In every narrative there are gaps: places where, although things happened and the characters spoke and acted and lived their lives, the story says nothing about them. It was fun to visit a few of these gaps and speculate a little on what I might see there.
As for why I call these little pieces lantern slides, it's because I remember the wooden boxes my grandfather used to have, each one packed neatly with painted glass slides showing scenes from Bible stories or fairy tales or ghost stories or comic little plays with absurd-looking figures. From time to time he would get out the heavy old magic lantern and project some of these pictures on to a screen as we sat in the darkened room with the smell of hot metal and watched one scene succeed another, trying to make sense of the narrative and wondering what St. Paul was doing in the story of Little Red Riding Hood—because they never came out of the box in quite the right order.
– Philip Pullman
Haku walking out onto the red bridge of the bathhouse. He doesn't know what made him come here; It seemed like a perfect idea at the time. The sun starts to dive beneath the horizon, the shadows lengthen, and he can sense the world dozing off, another one waking up; the second shift has begun. The train passes beneath him, and he stares at it blankly. As it clatters off into the distance, the sound of running feet reaches his ears. He looks up, and it is like the moment the orchestra has finished tuning and the perfect harmony is played for a fraction of a second before stopping abruptly at the flick of the conductor's baton. He hears it played in his mind.
Chihiro.
He likes to have his rice with a sprinkle of tea leaves, to yarn with Kamaji, to bug Yubaba out of her enormous bun, and to go fishing with Haku on sunny days. That is, when he has any time to do these things, which he doesn't. The old building, which gets older every day, requires attention more than anything. The Elevators rattle and creak like an old man's joints, the lights keep flicking in and out like ancient rheumy eyes no matter how many times he replaces the lamps, the infinite matrix of pipework always leaking and rusting. But he loves his job, his life, all the same.
"It's strange," He says to Haku one day, after drifting lazily together for a while in their small boat, on the ocean that had once been a swamp.
"What?"
"The building...she seems to...repair herself? How should I describe it...As if I know I have to fix something, and I set out to fix it, and when I get there it's fixed. But I don't remember going near it at the time, and the others didn't see me there either."
Haku raises his eyebrows. "You don't know?"
"What?"
"You're-"
And before he said it, he realized that he had become the god of the bathhouse.
Sometimes, he flicks his head and frowns into the distance, tense and focused. Like a cat, she observed. Except he doesn't flick his ears along with his gaze.
The Ogino's Audi Quattro. It was two or so years old, and experienced quite a rough birth into existence; Chihiro's father was whimsical but determined to stay true to his whims. If you asked it what it was doing sitting , forsaken, in front of a two-faced stone gargoyle in the middle of the woods, gathering leaves and dust, it would say that it was waiting for the pigs to come back with their piglet.
Later, Chihiro remembered his scales were not quite mother-of-pearl, and she would quickly modify what she had been reading: from mother-of-pearl to not-quite-mother-of-pearl.
One of the children raised his hand. "But, Ba-chan, um, it's mother-of-pearl in the book."
She smiled and patted his head. "I know. But it wasn't quite that, so I improvised."
He tilted his head. "Improvised?" A perfect echo.
She laughed. "It's the difference between life and its plans, child."
