Mound of Earth
By Neech
For Victoria
It was a small, raised mound of earth hidden away by lush, green vegetation just beyond the stated boundaries of the shrine grounds that a tall, mysterious, ochre-eyed man with a fedora hat returned to every year on the exact same day.
Young Higurashi Kagome would know. After all, she had counted. Kagome may have only been ten years old, but she was observant, and the one thing she was not was stupid.
Ever since she was old enough to discern what was normal and what was not, the man with golden eyes was always something that stuck out: eyes of a brilliant yellow shade, fedora hat that hid every single tuft of hair, glints of white teeth that appeared a bit too sharp, the fact that no one but her ever noticed his presence.
Her mother had instantly attributed her… observance to precociousness, but Kagome would always shake her head emphatically and become quiet afterwards, silently biting her lip. After time, she had stopped mentioning it altogether, though every fifteenth April, she would cock her head at a barely perceptible angle, looking out the window and watching silently as a coated man slipped into the shadows of dusk's embrace.
He was an enigma.
And she was curious.
He wasn't an evil person, she had decided. Unlike the menacing figures that hurt little girls without a qualm in the world that her mother had warned her about, she could tell that he was not one of them. That much she was sure of. Somewhere inside her, she just knew.
He had caught her watching before, only to smile slightly, a mysterious, sad smile that did not answer the question in her eyes before slipping away behind the trees. Five minutes later, after debating endlessly within herself on whether she should follow him, she had thrown caution to the wind and entered the wooded area.
By that time he was gone, a bundle of white lilies and jasmine left at the base of the mound the only indication of a previous presence. That and the lingering scent of ginger.
An inquisitive soul, the knoll itself was something that interested Kagome very much, from its stark difference in colour of the surrounding soil to the fact that no vegetation grew on it. Ever. No higher than her knee, it stood alone surrounded by shrubbery and grassland, where the grass grew thinly and in patches from a metre radius around it.
She often eyed it suspiciously, making sure she never touched it with dirty hands, just on the off chance that it was actually a grave, and inadvertently offend the poor soul whose bones were hidden beneath it. Growing up on a shrine, she was a religious child, and she knew better than to do something as ignorant as touching and befouling a questionable object. And so, after every visit, she placed joss-sticks and incense beside the sprigs, clearing the flowers after they had died.
She wished she knew whether the man wondered about what happened to the wilted flowers.
Finito