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Her name was Tsumugi Maruyama.
Suguru does not remember her very well. She had glasses, hair clipped short to her chin, and round, red cheeks. Her demeanor was as soft as her features, and she stood out just as much as her cheekbones did— which was to say, not at all.
She was much older and went to school in the next town over because their town, really a village, honestly a neighborhood, was embarrassingly small. Naturally, with a population of only enough teenagers to fill a cleaning closet, nevermind a whole school, they had to make the trip all the way over the mountains into the next town over to complete their education before repeating the whole thing again, backwards, on the way back. Rinse and repeat, six times a week, morning and afternoons.
It's no surprise, then, that she and the four whole other high schoolers would often return with fancy snacks as treat slash reward slash brain stimulation: but soon realized the untapped potential of exploiting little ankle biter grade school kids out of their pocket money with a cookie or two… and the rest is history. Mostly.
Another thing about Maruyama was that she was a suck up— the fond-of-all-children and tears-up-at-every-other-movie flavor of suck up, specifically. This was bad when dealing with children who, in fact, played just as dirty as their older peers; their methods simply skewered more underhanded. Simply throw in an act of pitifully fishing for coins in your pocket to drive the price down.
So— poor thing never quite made a profit. The opposite, actually, to no one’s surprise. It’s why she eventually put her foot down, announcing she’d stop selling to spoiled, ungrateful, horrible little brats— that is, until Suguru found her a little later that same evening and promised her to buy one full price. No swindling here, promise, cross his heart and hope to die.
She folded, a whole accordion. She told him to meet him at the Hokora near the river the next day, four in the afternoon.
Her name was Maruyama, and Suguru was supposed to trade five hundred yen with her for a wrapped Baumkuchen ( and her trust; Suguru was playing the long game, after all ), but when the hour struck and his Baumkuchen craving was not yet sated and he still had a full pocket of jingling coins, he’d marched around the Hokora in case she’d decided, for whatever reason, to engage in a game of hide and seek as extra payback for the hundred or so yen he’d personally already swindled out of her—
— and he does find her body hiding, actually, two meters down and away from where she’d stumbled off the cliff and died near the river.
Her name was Tsumugi Maruyama, and she was fifteen years old when she died.
His name is Suguru, and he found her body at six years old, drenched in the dark stench of shadows.
When they finally fetch her corpse, dragging it up the cliffside and back onto the grass, that’s when he sees . Something like ichor, or maybe tar bubbles in her throat, an inky puddle the size of a coin. Suguru watches, part horrified, part fascinated, part hypnotized, as something mimicking eyes break the surface and float there, for a long moment. Then they fix on Suguru, and his blood runs cold.
It makes a noise like his faucet does when the last of the water drains.
It sounds like his name.
It sounds like her voice.
It feels like another shadow.
Stains are hard to get rid of.
Suguru knows this from the way his mother likes to curse out dark spots on the floor in the kitchen, born from some dropped box of apple juice or wayward coffee. It’s the same way his neighbor’s resentment turns into a shadow wrapped around his head, not unlike a throbbing headache, pulsing and furious, gnashing their teeth as their furious mumbles blended together into a single voice.
Neither are fun to deal with.
His parents deal with the former. Suguru is much too small for certain chores, because he cannot square his shoulders and lean his weight into the rag, using friction to rub out the smudge into nothingness.
They cannot see the latter. They cannot catch the shadows' attention, feel its energy writhe beneath their thumb, feel its metaphorical skin give like the skin of a blueberry. They taught him how to roll balls of cookie dough between his palms, but they cannot do the same to the hazy energy of a shadow, giving shape to the undefinable, giving weight to near nothingness—
— taking sustenance from the inedible.
So it is Suguru’s job to clean those up.
Naturally, then, it is Suguru’s job to take care of this . But…
“Maruyama-san,” Suguru addresses the shadow.
It’s not quite the same this time, is it?
It is an inkblot on the grass, just as viscous and just as striking in its unblemished obsidian. It is just about Suguru’s height, give or take a centimeter— its form is fluid and difficult to understand, some shapeless thing pulled together into a convulsing mass, not unlike a half-filled water balloon. With no sharp edges— or really any edges at all— Suguru almost finds it… cute. Like some sad animal.
