · Yokosuka, Kanagawa
The hospital had not changed its smell since the weeks before. It still smelled of clean working against something underneath it, a sterile glaze over an unmovable reality. But the first time Riko had come here, she had been here for Baba. That visit had given her practice. This night gave her none. Things felt the same but still different.
She was learning, slowly, that hospitals ran on their own time. They existed in a pocket of time that was slightly separate from the rest of the world. You came in from the street and the light changed and the air changed, and the pace of everything shifted into something that moved according to its own logic. Tonight, the logic felt entirely hollow.
She had come straight from the house after the ambulance left, her mother's light jacket thrown across her lap as she sat. She hadn't changed out of her pajamas, just threw on a coat, because there hadn't been time. She had stopped being embarrassed about her cloths in hospitals weeks ago, when she showed up with an oversized tee shirt. Nobody looked at her here. Or rather: people looked and then looked through, the way you process someone who is not your reason for being in a room.
She had signed the forms at the desk. Saki was behind the double doors, a social worker already mentioning names of residential care facilities forty minutes outside the city. A nurse had said someone would come to update her shortly, which was the kind of information that told you nothing except that you were going to be waiting for a while. She found a blue plastic chair amongst the sea of blue plastic chairs and sat down.
She sat with the jacket on her knees looked at nothing and waited. At this hour, the waiting area wasn't busy — occasional medical staff in colorful scrubs moving through. It was well past visiting hours so mostly just staff. She watched them without watching. She had gotten good at this too.
Then she noticed the girl across the room. Riko watched her the way you notice someone who has gone very still in a place where most things are moving. She was sitting sideways in one of the blue chairs with one leg tucked up, a sketchbook open across her knee, working in pencil with the focused quiet of someone who is entirely somewhere else. Not looking up, not looking around — just drawing, with the concentration of someone for whom drawing was not a creative act but a functional one, the thing you did because it was the only way you knew how to be somewhere without leaving.
She had round glasses, and her hair was pulled back in two tight braids, a small red hair tie at the end of each. There was a smudge of graphite on the side of her hand. Riko watched her for a moment — not long, just a moment — because there was nowhere else to look that didn't cost something.
A nurse came from the far end of the corridor. Riko watched her approach and understood from the pace of it that she was not heading in Riko's direction. She turned away. When she looked back, the girl with the sketchbook had looked up. Just for a second — maybe two. She was looking across the room, past the fluorescent glare, her eyes catching the light. For a brief moment, her gaze passed right over Riko and the jacket in her lap. She wasn't looking at Riko with recognition; she was looking through, processing the world from a deep interior distance.
Then she looked back down at the sketchbook, her hand moving again, graphite tracing lines on paper.
A nurse came for the far end of the corridor, again. This time she came up to Riko and said, “Your Mother has recovered.” That was the word they choose to use, Recovered.
Riko nodded and signed the forms and arranged for what came next, which was a different set of phone calls and a different set of forms and a residential care facility the social worker recommended, forty minutes outside the city, in a quiet place with a garden.
She took Saki there two days later in a taxi they'd booked the night before.
Saki held her hand in the back seat and said, "I know I keep saying I'm sorry…"
Riko said, "I know."
Saki looked out the window for a while. She was somewhere between doses, in the thin, scraped-clean place where she sometimes said true things. Then, to the glass, not to Riko: "There was a woman at the bar, back then. Shimizu-san." Her voice was thin. "She warned me about a man — told me plain, he won't stay. I didn't listen." A long pause. "She was the best friend I had, and I don't get to call her a friend anymore. Not after what I did with what she gave me."
Riko didn't know the name. She thought it was one of the roads Saki went down when she was like this — the ones that didn't lead anywhere, that closed over by morning. She filed it with the rest and watched the meter climb.
"What did you do?" Riko asked.
But Saki had already moved on, or moved off, her forehead against the window, and she didn't answer.
They reached the facility.
Saki turned to go in. Riko held her hand up to say bye, then took the taxi home.
She sat at Jiji's table under the dim lamp for a long time, that night.
Then she called Hasegawa-san.
He told her to come in Thursday. She came in Thursday.
