i
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Dripping blood, my opponent attempted to flee into the grass—but it was easy for me to circle around in front of it. The four-legged animal was covered in wounds, and it was already too exhausted to move quickly.
I thought it was time to put it out of its misery. It no longer possessed the will to fight back.
I took the animal’s throat between my upper and lower jaw. I felt its neck bones break in my mouth. The sound and sensation traveled up my jawbone. The animal slumped, hanging limp in my mouth.
I showed no mercy. I didn’t want to do this, not really—but Yuka wanted me to, so I killed my opponent.
I opened my jaw, and the animal’s dead body fell from my mouth, slumping limply to the ground. There was no light in its eyes, and it had gone completely quiet.
I howled.
Yuka and I had brought the four-legged animal here, under the bridge. Yuka had stopped in front of a house as we’d passed, gazing through the gate and sizing the animal up. When I followed her gaze, I’d seen the animal looking back at us.
Yuka had looked at me and said, “This is tonight’s prey.”
It was not as if I understood the words Yuka spoke—yet I knew what she was saying.
This ritual happened occasionally at night. I’d lost track of how many times. We would find our prey in town, taking it to the secret place under the bridge that only Yuka and I knew about. And then Yuka would make me fight.
I obeyed her orders. I ran across the ground as she commanded. I leapt on my opponents, knocking them down. The four-legged animals I fought were all smaller than me, so if I slammed into them, they would fall over, hurt. Blood would splatter their fur, and their bones would break.
When I won, Yuka would smile, looking very happy. We couldn’t communicate with words, but her feelings flowed through me like river water, so I always knew when she was happy.
Yuka had been my friend since I was very small. When I first met her, I was with my brothers, who had been born with me. I was sleeping nestled up against my mother, and Yuka peered down at me with interest. I can still remember that now.
Half my howl vanished into the night sky. The other half echoed low under the bridge. The bridge was right overhead, blocking most of the sky—and when I looked up, I could see nothing but inky darkness.
The river was wide and the bridge large. On the riverbank around the bridge, there was a sea of tall grass, which you had to push your way through to get anywhere. But below the bridge, there was a small clearing without grass. The sunlight didn’t reach here, which left a circular clearing—where we were.
Yuka and I had found it one summer day, discovering that you could stand in the middle and be surrounded by walls of grass. It had been our secret place to play ever since.
But now it was where Yuka made me fight.
I didn’t want to bite and kill the animals, but Yuka wanted me to. When she gave me those orders, her eyes were dark as night, with no light at all.
Yuka had been sitting at the edge of the circle, watching me fight. Now she stood up.
It was time to go home. I knew what she was thinking. We had a connection that was beyond words.
I picked up the corpse in my mouth and went to toss it in the hole that was in the grass a little way from the clearing. When I dropped it in, the tiny body tumbled down along the edge of the pit. It wasn’t that deep a hole, but the bottom was dark and hard to see. I could hear the body hit bottom.
The hole had been there when we found this place. Someone might have dug it, planning to bury something. It was too dark to see, but the bottom of the hole was now filled with the corpses of animals Yuka had made me kill. If you stood near it, there was a horrible stench.
The first time we carried out this ritual under the bridge, Yuka had ordered me to throw the body in the hole after. I hadn’t yet learned to fight, and I was almost as badly hurt as my opponent in the end. When I’d faced my opponent, my mind went blank, and I had no idea what to do. But now I was good at fighting. I could kill my opponents calmly. Yuka was satisfied with how strong I had become.
The hair that had been ripped out when I bit my opponent filled my mouth. I swallowed it and then headed for the water, pushing my way through the grass until it opened up before me.
The forest of grass abruptly gave way to a vast expanse of running water. The water was so black that it looked less like a river than a giant pool of darkness. The lights on the bridge above cast reflections in the water from there to the opposite bank.
I washed the blood off my mouth in the river, and then I returned to where Yuka was waiting.
“Time to go.” Yuka uttered speech that held that meaning as she headed for the stairs.
The stairs led diagonally up the bank to the bridge. To get to the stairs from the clearing, we had to push our way through grass. I ran to her side, and we walked together.
As we neared the stairs, I saw some grass move—the tips of the long grass stalks swayed slightly. For a moment, I thought someone was standing there, and tensed. I listened closely, but it seemed it was just the wind.
Yuka had already reached the top of the stairs, where she was waiting for me. I bounded up the stairs after her, leaving our secret place behind.
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