I own nothing.
"Mom?"
"What is it, Mori? You break the strap on your sandals again?"
"Uh-uh, Mom. I wanted to ask you…"
"Well, what is it? You'll never get an answer if you don't ask a question."
"Where did I come from?"
"Hmm, I bought you from the store as a seed and planted you in the ground. I watered you every day for months and months, and eventually you sprouted. I plucked you out of the ground and took you inside, and you've been my daughter ever since."
-0-0-0-
The world had words with which it described Natsume Reiko, and Mori had never thought them fitting. Cruel? She saw no trace of cruelty in that face. Liar? How could she be a liar, when all she saw with her own eyes was the truth? Freak? Mori saw nothing in her mother that fit the word. The world had words it used to name Reiko, but they would never capture the truth of her heart. Nothing would, since Reiko wouldn't name herself to the world. If they weren't going to listen to her, she didn't see why she should try to make them listen.
Mori sometimes wondered if she'd spent the entirety of her early years beneath the oak tree just outside of town. She knew it couldn't have been so, had memories still of rough floorboards creaking under her feet and the metallic clatter of something falling to the ground, but clearer still was the tree and the leaves and the wind blowing cross the mountains, singing its own song.
There it was: golden light spilling over green leaves like rain or paint that stained the skies. The light catching her mother's long hair and making it flash silver. The smell of earth and grass caught in Mori's tiny hands. The crackle of cellophane as Reiko took daifuku out of their wrappers and her raucous laughter when Mori took one bite and the filling spilled out onto her fingers, melting in the summer heat.
This was what she remembered of her mother, Reiko laughing and teasing her, Reiko loudly sopping her fingers after she was done eating, Reiko's green eyes flashing bright and sharp like chips of ice when someone stopped them on the sidewalk. Dancing through fallen leaves with a broom held aloft in her hands. Mori asking her where she had come from, and Reiko coming up with a new tall tale every time she asked.
They dreamed under the great oak tree, and there Reiko would dream forevermore.
-0-0-0-
'You look just like your mother.'
Mori came to regard those words as a curse over the years, something to be hidden with short, badly-dyed hair and the most inoffensive smiles she could muster, by shutting her eyes to all the things her mother had seen and been disbelieved over, a thin veneer of normality, at least. The words were hissed, turned into needles, judgmental comments on her clothes, behavior and disposition, gloating predictions of her future, as stagnant and dead-ending as the world was sure her future would be.
"So where is your father, anyways? Not around? Oh, well I'm not surprised. When a woman cares so little for herself, why should a man care for her?"
It was easier to remember her mother when she didn't have to contend with the legacy Reiko left in the minds of others.
But Mori did try to remember, nonetheless. She remembered light, and laughter, and leaves crunching under her feet, and the shadows of things normal people couldn't see flickering in the grass like smoke. Remembered things about Reiko that no one else remembered, because no one else had bothered to learn.
Sometimes, when she walked the streets alone and her shadow unfurled long and dark behind her, she remembered the stories her mother had told to fill up the emptiness of their small life. Mori remembered, even if she couldn't recall her mother's voice, rotted away by time as it was.
-0-0-0-
"Mother, Mother, where will I go?" she asked of the gray skies, the mountains, the whispering forests. Only the thunder answered, and she could not hear a word.