The locker room was the same. The harness was the same. The keg settled onto her back as it always had — slightly wrong at first, then finding its place. She buckled the straps and checked the hose and went out into the noise.
Moriko was coming out of the stockroom when Riko passed. She looked at Riko once — not long, not with anything that needed a name. Just the steady look of someone who has seen the shape of what another person has been carrying and is not going to pretend otherwise. She did not say anything. She nodded and went back to her route.
It was all she had.
Riko went to her section. The crowd was loud and the game was close and nobody looked at her for longer than it took to press money into her hand and take their cup. The keg was full and heavy on her back and she had been on this route long enough to know it by feel.
She kept going.
The hollow was there — it had taken up residence somewhere under her sternum, a hollow with weight to it, and she understood she would simply be learning to carry it from here on. But the keg was on her back and the cups were in her hands and the crowd was alive around her, and she was here, and she was still here, and for now that was enough.
She strapped on the keg and took heart from the din,
and went back to work carrying the hollow within.
The Cedar Box
2022 · Yokosuka, Kanagawa
The house took longer to clear than she had expected.
Not because there was so much in it — there wasn't. Baba and Jiji had owned what they used and used what they owned. They had grown up understanding that objects do not last and that what matters is not what you have but what you know how to do. There was furniture, modest and well-maintained. There was a kitchen that was organized with military precision. There were clothes, folded and labeled in the drawer with Baba's handwriting, which Riko found she could only look at for a few seconds at a time.
She was not in a hurry. The property was theirs, passed down, so there was no landlord's deadline ticking down the days. She came after school and on weekends, going through things slowly, which was the only way she knew how to handle a house that had held so much of them.
She had developed a system. Things that were practical — clothes, kitchen tools, Jiji's dictionary — she kept or boxed for donation with the same deliberateness Baba would have applied. Things that were only theirs — the photograph on the shelf, the crossword book with Jiji's handwriting in the margins — she set in a separate pile that she was not ready to make decisions about yet. Things that were clearly finished — old bills, expired coupons, the accumulated paper of a long life — she put in the bin.
She found the cedar box in the back of the upper shelf of the wardrobe, behind a folded blanket.
It was small — about the size of a New Years money envelope, but wider, built to hold one thing rather than many. The wood had a faint sweet smell that she associated with Baba. It had a small brass clasp. It was not locked.
She opened it.
Inside: an envelope. Nothing else.
She took out the envelope. It was not sealed. She turned it over.
In Baba's handwriting, on the front: Saki.
She stood with the envelope for a moment before she opened it. She was not sure why she paused—the writing was clear, the meaning was not ambiguous. But there was something in holding it that felt like a threshold, and she had learned to be aware of thresholds.
She opened it.
Inside was just a photograph. The photograph was old — flat in the colors, a camera phone from ten or more years back. A man. Medium height, dark hair, a dark jacket, something in his bearing that was slightly overdressed for wherever he was, like he had chosen his clothes for a room with more people watching.
He was standing with two children—a boy whose head barely reached the man's hip, and a girl who was even smaller, maybe two or three. The boy stood a half step in front of the girl, his shoulder turned toward the camera and his body angled so that she was behind it, the way you stand when you have decided something is yours to keep between the world and the small thing at your back. He was looking straight into the lens with a steady, quiet intensity. The girl, half tucked behind him, was not looking at anything in particular.
The man was looking at the camera with an expression that was not quite smiling.
She turned the photograph over. Written on the back: His other family.
She turned it back over.
She looked at it for a long time—long enough that the details stopped being details and became a kind of general knowledge, until you stopped seeing its parts and start just seeing it. She looked longest at the boy. She could not have said why. Something in how he stood. An old photograph. Baba had kept it in a cedar box at the back of a wardrobe for long enough that the box smelled like age.
Why didn't she give this to my mom? Riko thought.
She looked at the faded ink of her mother's name on the front. Saki. Baba had written it down, intending to hand it over, and then she had looked at her daughter and realized exactly how much the blow would destroy her. She had chosen protection over exposure. She had boxed the secret away to save Saki from the bleeding edge of it, tucking it into the dark until the memory dissolved and the box was forgotten.
