It smelled like peace and stillness here.
That was the first thought that crossed Yuuma's mind as he slammed the door to his old, horrid mauve Buick.
It was autumntime, her birthday. The leaves on the ancient towering trees were beginning to fade to sage, gold, red, and purple. She once said they reminded her of rainbow Goldfish, accented with her girlish cackle.
Trees swarmed the surrounding foothills, acting as sentries over the lone road that led to this place. More trees guarded the only structure out here, an old and faded white church. A willow stood by the church, branches drooping and swaying.
Yuuma stepped closer to the place of worship to get a close peek inside, standing on a cinder block stepping-stool to do so. He observed the structure in silence. Built back with the arrival of the settlers. Back before TV, that was all Yuuma knew. The paint was chipping and the windows shattered, glass pieces pilfered long ago. Inside was a barren wooden floor decorated with dull wooden pews. The walls were papered with a musty rose design. It was okay to look, but no one stepped inside the ancient church. Taboo, she said.
A shudder racked the tall man's body. His own memories were one thing, but those that haunted this worship site of the natives were quite another.
He made a one- eighty and stalked toward the other attraction of this clearing.
A worn fence to ward off undesirables, a bizarre mishmash of iron posts and wooden pickets. The gate was rusty and easy to pry open. You can do this, Yuuma, you'll be fine.
As soon as his boot touched the graveyard grass Yuuma knew he most certainly would not be fine. Inhale, exhale. Rise, fall went his chest. Just focus on breathing.
Yuuma tottered through the boneyard, examining gravestones for names. Good, American last names, claimed by those who had settled here. Now, where was the one he was searching for...?
Don't kid yourself. You feel the magnetic draw to the one you seek. Don't deny it.
The thought startled him. So clear, like she had been standing right beside him as she scolded him for prolonging the inevitable.
Of course he knew which gravestone he was looking for.
An unseen force guided his feet to the spot while his mind raced with the wind. Yuuma would be lost completely in his thoughts if it weren't for that force dragging him to the spot. He liked to think it was her hand, dragging him along impatiently as if there were any other way to drag someone to something they needed to see right now.
And then... He found it.
Megumi Kamui
Gone to glory.
September 24, 1998 - June 25, 2013.
It was so simple, so effective, so her.
As if all of her life, her fire could be described in that single dash.
Yuuma tripped over nothing and landed on his knees as a riptide of memories swept him away.
He and Gumi had been friends as long as there had been a dash, so, basically all of their lives. He held her hand when she twisted her ankle so far around he had joked that 'it didn't look legal'. She cut his hair with safety scissors while he slept and laughed at his expression when he looked into a mirror the next morning. They ran along beaches and played with what Gumi called a 'soap-like paraplegic jellyfish called Lestrade.' He gave her her first kiss, she gave him his first black eye. Then she kissed him later to make up for it. He followed her everywhere, to high school, to vacation, to weddings and funerals.
He even followed her to the hospital and held her hand when they heard the diagnosis that couldn't be legal.
Yuuma was the only one in the world that Gumi could fully trust. She engulfed him in her fire. She was fire. Talkative, impetuous, persistent, despicable. Brilliant, irritating, shining, impossible Gumi.
That fire refused to snuff out, even when she entered the hospital for treatment. The doctors said they had never seen this kind of throat cancer before; it was the type you only read about in medical books and dealt with in theory.
Yuuma lost decades of sleep staying up with her, running his oversized hand along her bristly scalp when her hair started to grow back in chick-like tufts. He watched them grind up rainbow drugs and shoot them into her veins. He even held her hand when she had countless MRI scans and whatever else done. Damn the radiation risk to his health and other consequences; he would follow Gumi anywhere.
They said the treatment was starting to work after a while. He nodded and half- smiled and believed them, even as he watched the black snakes crawl up the back of her neck, anaconda-ing her tender esophagus, suffocating her.
But still the fire burned. She told horrible knock-knock jokes and watched YouTube videos with him. He read her books and she told him impossible stories of her past lives as both a narwhal and an Egyptian queen.
