Oh yes, the shed! That was quite something, wasn’t it?
No, not a typhoon. If a typhoon had done that, this house or the road out there would have been smashed up, too, don’t you think?
There was no construction going on at the time, either. But no need to worry. It wasn’t an accident or vandalism. It’s not like a truck could have rammed into the shed without tearing through the hedges first, and who around here is strong enough to smash wood to smithereens like that? But you’re getting close. In a way, you could say that someone flattened the shed. Well, no, not someone so much as something. It was just that time of year again.
Yes, that’s right. Once per year. No, not some yearly disaster. It’s the date we used to hold our festival on back in the day. Now, don’t get me wrong; no one got worked up by the festivities and deliberately smashed my shed or anything like that. No one around these parts has the energy for that sort of thing nowadays. We don’t hold the festival anymore. But maybe we should. The festival was to thank our village’s god, after all.
A harvest festival? Yes, I guess you could say it’s something like that. It just goes to show, though, what happens when you don’t keep up the tradition. Though I’m not sure how we’re supposed to celebrate a god that does a thing like this…
Oh, the god isn’t around anymore. Well, they say back around the time the first big road was made, the god picked up and hauled itself back to the mountain, claiming there was no need to look out for us anymore.
When it came time to widen the road, there was a lot of stuff in the way—you know, the paddies and the fields and what have you. The shrine, yes, sure. I suppose it was in the way. Not that we were insensitive about it. A priest came and purified everything, good and proper, before the shrine was moved. So I don’t think the god is angry at us, nothing like that.
There used to be a festival once per year when the god would come down from the mountain. Let’s see, it was around when my second child had just started elementary school. We had put up a few little stalls and strung up some lanterns, and the children did Bon dances and carried the palanquin on a procession to the shrine.
There were still lots of children in the village back then, and they wore animal masks of a character from some anime that aired on Fridays and danced along to the theme song—that sort of thing. We were all wearing the traditional happi festival coats, and everyone was whooping it up. Even the teachers from the school, the quietest sticks-in-the-mud, were having fun, like they were completely different people. Things were fun back then. Back when this place was lively.
That night, just as everything was winding down and people were starting to head home, we heard a loud crash from over by the elementary school. It was dark, though, so we figured maybe a truck had hit the school building. Someone could have been hurt, and we had all that leftover adrenaline from the festival in us, so everyone rushed to find the source of the sound.
The mosquitoes were flitting about, and the frogs were singing in the paddies as we held our children by the hand and hurried down the road through the fields. “There, over there,” we shouted as we made our way toward the darkened school building. When we arrived, though, the gate looked just fine. While we were still milling about, trying to figure out what all the noise had been about—like maybe there had been a gas explosion—a shout suddenly came from near the pool. My own kid’s teacher was actually the one who had gone and grabbed the keys from the janitor’s office, but whatever they had seen, it made their knees buckle right out from under them. Of course, we had to go see for ourselves. And when we flipped on the pool lights, bright as day, and went to take a look, there it was.
The water was already drained, and the pool was dry as a bone. Inside it was something that looked like one long pipe, stretching from one end of the twenty-five-meter pool to the other. On the five starting blocks down at the end rested five fat fingers, tipped with curved fingernails, each finger on a separate block. An arm. It was a huge, giant arm. We figured it was some kind of prank and called the police, but after taking a good look, the man who did the autopsies announced that the skin, the muscles, all of it was real. Obviously, there’s no living creature out there so big, but it really was a humongous human arm. Not that the police department was about to file a report. Who were they going to put down as the victim? A man with a twenty-five-meter arm?
Police, hospital, we’re all more or less intertwined in this village. So what else were we gonna do? Everyone got together and carried the arm to the shrine, just like it was another palanquin.
The looks on our faces! Imagine if a truck had passed by just then as we dragged the long pale arm along through the dead of night, grunting and groaning and dripping with sweat. But that was when it all began. Ever since, around this time of year, another huge body part falls somewhere on the village.
Yes, my shed got hit, too. Wham, straight out of the sky. I knew right away. I said to myself, I guess it’s my turn now. It happened to my neighbor, too, you see, about four years ago.
We got an eye. Big, round, and glistening, smack-dab on the shed’s roof, flat as a pea on a plate.
Of course, it only happens the one time per year, and no one’s ever been hurt. What’s that? Why don’t we do something about it? I suppose we would if we could, but what can anyone do really? It’s a god, after all; it’s not like it’s going to hurt anyone. Sure, maybe we could move someplace else, but the only folks left round here these days are the ones who never had any other options in the first place.
I don’t know if it’s up there in the sky or whatever, but you’ve got to wonder. How much of it could even be left at this point?