Baba had never intended for Riko to stand here in an empty house, holding this envelope. She hadn't left it as a clue or a legacy. It was just a ghost left behind in a closet, waiting for the one person who could actually carry the weight of it to pull it back into the light.
His other family.
She knew that she had a father. She had known this in the abstract way of someone who knows a fact without it meaning very much — a category, a slot in a form, not a person. Her mother had not talked about him. Baba had not talked about him. Jiji had not talked about him. She had not asked in any serious way, because asking had seemed, somehow, like it would open something that nobody wanted opened, and she had long ago decided that she could live without the information if the information was going to cost more than it gave.
Now she had his face.
She looked at it. She thought: this is what a face looks like. Medium height. Dark hair. A jacket. A boy and a girl.
She thought: they don't know about me either.
She did not know how she knew this. But she did.
She put the photograph back in the envelope. She put the envelope back in the cedar box. She closed the clasp.
She stood in the quiet house with the box in her hands. The crossword book was on the floor. Jiji's handwriting was in the margins. The kitchen smelled like Baba's kitchen even without Baba in it, which struck her as one of the stranger things about houses — the way they held the residue of people long after the people had gone.
She put the cedar box in the pile that she was not ready to make decisions about yet.
Then she went back to clearing the shelf.
In a cedar box, quiet, a secret lay sleeping,
Left by the one who had no gift for the keeping.
Winter
2022 · Yokosuka , Kanagawa
The hairbrush is her mother's.
She knows it by weight. By the curve of the handle, worn smooth before she was old enough to hold it. It is dark wood, or was once—the varnish gone soft in patches from use, from her mom's hand before it was hers. She found it in the bathroom when she was ten. She did not ask whose it was. She knew.
She brushes her hair with it every morning. Forty strokes, left side; forty strokes, right side; then the part—slightly off-center, as her mother wore it in the single photograph Gumi keeps in the back of her notebook. Then the braids—gathered from just behind each ear, two of them, worked down and forward as her mother taught her once and she has not forgotten. She does not start them at the crown. She decided this deliberately. Her mother wore her hair down. The braids are a conscious choice she made from a young age: something to distinguish her in her father's eyes. Something to contrast with what he longs for—his dead wife, Gumi's mother, Haruka. Everything about how Gumi looks is her mother—everything but the braids.
She puts the red hair ties in last. One at the end of each braid.
The only color she wears. She has been asked about it in two school interviews now and has given two different answers, neither of which is true. The true answer is simpler than anything she could say in an interview: everything else she puts on in the morning—the brush strokes, the part, the braids themselves, the face she did not choose—is in service of something or someone. Her father. Her mother's memory. The careful negotiation between them that she has been making since she was old enough to understand it. The hair ties are hers. Just hers. The one thing she puts on each morning that belongs to no one else.
She decided this at ten and has never said it out loud.
Her dad is asleep when she leaves.
He sleeps late on Tuesdays—or he tries to. She can hear from the rhythm of it that he hasn't found real sleep yet, the shallow cycling he does when the nights are bad. She stands in the hallway for a moment and listens, then goes to the kitchen and leaves water and his medicine on the counter where he'll see them. Then she leaves for her day.
The walk to the train is twenty minutes.
She uses them like she uses most of them—drawing in her head, laying out panels on the grid of the sidewalk, thinking in rectangles. She has a chapter that isn't working. Not the deadline kind of not-working, but the interior kind, where you know the shape of the thing but keep cutting your hand on it every time you try to pick it up. The chapter is about the gray cat. The one that has lived in her alley so long she has stopped noticing him like you stop noticing anything that has always been there. She keeps drawing him wrong—keeps making him too present, too resolved on the page, when the whole point of him is that he resists that. He is just there. Always. And she cannot figure out how to draw just-there without turning it into something else entirely.
She is still thinking about it when she gets on the train. She is still thinking about it when she gets off.
The classroom studio is on the fourth floor. She sits at her table and works on a different page for two hours—an establishing panel she keeps getting wrong. She still can’t get it right. She puts the pencil down. Leaving, she stops at the window and looks at the street below: the shapes of people moving, the gaps between them, the places where no one is standing. She looks at the empty places for a long time.
