First place winner in the "Face" theme competition at Live Journal's Inuyasha Fanfic Contest, January 2007. Horror/Supernatural. This short fic was an experiment--my attempt to to write in a darker, less familiar style.
Thank you to everyone who has kept me on their favorites and author alert lists. I have been writing a lot recently—I have several drabbles, two longish one-shots, and a new chapter of Towards the Future in the pipeline and I hope to have them up soon. As always, thanks for reading!
Shinidamachu
Princess Wakasa contracted smallpox late in childhood.
Her fever raged and for ten days she balanced between life and death. Her skin puckered with lesions and pustules like embedded rice. The servants who tended her also fell ill and died. Finally, the sores broke and drained and her eyes, once sealed by pus and infection, opened. She recovered, but her face was forever pitted and scared, knobby and shiny in the places where the scabs had fallen.
Even the servants mocked her. Her father overheard her nurse call her Mountain Ogre to the cook, and had the old woman soundly beaten.
She was still wealthy enough for her father to find her a husband. The evening her intended was brought to meet her, she had her women cover her face in a heavy layer of rice powder.
"Was your mother a piece of chalk?" he asked bitterly.
She took poison that night.
The more honorable method would have been by blade—a swift and purifying end. But the princess was too timid to tear her own flesh. And secretly, deep in her soul there was a part that wanted to linger, a spiteful and childish corner that longed to hear them all be sorry, to hear them wail and weep and beat their breasts for her.
And weep they did: One of her women told her father the words his daughter's intended had said to her, and he rose up in rage.
Linger she did: For two days, as her organs shut down and her toes and fingers turned black. It was an agonizing way to die.
Suffering. In her final moments she prayed. "Merciful Buddha, my whole life has been suffering. Please—"
Excruciating pain shot through her body like burning, wriggling, needles. Her muscles froze and became a vise clamping on her desperate lungs, her decaying heart. It lurched and spasmed and her mouth filled with blood.
"Merciful Buddha!" she cried. "When I am reborn, let me have a beautiful face!"
Her women were making noises, there was a cloth pressed against her forehead. They held down her limbs as she coughed and convulsed and spat more blood.
"A beautiful face! Make me a peasant or a whore, but give me a beautiful face!"
There was noise and commotion and pain.
Her soul—a shining white ball—rose from her chest and began its slow ascent, bobbing on unseen currents toward the heavens. She drifted above the sick room and through the wooden ceiling into the cool night air.
Peace. Escape. Rebirth. All waited for her above.
Without warning, the soul felt six tiny clamps like insects' legs, latch to it.
The startled soul trembled. The Shinidamachu unfurled and beat their powerful tails against the wind, surging downward.
"Hush," the soul collectors soothed. They clicked like cicadas, rubbing their forelegs against the shining bubble. "Hush, the Lady Kikyou has suffered so much. She regrets so deeply..."
The soul quivered. It had no voice to scream. Lacking internal momentum or power, it couldn't even struggle as it was carried hundreds of miles across dark countryside and mountains.
The moments broke down into a series of unconnected images, fear and panic. There was a woman alone and a black forest. There were the red and white robes of a priestess. The woman's face was very beautiful, impassive, and white as death.
No! I want to leave, it shuddered. I want to leave this world! I want to—
The priestess cupped her fingers and pushed the soul into her empty chest.