ALL'S WELL
"If you come near me again," said Chiyo, "I'll kill you, and your kid." The girl's feet stomped on the wooden stairs to get up the mountain, away from the young woman behind her.
Osaka crawled after her in the rain, mud soaking into the knees of her maternity dress. She was crying, but she didn't know it.
"You can't leave me like this, Chilyo!" screamed Osaka. "He's YOUR BABY!"
"Did I ever show you what I got in America?" Chiyo twirled with a brandished shotgun. "It's called YOUR END!" She pulled the trigger.
"EPILOGUE!" screamed Ayumu, still too-much alive.
Had it been a dream? she wondered through the confused haze of waking. It sure is dark, still, she thought, until she realized she couldn't breathe. She lifted her face out of her pillow, and found herself stairing into 11:27 AM. The clock had failed to wake her. Now it just taunted.
"Oh my God!" said Osaka. The image of a cat in a window flashed before her eyes for some reason, but she hadn't time for daytime hallucinations. She jumped up, threw her pajamas to the floor and grabbed those clothes she could afford to launder yesterday. She wouldn't be able to eat, nor would she care to, because her apartment, with its littered floor and cracked window and doorless bathroom, was a less-than-inspiring environment.
As she left, she said, "Good-Bye, Good-Bye, home," always adding the second farewell out of fear (or hope) the home won't be there.
ELSEWHERE...
Chiyo hated airports. She hated the flight, and standing in this crowd, and every second her bitterness grew. The wonders of the world that a girl of eighteen years should feel, the privileges granted by quality education, the possibilities of the life before her, all seemed to dance perpetually behind her mind sack, never to be felt again.
She ran by the coffee shop, so named because the founder couldn't type "cafe" with the ~ over the "e." The walls painted a pleasant blend of pale greens, earthy and gray neutrals. "So appropriate," thought Chiyo, "that the coffee should taste like bland dirt." She finished her cup amongst the dozens of others waiting in their seats for delivery or extraction.
She began to wonder how things had changed, and what her friends would be like. Will I even recognize Osaka when I see her? she wondered, perhaps a bit too late. Does she still go by Osaka?
Suddenly she noticed the young foreign man coming discomfittingly close. Just as he nearly passed, and Chiyo nearly released a sigh of relief, he turned to sharply to face her. He opened his mouth to say something.
"Not in this lifetime, friend," she said, crossing her legs, though "Shut up and take me to the bathroom now," was what she really wanted to say.
The disappointed young man and she shared a moment of stares amidst the busy airport. His mouth opened again. This time, it closed around her lips, his tongue peircing them, entering with the speed of a snake. He threw her into the air, and all the people came running, drowning her screams in their own as she came down into them.
The crowd held the girl up, pulling down only her clothes, ripping them off one by one and leaving her bare. They dropped her hard on the floor, naked and hurt, and formed a circle with her at its center. The ceiling, she noticed, sprouted black veins, and crumbled over them all into fine powder and enormous chunks of architecture, falling, crushing the men and women and children staring at her. Beyond, she saw, to her absolute horror, were blue sky, and white clouds, and the the bright sun. Her cousins looked down on her, with Grandma and Grandpa, and all her other loved ones in Heaven. Its horribly glorious divine light beamed down across the ruins, aging millions of years a second.
She tried to move, but found herself paralyzed in Heaven's view. The young man stood over her again, and smiled. He dropped onto her body, stroked it, and revealed his fangs, forked tongue, slit eyes. The two rose into the air, him atop her still. The survivors of the ceiling crawled, injured and bleeding, onto the wreckage, and hissed at the two, laughing and grinning. As they twirled, Chiyo watched the young man change, shed his clothes like a skin.
Then they copulated.
Chiyo lost her fear and succumbed the awesome pleasure, and screamed in glory for more and more, as the the demons laughed and her family cheered, for more and more for millions of years.
"Is this yours?" asked the handsome young foreign man.
Chiyo blinked to get the hallucigenic glaze out of her eyes. "I'm sorry?" she asked him.
"Is this bracelet yours? It was on the floor by your foot." He jingled a little silver trincket before her.
"Oh, thanks, but, no."
With that, he walked away with a new bracelet. Perhaps he left it with lost and found.
Chiyo felt relieved, yet oddly disappointed. At least she had snapped back to normal, and that was worth any discomfort.
"Chiyo-chan?" asked a woman with a familiar drawl. "Wow - I didn't even recognize you, you're so different."
"Osaka?" Chiyo didn't recognize the female before her either. But then she remembered the eyes, and the face, as developed and hagard as it was.
"If we're going to be staying together, call me Ayumu. I'll help you with your bags," she said. "How do you like being back home?"
"I wouldn't know yet. I'll wait to see how things have changed." Chiyo and Ayumu carried the latter's luggage down into the parking lot, into a sporty little vehicle with red body and white trim and a name across the back which shall be spared for the sake of the reader's imagination.
"This is a nice car," said Chiyo.
"Yeah. I inherited it from a rich uncle three months ago."
"Oh, I'm sorry," Chiyo said as they boarded. "You must have been awfully close for him to leave this to you."
"Not really." Ayumu pulled out of the parking space. "I think he actually bought it for the occasion. Just so everyone would get something nice, you know. My Mom got a fully-stocked jewelry case."
"Really?" The younger woman looked for the right words to say. She looked around the densely laid business area for inspiration, but found little. "You never mentioned having rich relatives to me, as far as I recall."
"You think I shoulda?"
"Keep your eyes on the road - please." After averting that disaster, Chiyo continued, "It's not proper etiquette, I suppose, but I would have expected it. I'm just saying that it's a bit of a shock."
"Well, I thought about it at first, but then I figured, how polite would it be to say, 'My uncle's beach house has four floors and a tiger pen? And his winter house was built on a cursed mass grave..."
"I understand, Osaka." The irritation barely showed in her voice, but they both ignored it. She then turned her face in embarrassment.
"You still think of me as Osaka?" said Ayumu. "Now don't be ashamed. It's kinda cu..."
Her sentence was cut off as her torso nearly was by the seatbelt. Both their bodies flew forward at approximately twenty-five miles per hour, then smacked back into place by very irratable airbags. Ayumu, dazed and disoriented, wondered where the glass in her lap came from, ere to looking out her window to find it missing. Chiyo's seat rested off its sliders several inches from where Ayumu had left it as well. Most startling, however, was the car before them, just visible past the shattered windsheild.
"I don't suppose you could call the police, do you, Chiyo?" asked Ayumu. "My phone's dead."
The response was muffled by the air bag, but an audible, "I can't feel my arms."
"Oh." Ayumu unbuckled herself, slipping her fingers a bit on the red-soaked belt. "Well, just sit tight while I exchange information or something." She opened the door, stepped out, and slammed it shut, just in time to see the other vehicle departing at ludicrous speed.
She continued to stare, gawking, listening to the drivers loud, vehement, blasphemous profanities. They only ended when another colision drowned them out. The car's tires turned one way, the rest another, and the driver and his white speed demon were enveloped in fire.
Such happens when a car kisses a gas pump.
Ayumu was long beyond tears. She looked at the smoking massacre of her car, the only valuable thing she owned. She looked at her friend, bleeding, probably dying in the passenger's seat. And she said, "Well, fuck this," and climbed back in hurriedly. "Let the police sort it out."
With that, she backed the car around the deserted street, ready to speed away. But she found her path blocked by the oncoming police, firetrucks, and ambulances.