She does not yet know what she is seeing.
She takes the train back.
Her phone buzzes against her leg one stop from home.
She almost doesn't look. Her hand still wants the pencil, not the screen, still half inside the chapter that won't come. Then she looks.
The neighbor. She reads it once. She reads it again, because the words won't line up the first time. A loud sound. From your apartment.
The train doors open. She is already through them.
She doesn't run. Running is for people who don't know yet. She walks fast. There is a difference, and her body understands it before she does—the hand that knows a line before the pencil does knows this, too. Two turns off the main street. Then a third.
The front door is unlocked.
Inside, the smell hits first. A broken whiskey bottle lies in a pool of dark amber on the kitchen floor. Next to it is her dad. He looks as if he was reaching for the counter when he fell.
Drinking again.
He's breathing. She makes herself confirm it before anything else. His lips keep working at something, and whatever it is, it never arrives.
She knows what she has to do. She dials the emergency number pinned to the refrigerator door with a magnet. As it rings, she sweeps the broken glass aside with the edge of her shoe and kneels beside him, placing her hand on his shoulder.
The moment he registers the warmth of her touch, his eyes open. They fill with tears as he looks at her. It takes everything she has not to cry herself. It’s the look he gives her only when he sees someone else.
"HARUKA!" he yells. "Haruka, you've come back! I missed you so much!"
"I'm here," Gumi says quietly.
A voice from the phone snaps her back. "Hello? Hello, is anyone there?"
"Yes," Gumi says.
As she settles onto the floor beside him, one of her braids falls over her shoulder. His eyes lock onto the red hair ties.
"You aren't her! You're a liar!" he screams.
His cold hand shoves her back with a sudden, violent strength—the kind of strength he only finds in moments like this. He collapses back onto the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.
"Hello? Are you alright?" the voice on the phone asks.
"Yeah. It's my dad. Nishijima Kenji."
"I understand. Sending an ambulance now."
The back of the ambulance is warmer than the street. That’s the first thing, and she hates that she notices it—that her body keeps its small, stupid records even now, with her dad strapped to the board and a stranger's gloved hands on his chest.
Someone asks questions. She answers them automatically. Name. Age. What he drank. When she found him. The paramedic writes it on a tablet without looking up. That’s better. A look is something she’d have to hold, and she has nothing left to hold it with.
Out the narrow rear window, the town blurs past in the dark—the same town that went by an hour ago from the train, when she was still a person with a chapter that wouldn't come.
She looks down at her hands. Graphite smudges the edge of her palm from the morning, from before. Everything else has shattered, but the graphite is still there.
Then the double doors swing open into cold fluorescent light and that sharp, antiseptic smell a home never has. A vinyl chair in the corner. The long, heavy shape of a night she will have to survive one hour at a time.
Gumi sits down, reaches into her bag, and pulls out her sketchbook. It's the only way she knows how to wait.
Across the waiting room, a girl sits with a jacket across her lap—someone else's, by the look of it. She is younger. Her hair is in two low pigtails with an orange bow at the end of each, the color sharp even under the fluorescent light. She sits the way some people sit in hospitals: like the building is a temporary condition, like she is already partly somewhere else.
Gumi does not look up from the page. She doesn't need to. She takes in the whole of it in the peripheral way she takes in most things—quietly, completely, without announcing it. Her hand keeps moving.
Without deciding to, she draws the beginning of a figure—just the outline, the stillness of someone waiting, the blunt line of bangs, two pigtails low at each side. She sits with it for a moment. Then she draws the bows at the ends. In pencil, which has no way of knowing they are orange.
It won't be until much later that she understands what she is seeing.
The doctor finds her in the waiting room sometime after three. He uses words Gumi has learned not to fear over the years—the vocabulary of manageable things, of things that can be monitored and adjusted. She listens to all of it. She asks the two questions she always asks. He says they will keep him overnight, and that she can come back late tomorrow to take him home.
She thanks him.
She takes the train home.
The cat is at the gate. Waiting. He does it the way he does everything—on purpose.