Until D-day.
A sudden surge of strength caused the cancer to clench her throat so tight she could barely breathe, much less talk for hours on end like she used to. But she still smiled. Always smiled.
On D-day, the doctors came to visit the three primary members of Gumi's cheer leading squad. Her mother, her older sister Sonika, and himself, naturally. Everyone else had all but given up, especially when the black snakes on her neck began to writhe.
The doctor gave that sigh and removed those glasses like you always see in movies when they must be the bearer of bad news. Yuuma figured the doctor had probably done this exact same thing countless times in the field of oncology. Only this time, it would be different.
He was delivering the death sentence, but this time he gave them the choice. To pull life support and let her leave in peace, or suffer hooked up to various machines for the rest of her numbered days.
Mom voted yes, to spare her sweet Gumi. Sonika voted no; her insistent optimism was hoping for a relapse, which starting a shouting match between her and her mother. Both furious women looked at Yuuma accusingly, daring him to take their respective sides.
Yuuma was in agony. Why did the decision to end Gumi's life have to rest on his shoulders, of all people?
"I would like to see her, before I cast my vote, if you please," he mumbled, staring fixatedly at the ground while his tear ducts burned.
They took him to the firebrand on her death bed. Her smile had withered from her corpse-white skin. She was just barely clutching life with her fingernails.
Yuuma walked over to her bed and sat by her. They sat in silence for several moments, her heart monitor's occasional beep acting as a metronome.
"They want me to decide. What should I do, Gumi?" he rasped.
The flicker and widening of her eyes beckoned him closer. He leaned it, ear brushing against her lips.
"Extinguish the fire. Please. I'm begging you."
Those seven words scorched his soul, but he nodded and gestured to the doctor. Sonika shrieked in agony and cried, "No!" The doctor nodded grimly and went to turn off the mechanisms. Went to turn off Gumi.
Real tears crashed down Yuuma's cheeks. A noise he would deny making until his dying day as he wrapped Gumi in their last bear hug. Last, last, last. That word would have a whole new meaning as the other side of his heart was ripped away.
"Thank you," she whispered as her last, most brilliant sunny smile curved her lips. Bald, corpse-pale, and a string of braided bones, she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his entire life. "I love you."
"I love you, too," he choked as the machine shut off, the heart monitor flatlined, and her eyes glazed over with death.
Jerked back to present day. Yuuma stared in horror at the slab in the ground, adorned with that accursed dash that was supposed to represent her fire. The fire he had snuffed out.
Yuuma let out a weak sob-laugh as he remembered the summer Gumi died. All summer, as she wasted away in the hospital, the land had been dry as bones as a drought plagued the entire state.
That day she went to glory, it had rained all day long, seemingly to drown out Yuuma's tears and pitiful noises as he broke down beside her deathbed.
It hadn't rained again since that D-day, three months ago.
Now her lovely bones rested here, in the family graveyard, amongst her ancestors. This tiny patch of frozen time and peace, all the denizens silently rotting while the world continued to spin wildly by.
Gumi was at peace.
That was all that mattered, even if the flame no longer burned and ravaged on.
All that was left was ashes.
Happy ashes that couldn't suffer or cry but they also couldn't smile like the moon or engulf you in a blazing inferno that makes you feel more alive than you ever had.
Twice her name left Yuuma's lips. Once a scream, next a whisper. No one would hear him, out in this deserted place in the woods and foothills of the South.
His cries echoed and faded.
He was still in love, but all he heard was nothing.
Yuuma fumbled and cursed as he pulled her birthday present out of his pocket. He supposed others would have brought flowers or a picture of their dead beloved ones, but he just brought one thing.
A lighter.
"Keep the flame burning, love," Yuuma whispered as he set the lighter on the headstone and gave it one last wistful pat.
For a second he thought he could feel her, smiling and scorching down at him, from heaven or glory or wherever she was.
Goodbye, my almost lover, he could feel her whisper.
Then Yuuma stood up and walked into glory.