In that way she’s a perfect echo of her living self. Just as unassuming and quiet, unobtrusive and shy in its demeanor— all so unlike how these… things usually are. Gargling, writhing things made of misery and disgust. Well, she also gargles ( like a river ), and writhes ( like a slug ), and is made of misery and disgust ( like… the rest of those things ), but…
It was once a she , and she had a name.
“Maruyama-san,” Suguru attempts again, weaker. The shadow simply stares back at him. The gurgling in its throat is barely audible. For all he can see of shadows, he cannot understand them. It’s like speaking to an animal. ”That’s who you are, right?” he continues, anyway, “you’re… her shadow. Because she died.”
No answer.
”… I’m sorry. Are you here because of me? Is it because you know I’ve taken money from you before? I’m sorry. I don’t want the Baumkuchen anymore.”
He fumbles with his pocket, taking out the money. It doesn’t quite have palms, or even really hands, but he finds the closest thing to one it has— goopy and wet, as undefinable as the rest of it— and he presses it into its palm. It’s pitch black, cold to the touch, sticky like tar. “Here. Take it. Please. It’s okay if I don’t get the Baumkuchen… you can keep it.”
It doesn’t move, even as he peels his hand away. The coins simply sink into the darkness, and…
Nothing. It doesn’t disappear like the coins. Instead something changes in its conduct; it leans forward entirely, like a cresting wave, and its not-quite-arm reaches up, almost… expectantly. More .
Instinctively he shoves his hands into his pockets. His fingers only find the bottoms of his pockets, and he pulls them out with a sheepish smile. “Sorry.”
There’s the sound of a large hand dragging through the surface of a full bathtub, with all its indignation and aggression echoing off the hollow ceramic. Somehow, a laugh finds its way past the ache of his stomach.
A whole week after her death, Maruyama’s shadow continues to stain the shrine and its meadow.
Suguru sticks around, offering more, and then some. He learns that she likes little pieces of metal, all sorts of little knick-knacks, but her favorites are chocolate icing donuts with sprinkles, the generic combini brand, and five hundred yen coins. It’s greedy, but Suguru thinks she deserves to be, considering how much was taken from her before.
Right. She was a person before.
Human, with a soul. Just like Suguru. Just like Mama, and Papa, and like the rest of their town. Perhaps twisted, but all sorts of things metamorphosize. Caterpillars into butterflies, tadpoles into frogs, Maruyama into…
Humans into…
Anyway, who is Suguru to deny her that? It feels appropriate to give her presents. Offerings. That’s the sort of place they’re in, after all— their Hokora is older than their town, as gray as it is old, holy in its modesty. Shadows are anything but divine, but Maruyama-san isn’t like them. She’s just…
Lost. Hungry. And Suguru is simply feeding the needy.
He prays at the shrine, too, because he might as well. He prays for the proper release of Maruyama-san’s soul, and for a better allowance to offer her more coins.
One day he’s joined by a stranger. He’s a wiry old thing, made of bones and wrinkles, covered in thin and spotted skin, like a stained tablecloth. Suguru says nothing, because he was raised to be polite, but his presence is uncomfortable, and the man senses it.
“Good afternoon,” he offers. Suguru says nothing. But the man is old, with that sort of meaningless, simplistic joy that must come with surviving past a particular age, and instead of displeasure he responds with a gentle chortle. “I don’t often see kids your age around here.”
“... no,” Suguru says, tension slipping off his shoulders like water.
“Are your parents here?”
“No.”
“So you’re here by yourself.” He says it with a sort of conviction, even nodding along. Like it’s something to be proud of. Instead of saying more he reaches into a pocket and hands him a lollipop. His smile is wry and wide. “It’s not often you get an offering back at a shrine, hm?”
His name is Tatsuki Kikuchi, and he is eighty-six years old. He has no grandchildren, and is a widower— it means he’d lost his wife, he explains at Suguru’s puzzled expression.
He came occasionally, now decently frequently for her sake. He carries around candy, also for her sake, and leaves it as an offering from time to time. She had a sweet tooth, apparently, and preferred strawberry flavored. Grape, conversely, was her least favorite.