She unlocks the gate.
He comes in without being told.
She sits on the step and he sits beside her, not touching. Close is his whole vocabulary. She opens the sketchbook to the hallway page. The figure. The bows she couldn't make orange.
She turns to the chapter she can't crack. The gray one. She looks at what she's drawn—the cat, rendered carefully, taking up his place in the frame. Too much. All wrong. She has been trying to draw the thing itself when the thing itself is exactly what resists being drawn.
She thinks back to the window earlier. The street. The gaps between people.
The empty places.
She picks up the pen.
She draws the space where he isn't. The outline of his absence. The shape of the air around him.
She sits back and looks at it.
That is it. That is the whole of it. She has known it somewhere for a long time and has kept drawing over the top of it.
He sits beside her and does not move and does not require anything, and she turns the page.
She carried the whole of the living and dead,
And still found her own color in red.
She found them the way she found most things that mattered — by accident, at the edge of something else.
It was late autumn. The stadium work had dried up with the season, and Riko spent her Saturdays differently now: no uniform, no heavy keg strapped to her back, no dispensing draft beer into plastic cups while counting steps against the cold. She was supposed to be studying for her exam next week. She was not studying.
Instead, she sat at a corner table in the student common room, a textbook open and completely unread. A girl from her class had stepped out to grab a drink down the hall, leaving her laptop open on a nearby table. A playlist was still running, the volume low but distinct in the quiet room.
The music moved through the space like morning fog. Riko had ignored the first few tracks, letting the generic pop drift over her without registering a single note.
Then a new song started.
It began with a heavy, isolated piano arpeggio — a cascading sequence of notes that felt instantly darker, weightier, and more deliberate than anything before it. The piano began building on itself, looping and layering with a haunting momentum that physically changed the atmosphere of the room, stripping away the sterile chill of the fluorescent lights. The music swelled, rushing toward a chorus that caught Riko completely by the ear.
On her desk, her phone screen lit up. The passive display had already picked up the track:
Flicker — Bleeding Cherub.
She stared at the name as the heavy arpeggios surged through the quiet common room, transfixed until her classmate returned, snapped the laptop shut, and broke the spell.
On the train ride home, the melody still stubbornly stuck in her head, Riko pulled out her phone. She opened Spotify and pulled up their discography, the glare of the screen reflecting softly against the dark train window.
Nine studio albums in total — a visual timeline spanning years of evolution.
She started with the oldest: Despair. The cover was a dark, suffocating forest scene cast in a sickly pale-green light, shadowed figures moving through the brush like ghosts. It felt raw, underground, and unpolished.
She tapped the second album, Grey. The aesthetic had completely broken away. It wasn't a photograph at all, but a cold, slate-gray interface laced with strings of binary code and a stark command prompt cursor blinking past a single word: >Grey.
Then she hit the third album, Whispers in the Dark, and her thumb hovered over the glass. The entire world of the band had shifted.
The cover featured a pale-skinned girl with long, midnight-black hair, dressed in an intricate Victorian gown before a towering Gothic cathedral under a full moon.
As Riko scrolled through the middle discography — Ghosts of the Past, Never Enough, Cemetery, and Eerie Bloom — that same dark-haired girl remained the anchor. Each album pushed her through a distinct cycle of shadow and isolation, her eyes shifting from electric blue to amber, framed by bat-winged collars, throne rooms, and bleeding-ink tears. Riko recognized Ghosts of the Past instantly: it was the exact artwork from the concert t-shirt Hasegawa-san had gifted her at the stadium.
Then came Winter. The warmth of the earlier throne room was gone. The girl lay in an open stone coffin shot from directly above, snow banking the stone on every side, her violet eyes staring upward in cold exhaustion beneath a crown of black roses.
Finally, she reached the newest release: Feels So Good.
This one broke the cold entirely. The girl stood in the moonlit courtyard of an old temple, paper lanterns burning low along the path. She had grown two long black curves of horns from her hair, red roses tucked at their base. Her eyes were a bright, knowing blue, one cheek marked with the familiar dark tear, caught mid-gesture as if saying something she knew was trouble.
