Prelude
“Huh? Oh, it’s just you. Mom’s still… Huh? A message? How should I know? Why don’t you just tell her yourself?”
“Useless.” She heard him click his tongue at her.
“What did you say?” Minori pulled down hard on the string of her parka, making the hood pucker up.
“Bernie!” said the voice on the other end of the phone. The hip method of communication shared by the older-sister-and-younger-brother duo came back to her. Say it ain’t so, Bernie! When he urgently yelled those words in the past, it had always made her laugh, but now…
“If you need something, you could just call Mom’s cell,” she told him.
“I tried, but I couldn’t get through!” The disgruntled tone of her brother’s voice only made her feel like retorting more sharply. She frowned, even though he couldn’t see it over the phone.
“I’m cold over here, you dolt! I had to come all the way out to the hall just to talk on the phone with the likes of you! You’re a nuisance!”
“Then use a cordless!”
“A core-des?!”
“You don’t know what a cordless phone is?!”
“I don’t know where it went!”
It actually was cold. She had pulled off her socks while under the heated table, and now she was barefoot. In addition, the phone was set up near the entryway, in a wood-floored hallway that felt below freezing. Even though she was indoors, her breath was terrifyingly white.
“Then how should I know, ugly?!” the voice on the other end of the phone wailed back at her. “You idiot,” her little brother added as she wrapped the string of her parka tighter around her freezing hand. The hood along her back crumpled into even more of a mess.
“Next time you come home, I’m actually going to kill y—oh. I think that’s Mom?”
The jingle of keys echoed loudly from the entrance, and her mother came in, wearing a coat and carrying a shopping bag in one hand. Minori thrust out the phone and just said, “It’s Midori.” When it finally registered for Minori’s mother that her son was calling from the dorms, her excited voice filled the room—“Hello, hello?!”
“Seriously,” Minori said, “you’re so loud…”
As she brought the bags over to the kitchen, she noticed the droplets shining on her mother’s coat. For a moment, she mistook them for rain.
“Huh? No way.”
Still barefoot, Minori headed to the entrance. She slipped on her loafers and opened the cold steel door, then ran into the outside hallway of the condo. The cold air that permeated her lungs came as a shock.
At some point, snow had started to descend on the town she now watched from the fourth floor. She forgot the cold in spite of herself and leaned out toward the white flakes fluttering down like countless small feathers from the night sky. She’d said she hated snow during the school trip, but it was special when it fell in her own town.
“Wow! It’s beautiful.” Minori thought about going back to her room to text her friends. We got snow, did you notice? It’s so pretty. Hey, take a look outside. What are you doing right now?
“A white Valentine’s Day…but we already have a White Day in Japan. What else would it be called?”
In the end, she stayed where she was and concentrated on the fluttering and dancing flakes in the sky. She formed right angles with her thumbs and pointer fingers, making a rectangle to look through, like she was taking a picture.
It was the sacred evening of Valentine’s Day. The snow might have been a gift from heaven. A pure white curtain sent for a brief period to insulate people who weren’t honest with themselves from everyday life.
In that case, come down, she thought as she stretched her hands farther into the freezing night sky. I’ll close my mouth and my eyes. I won’t send out those texts. I’ll just be here. She spread her fingers to catch the snow in her palm. She could see the small flakes, faint and fleeting. As they touched down, it felt as though the warmth of her hand, the vivid emotions amassing within her in the moment, and the memory of the words she’d exchanged were all evaporating along with her body heat into the sky.
There, they’d turn into droplets of water and eventually freeze in the clouds to once again come down on the world. Her heat would become glittering diamond dust and fall on everyone’s heads without so much as a sound, and—
“Hey, missy! Miso or soy sauce pork belly—what do you want?!” Her mom, who had poked her head out from the front door, held a rustling package of frozen ramen in her hand.
“You ruined it, Mooom!” Minori groaned, holding her head sorrowfully.
Seriously, this is why, this is why. She raked her fingers through her bangs and looked back up at the night sky from which the snow fell.
This might just be how it is. This might just be the way things go, even after everything, on a night like this. She twisted her fingers around the strings of her parka, which was pulled as taut as possible, and released a long white sigh into the night sky. The falling snow and her breath could become part of the curtain coming down on the world. It could become the protective white barrier sheltering the two people who were probably meeting somewhere out there right now, like the shell of an egg.
She was sure that if they were together, protected from the eyes of others, they could come clean to each other in their private moment.
Hey, universe! Minori thought as she breathed in a lungful of the freezing air. As though trying to draw people’s attention, she spread her arms with the grandeur of an actress performing on stage.
“What kind of mother feeds her daughter, who works at a ramen shop, more rameeeeen?!”
“You…just stop…”
Ha ha ha ha, Minori laughed. This time, she actually went back inside. Light leaked from the front door.
She didn’t see the black sports car on the bridge crossing the river, racing smoothly past several cars like it had a life of its own.