Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a young girl standing farther down the road and stopped dead in my tracks, blinking a few times to make sure it wasn’t the sunspots in my eyes. She wore a slightly oversized tank top and denim shorts that showed off her naturally tanned skin, and a little ponytail dangled out from the back of her baseball cap. Even from a distance, it was plain to see that her once bright-red sandals were well worn and faded, something that only emphasized her outdoorsy, adventurous nature.
“See that? That’s the line where the rain stops!” she said with her back to me, pointing ahead to where the road began to glisten in the sunlight. Her voice was soft and delicate, yet it rang clearly in my ears. I supposed that wasn’t too surprising, given that every other noise of the afternoon, even the incessant chirping cicadas, had suddenly gone quiet. An eerie silence fell over the neighborhood, almost as if it were frozen in time. The girl turned around and grinned at me with the bubbliest, most effervescent smile I’d ever seen.
It was her. Karen. My little sister.
“Look, Kaoru! See how it always dries up by the time we get close?! But I bet if we ran fast enough, there’d still be at least a few puddles left on the ground!”
An intense wave of déjà vu washed over my entire body.
Right, I remember now. Back then, we didn’t know it was just a mirage, so we were trying to come up with an explanation for how there could be rain-slicked streets beneath clear blue skies—some sort of dividing line between rain and shine.
I wanted to tell her. Desperately, I did. Now that I was in high school, explaining how heat mirages worked should have been no trouble at all. But I couldn’t do it. My body seized up like I was suffering from sleep paralysis, and I couldn’t squeeze out a single word. The only part of me still in motion was my heart, which threatened to beat right out of my chest.
“Hey, what’s the matter? Why are you just standing there?” she asked. “If you’re not coming, then I’m gonna go on ahead without you.”
Karen turned her back to me once more and started to walk off. I tried to call after her, but again, the words wouldn’t come. The only sounds I could wring out from my parched throat were a few haggard breaths. All the words I tried and failed to cry out—come back, wait, don’t go—remained trapped in my lungs, swirling around in a toxic haze with all the other things I’d left unsaid. My chest burned with the urge to let them all out, but my mind raced too fast to even remember to breathe, and I started getting lightheaded. Before I knew it, Karen had disappeared into the shimmering heat haze that hung in the air above the asphalt. Once again, I could do nothing to stop it.
Then, all at once, the cacophony of cicadas came back in full force, almost as though they’d just returned from lunch break. The beads of sweat that had been waiting politely on the tips of my lashes finally trickled into my corneas, and I reflexively closed my eyes tight to purge them of the sting of salt. I ran as fast as I could the rest of the way home.
When I made it back to the house, I reached into my book bag for my keys and let myself in the front door. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to how dark it was inside—though that probably had more to do with how blindingly bright it had been outside than anything else. I went straight up to my room to change into a T-shirt and shorts, then headed back to the kitchen. After taking a minute to catch my breath and quench my thirst with a glass of iced barley tea, I made my way to the traditional-style sitting room. It was a modest space—just eight tatami mats in total—with few decorations aside from a hanging wall scroll in the alcove that depicted a pleasant mountain scene. Now that my eyes had had a chance to adjust to the darker indoor lighting, looking out over the veranda through the sliding doors was like peering into a totally different world—one much more vibrant than ours.
I walked over and sat with my legs crossed atop a floor cushion laid out in a corner of the room, right in front of the altar we had set up in honor of my sister Karen. She had been my only sibling, just two years younger than me, and had died five years prior after a tragic and accidental fall.
It had been a sweltering summer’s day, same as this one. Karen and I had taken our insect cage and butterfly net and gone looking for bugs in the nearby woods. We were specifically out searching for rhinoceros beetles, but by the time evening rolled around, we still hadn’t found a single one. It wasn’t as if we had some huge desire to catch one either, but we had told our mom that we’d bring back a big one that’d knock her socks off, and we were both too stubborn to give up yet. So you can imagine our delight when we spotted not one but two beetles hanging out together up high on a very tall tree—a rhinoceros and a stag. We were determined to do whatever it took to catch them both.