He offers both to Suguru. Suguru takes both, because he’s not picky. In return he confesses— some, not all. Not the shadows, never the shadows, but… of Maruyama. The sweets, the Baumkuchen, all the yen. He listens, with all the patience of a man his age, and at the end of it he ruffles his hair.
And so— Kikuchi becomes part of his routine. Suguru feeds Maruyama, then returns to the shrine to pray with Kikuchi, then chat with some candy.
One day Suguru clacks down on the lollipop, loud enough to make a noise, and says, “Kikuchi-san?”
“Yes, Suguru-kun?”
“Do you think she’s listening?” A pause. “Your wife. Ah…”
“Mitsuru.” He chortles, a wheezing, tea-kettle noise. “Maybe… what do you think, Suguru-kun? Is she watching over us both?”
Suguru hesitates. He looks up, between the leaves, translucent beneath the sun. They’re not too dissimilar to Kikuchi’s soul, he thinks— fragile, trembling even in a weak breeze.
“... sure. I guess.”
Kikuchi smiles at the thought, broad and wistful. The wind stills between them.
“I’d like to think so, too.”
Maruyama’s appetite grows like the nights in fall, gradual yet steady. He’s lectured for his gluttony— because why else would a second grader need so much allowance, buy so many sweets, return with so many lollipops?— but Suguru takes it with grace.
But Suguru’s bottomless patience does not reflect in his father, especially not one who has nothing close to the whole picture. For as little Suguru wants to fault him, the fact remains: for the rest of the week, you come home, right away . No detours, no distractions, no nothing. Suguru fights the urge to roll his eyes.
“Kikuchi-san will cut down on the candy for both of you, okay? It’s for your own good.”
“Okay, papa.”
It only takes two days.
Suguru is an obedient boy. He heads home right away, as he’d promised his father, but a crowd and the high pitched wails of sirens swiftly block his path. Suguru steps between legs, searching for answers, but instead—
”Suguru!” his mother calls out, spotting him between the gathering crowd, scuttling towards him like a bug and gathering him up in her arms like a bundle of old laundry. Her voice is wet, damp like a towel, uncomfortably staining his collar. He squirms and fits his chin into the crook of her neck. “Oh, Suguru. We should’ve gone and fetched you right away.”
”Sorry Mama, I’m okay,” he says, only half meaning it as he tries to lift his head above the crowd; “what’s happening?”
”He died, Suguru. I’m so sorry.”
”He?”
”Kikuchi-san.”
Unlike Maruyama-san’s accident, the cause of Kikuchi-san’s death is too strange to comprehend. They’re much too far from the forest for it to be a bear, and his injuries are much too strange to be inflicted by claws or teeth, besides. It’s as if he suffocated. Drowned .
His parents gossip about it after dinner, almost just out of earshot. Drowning? Two meters above the water? How was that even physically possible?
Suguru only half listens. He stares at the wall.
“Maruyama-san?”
The noise she makes is one of greeting, high and eager like a musical scale.
Is this the sound she used to greet Kikuchi-san, too ? he wonders.
He still has the candy. He still has the money. He fishes them out of his pockets, watching as they tumble to the ground. “Here… sorry. That’s all I have.”
Her gurgles are high, almost like a boiling teapot. He picks up a wrapped chocolate donut. “This was your favorite, right? With the pink sprinkles. You never shared this one.”
He breaks the plastic with his teeth. It tears easily, too easily, and in his haste that falls to the ground, too. “Whoops. Everyone wants a taste of the grass, huh?”
Not that she cares. She makes a bubbly noise, and slithers over, slug-like and slow. He watches as her inky goop surrounds the donut. She sort of looks like chocolate frosting herself like this, dark and opaque.
He wonders if she’ll taste the same.
He lets her have her moment. He pockets away the rest of the candy, the money. He walks around her, finding a rock to perch on, and carefully gets comfortable. She barely notices, too caught up in her own gluttony.
”I’m sorry,” he whispers past the lump in his throat, and reaches out his hands. She turns at the sound of his voice and reaches back, expectantly, but her form twitches, then stretches like taffy.
She makes a confused sound, low like the yowl of a cat. If he listens closely, or if he imagines hard enough, it almost sounds like his name.
Suguru closes his eyes. He imagines rolling up cookie dough.