The Girl from the Well

There is terrible contorting in the way the figure he sees moves. It does not crawl. It does not speak. There is only a dreadful, singular purpose in the way its fingers and feet scuttle closer, spread from its body like a human spider, though I am neither human nor spider.

The Stained Shirt Man soon realizes the futility and sinks back to the ground. “Was it the girl?” he asks then, and in his piggish eyes, dreadful realization seeps through. “Was it the girl? I didn’t mean to…I never—I swear I won’t do it again, I swear! I won’t do it again!”

He is right. He will never do this again.

“Please,” he croaks, lifting his hands as if they could shield him, and whether he is asking for mercy or wishes to be killed quicker, I do not know. “Please please please pleasepleasepleaseplease.”

Something gurgles one last time, and it is above him. He looks up.

This is how the Stained Shirt Man now sees me.

He sees a woman on the ceiling.

Her gray feet are bare, settled against the beams.

She hangs down.

Her chin is jutted out, her head twisted to the side in a way that the only thing certain is her broken neck.

She wears a loose, white kimono spattered in mud and blood.

Her hair floats down, drifting past her face like a thinly veiled curtain, but this does not protect him from the

sight

of her eyes.

There are no whites in her eyes; they are an impenetrable, dilated black.

Her skin is a mottled patchwork of abuse and bone, some of it stripped from the edges of her mouth. And yet her mouth is hollow, curved into a perpetual scream, jaws too wide to be alive.

For a long moment we stare at each other—he, another girl’s murderer, and I, another man’s victim. Then my mouth widens further, and I

de

tach

myself from the ceiling to lunge, my unblinking eyes boring into his panicked, screaming face.

? ? ?

Some time later, the other girl comes to stand by my side. Silently, she holds out her arms, knowing what comes next. The braid around her wrist dissolves. At the same time, the rope on the dead man’s arm shatters like it was made of glass.

She is free. She is smiling at me with her gap-toothed grin. When the dead are young and have once known love, they bring no malice. Something glows inside her, something that flares brighter and brighter until her features and form are swallowed up, obscured by that blessed warmth.

Yearly festivals of chochin were celebrated in my youth, paper lanterns lit to honor the dead during older, younger times. In dimmer recollections I remember grabbing at those delicate, fire-lit paper lanterns and the excitement that coursed through me as I held them aloft. I remember running along the riverbanks, watching dozens of chochin afloat on the water, bobbing and waving at me as I struggled to keep pace, until they drifted off into larger rivers, into places where I could not follow.

I remember straining to see the lanterns floating away, growing smaller until darkness enveloped the last. I imagine them in my memory like tiny fireflies hovering over the river’s surface, ready to find their way into the world. Even then I found the word fitting, soothing.

Fireflies.

Fire

flies.

Fire, fly.

I remember my mother’s voice, warm and vibrant before the sickness crept inside her. I remember her telling me how chochin bear the souls of those who have passed away. It is why we light these representations of their essences, she said, and float them in rivers—to allow the waters to return them to the world of the dead, where they belong.