Nine covers. A journey from raw, shadowed woods, to sterile digital isolation, to a sprawling Gothic universe — and, at the far edge of it, a girl laid to rest in the snow who had eventually stopped surviving the dark and started living in it.
Riko looked down at the pale face on her screen, isolated from the crowd of commuting strangers by the hum of the tracks, wondering who had built this world.
Whoever had drawn these understood something about being a woman who felt things in the dark. Not performing the feeling. Not decorating it. Just holding it steady on the page and saying: Here. This too.
Nine albums. One artist whose name she did not know.
She pressed play on "Flicker" again, letting her headphones seal out the world. The heavy piano arpeggios filled her ears, rising and falling like waves, building up a sudden, restless tide inside her chest as the lyrics scrolled across her screen:
A flicker in the candlelight,
A sudden spark in darkest night
A fragile bloom, in winter's frost,
A feeling I had long since lost
She listened to the rest of Eerie Bloom. Then she listened backward, all the way to the cathedral and the solitary figure at the threshold, facing inward.
Baba would have hated this one. She would have listened to it twice to be sure.
Riko kept going. She kept the album art open on her phone — pulling it up between classes, on the train, and right before sleep. She was doing what she always did when something landed in her chest and refused to leave: waiting for it to tell her what it was.
It took a week before she understood.
She watched those hands move through the grief of the night,
And followed them home by the art they would write.
The Alley
2022 · Yokohama
The cats were there first.
Three of them. One gray, one striped, one a color Riko couldn't name in the dark — brown, or the idea of brown. They were spread across the mouth of the alley like they'd measured it out: gray in front, striped four feet back, the third one up on a crate where it could see everything and be reached by nothing.
Riko had not meant to end up here. She'd been walking — the walking she did in the evenings when the house was too quiet and the city was the right temperature and there was nowhere she had to be. Two turns off the main street, then a third. She stopped because she always stopped for cats. It had never once been a decision.
She crouched. The gray one looked at her and kept looking.
"Hello," she said.
The gray one did not move.
"I won't push it."
Footsteps behind her. Not passing-through footsteps — slowing ones, someone with a reason to slow down here. She looked over her shoulder.
The woman with the sketchbook.
Round glasses. Two low braids, small red hair ties. Riko had seen her for maybe four seconds in a hospital waiting room and had apparently kept all of her — the glasses, the braids, the graphite on the side of the hand. She had a bag over one shoulder. She was looking at the cats like she was counting them too.
"You're here late," the woman said. Not an accusation. An observation.
"So are you."
The woman crouched a foot away, same angle to the cats. The gray one stood, took two steps toward her, and sat back down.
"That gray one," the woman said. "He decides."
"Decides what?"
"Whether you're allowed."
Riko looked at the cat. The cat looked back and didn't blink.
"He was here the night I found this alley," the woman said. "Already here. I think he's always been here and will be after we're all gone."
"That sounds about right for a cat," Riko said.
Something moved at the corner of the woman's mouth and was gone.
"Hospital," the woman said.
Riko looked at her.
"I saw you. In the waiting room."
"I saw you. You were drawing."
"I always draw. It's the only way I know how to wait."
Riko had her own ways. Going still. Going so present in a room that it stopped asking anything of her. It had never occurred to her to keep a record of it.
"Your father?" Riko said.
The woman was quiet a moment. "He collapsed at home. I rode with him."
Riko nodded. Eight words. She knew what a whole night weighed when someone packed it into eight words.
"My mom," she said.
Then, because the woman had gone first, and because the cat was still watching:
"I found her in the bathroom at two in the morning."
She had not said that out loud to anyone who wasn't holding a clipboard.
The woman turned and looked at her. Not pity — Riko could spot pity at thirty meters and had a whole route worked out around it. This was the other thing. This was: I know which drawer that goes in. I keep something in mine.
"I'm sorry," the woman said.
"Me too. For yours."
The gray cat walked three steps forward and sat down between them. He did not touch either of them. He sat exactly in the middle and looked at neither, which settled it.
They stayed there a while.
"I'm Gumi," the woman said.
"Riko."
