Smiling, I kneel to pour their tea

Wishing I could throw it

In their faces instead.

---Lady Suzume Murasaki, 1766-1790.

After that, I made dinner—beans and rice, as usual, but this time I threw in some corn and chopped onion for variety, and to make it stretch further. Suzume would probably finish off whatever I didn't eat. What was I to do about a ghost with paranoid tendencies, an eating disorder, and probable clinical depression? None of the conventional treatments covered the possibility of a revenant patient.

I cleaned up and went to the cupboard where I kept the plastic containers. Living alone as I did (or had), I didn't need very many of them. All six were there. That meant that after eating the tuna fish yesterday and the chicken the night before, Lady Suzume had washed the containers and put them away, like any considerate, well-brought up person. No doubt she had disposed of the eggshells, fruit pits, etc, in some appropriate manner as well. I took one and scraped the leftovers into it, then stuck it in the refrigerator and started in on the dishes.

It was becoming more and more difficult not to sentimentalize about her, especially since I knew her history. (Or a version of it, at any rate. Her own account might differ markedly.) I could imagine what she had looked like before she was poisoned: a perfect oval face, coolly elegant— seemingly haughty, perhaps, but only because she was on her guard, and rather shy. Beautiful when she smiled, though...A slim figure—What had the writer said? 'Her figure was lacking in that abundance of womanly charms which Lord Minoru was known to admire'? I could guess what that meant. Many men have an infantile bias which keeps breast augmentation specialists in business. Not a practice—or a bias—I've ever subscribed to. After all, a woman isn't a cow—and as a doctor, I knew that time and gravity are unkind to large mammary glands.

I shook the dish towel out and went in the living room. There stood the chest, open and empty. I was now living with the ghost of a woman who had been dead over two hundred years, and she had violent tendencies at times. Perhaps I would be better off if I were to pack everything back in it, and find somewhere to put it, somewhere far away—before she decided to castrate me.

But I knew I wouldn't do that.

The evening stretched into the night as I unpacked my new laptop and set it up, only to discover that it wasn't compatible with my old router. Unfortunate, but not unexpected. There is always some issue when upgrading computer equipment: if not the router, then it would be some vital cable that was missing, or else an essential piece of software wouldn't have been installed. So I made a note of what I would need, and turned instead to my books. I looked for anything I might have on Japan and Japanese history, but there my collection was sadly deficient. I would have to remedy that—a visit to the university library tomorrow was in order.

By then it was late enough to go to bed, but before I did, I went down to the basement for one last look at Lady Suzume's skeleton. How, precisely, did being a ghost work? She ate, she sewed, she was ( as I well knew from the night before) solid at least part of the time. She didn't need to breathe very often, if at all, but she could be hurt, if the writer of the document in the envelop was to be believed. He had hit her with a baseball bat, and she had wept. Did her heart beat? How?

"Good night," I said, finally, and went to bed. I don't often self-medicate; that way lies hypochondria, prescription drug addiction, and ultimately, ruin, but I sometimes suffered from insomnia, especially when I was intellectually overstimulated. I certainly was overstimulated tonight. I kept some low dosage sleeping pills, the generic form of Ambien, on hand for such occasions, and I took one before I brushed my teeth.

I slept, and while I did, I had an utterly prosaic and simple dream—ridiculously so—if not for the presence of Lady Suzume. I dreamt that someone climbed into bed with me. It was not an erotic dream; this had the innocence of childhood, or of kittens sleeping together in a basket. Merely warmth, and a peaceful feeling of being safe, of being loved.

When I woke up the next morning, of course I wondered if there was more to it than a dream. Surely having Suzume sleep with me would have been more dramatic, though—or would it?

In the kitchen I found two things: first of all, the goldfish were no longer in the measuring cup. They were swimming around in a large glass punchbowl, another of the left-behind items, along with some gravel I recognized as having come from the garden path in the backyard. The aquatic plant had been rooted in the gravel, and the snail was meandering around on it. The water was sparklingly clean, and the fish looked healthily active.

The second thing was on the counter by the stove: my teapot, wrapped up in towels, sat next to a bowl covered by a plate. The pot was full of hot, fresh green tea, and when I lifted the plate, I saw a very carefully arranged flower made of smoked salmon bits and shreds of spring onion on top of rice which had been cooked until it went to paste. I could not be certain, but I was willing to believe that this was very close to what might have been eaten for breakfast in a noble household during the Edo period.

I don't normally drink green tea for breakfast, and while I had been planning to have the smoked salmon and spring onions, I would have put them in some scrambled eggs rather than over rice, but I knew better than to dump this out and start over. This was a friendly gesture, and Suzume would have been offended if I rejected it. Anyhow, it turned out to be surprisingly good.

A/N: Short, I know. Sometimes they are.