“Lieutenant Karen! We have a problem!” I barked, affecting a militaristic voice for the hell of it. Karen was happy to play along and gave me a stalwart salute.
“What is it, Sergeant Kaoru, sir?!”
“Our net will never reach that high!”
“Good God! Those bastards really have our backs against the wall this time, sir!”
I couldn’t help but burst out laughing at this. “Pfft! Where the heck did you learn to talk like that?”
“I heard it on TV!” she said with a mischievous smirk.
“Shoulda known.” I grinned right back at her.
To be sure, the two beetles were far too high to reach without actually climbing the tree. Yet there were no branches to grab within arm’s reach either, so that option was off the table too.
“Yeah, no way I can jump that high,” I concluded. “So what do we do now?”
“I mean…it seems pretty obvious to me. We’re just gonna have to climb up there.”
“What? No way. There’s not even anything to grab this far down…”
“Gosh, you’re dumb. Try thinking outside the box for once!”
“What, do you have a better idea?”
“Yeah! You can give me a boost! Then I should at least be able to reach that lowest branch, right?”
I looked up at the branch she was referring to. It was a good two meters off the ground. “…Isn’t that a little dangerous?”
“Aw, it’ll be fine! I’m a tree-climbing pro!”
“I dunno about this, Karen…”
“If we don’t hurry up, they’re gonna fly away!”
She had a point. This very well could have been our last chance of the day. With that in mind, I reluctantly decided to go along with Karen’s proposal.
“All right, we’ll give it a shot,” I said. “But you be careful up there, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. C’mon, let me get on your shoulders.”
I knelt down. Karen flung off the old, beat-up red sandals she loved so much and then climbed onto my back. Holding her by the ankles, I stood upright and hoisted her toward the branch, which she quickly clambered onto with no trouble at all. She climbed so effortlessly from branch to branch that she almost looked like a monkey—though of course I didn’t say that out loud, since it might come off a little rude. Still, I was pretty sure she could handle herself from there, so I brought my gaze down to give my aching neck a rest.
Looking back, that was probably the final nail in her coffin. I never should have taken my eyes off of her, even for a split second. The rest was kind of a blur—almost like it happened in fast-forward. All of a sudden, I heard the sound of a branch snapping overhead, and instantly I looked up. It was too late. Karen was in freefall, tumbling headfirst back to the ground. I still remembered the audible crack of her skull hitting the hard earth.
It all happened so fast. I stood there stunned for a good five, ten seconds, before finally coming back to my senses and calling out to her. She was already gone. Not a drop of blood on the ground, but she was no longer breathing.
I didn’t remember much about what happened after that—just that I got really, really scared and ran away as fast as I could until I found an adult in the nearby neighborhood who could help. I didn’t know for sure that she was dead until my parents told me the next day—the one small mercy being that the autopsy apparently determined she died immediately on impact and hadn’t suffered in the slightest.
Nevertheless, from then on, not a single day went by where I didn’t think about what I could’ve done differently. If I’d only refused to boost her up, or told her it was getting late and we should head home, or never gone out bug catching that day to begin with…Karen would almost certainly still be alive.
I sat there in silence before her altar for a time, then lit a stick of incense and rang the little bell as I continued penning apology letters to her in my head, ones I knew would only ever be returned to sender.
When I could sense my legs were about to go numb, I got up and headed into the kitchen to get dinner ready. I put some rice in the removable ceramic pot and swished it around with tap water to wash off the starch, switching the water out five times in total. I always had a hard time remembering how many times I’d done it, so my trick was to only swirl it around with as many fingers as the number of times I’d drained and refilled the water. The first cycle, I used only my pointer finger; the second, my pointer and middle; the third, those two plus my ring finger—like so. When I finally finished, I put the bowl in the rice cooker and pressed the Quick Cook button.