Neither of them said anything else. The cats rearranged themselves — striped one closer now, the third still up on its crate. At the end of the alley the city did its ordinary business: traffic, a bicycle, someone on a phone half a block away. The gray cat closed his eyes.
"Is there somewhere to be?" Gumi asked.
"Not really."
"Good," Gumi said, and opened the sketchbook.
Two strangers, one alley, one cat in between,
who each knew the weight of the things left unseen.
The Concert
2022 · Shimokitazawa, Tokyo
She bought the ticket at a combini kiosk on a Tuesday, during lunch, without telling anyone. The show was on a Saturday. She did not know what she expected. She only knew that the album covers had started something in her that listening to the music alone could not finish.
She needed to see where the art came from.
The venue was small — a live house in Shimokitazawa, low ceiling and dark wood, the kind of room where sound collected in the corners and didn't leave. She arrived early. She stood near the back, which she preferred, which gave her the whole room to watch.
The crowd filled in slowly. Mostly women, she noticed. Women in Gothic lace, women in band tees with the sleeves cut off, women who looked like they had come here from somewhere else entirely and did not wish to go back. A few men, standing very still, as people do when they know they are guests at someone else's thing.
Riko had worn her dark coat. Her hands were in her pockets. She was, as she usually was, still.
The lights dropped.
There was no announcement. They simply appeared — four of them, taking their positions like people who had done this enough times that the walk to the stage was unremarkable, just the passage from one room to another.
The Guitarist was short and curvy, her hair the blue-black of deep water, her expression neutral like someone who had chosen neutral. Two red hair ties at each end of her twin braids. She stood with her instrument as though the instrument were furniture, as though playing were not something she did but something she was.
Riko's breath stopped.
She knew those hands.
She had not been able to hold the memory clearly since the hospital. She had carried it in pieces — the sound of a pencil across paper, the curve of someone's bent head, the sense of being witnessed from a distance, lightly, the way light witnesses things. She had not been able to put a face to it. She had not seen a face.
But she knew those hands. The way they settled. The way they were never still but always quiet.
The music started.
Riko didn't move. She stood in the dark of the back of the room while Bleeding Cherub played, and the sound was larger than she had understood from headphones — not louder, larger, occupying the air differently, with weight and pressure and an insistence on being heard from the inside out.
The room stopped being a hundred people and became one thing.
Baba would have liked this.
She had stopped correcting the tense.
She watched the Guitarist. She cataloged without meaning to: the red hair ties, the round glasses that caught the light at intervals, the deliberate economy of her movement, how her eyes went somewhere internal during the instrumental passages, as though she was not here at all but somewhere private, somewhere worth the concentration.
An artist at work. That was what she was watching. Someone who had turned a stage into a studio, had turned a crowd into a reason, not a distraction.
Between songs, the vocalist said something into the mic that made the crowd laugh. Riko did not hear it. She was looking at the Guitarist, who had not laughed, who was looking at the strings of her guitar with the attention of someone who found something there worth examining.
There was a woman at the edge of the stage — not a band member, not crew, just standing there with her arms folded and her face calm, watching with a quality of attention Riko recognized: someone for whom this show was neither performance nor entertainment but proof of something. The woman was Japanese. She looked like she had arrived from an earlier era and had not bothered to update. She did not look like anyone's mother. She looked like her own complete thing.
The set lasted fifty minutes.
At the end, the Guitarist bowed — a small, formal bow, the red hair ties and her braids moving with the motion — and Riko found herself pressing forward through the crowd without deciding to, not far, just three steps, four, until she could see the stage clearly enough.
The band was already moving off. The Guitarist was the last to leave. She picked up her case, settled it against her shoulder, and walked toward the wing, and in the moment before she passed from sight she adjusted her glasses with two fingers and looked briefly, briefly, over the crowd.
Not at Riko. At nothing.
She was gone.
Riko stood in the emptying room. The house lights came up. Around her, people peeled toward the bar, toward the door, toward each other. She stayed where she was.
She had come to find where the art came from.
She had found more than that. She just couldn't say yet what more meant.
She followed no bloodline, no name and no call —
She followed the artist, and found them all.