Standard disclaimer: characters and situations property of Kinoshita Sakura and Higashiyama Kazuko
Some deadlines are impossible to meet, as you keep telling Reiko, who nods and smiles as she continues to sit by you, passing you fresh sheets of paper and refilling the inkstand into the small hours until you have cobbled a story together from stray ideas and vestiges of memories half-forgotten, buried in the recesses of your mind until they are unexpectedly needed. When you are finally able to lay the pen down, she takes it from you almost before the ink is dry and bows, thanking you for your efforts, and politely reminds you that her editor will expect the next installment on the same day two weeks from now.
By the time she disappears into the early morning mist, the brisk clicking of her heels fading away down the deserted street, you have already forgotten what you wrote scant minutes ago, but it does not matter: few people read folklore nowadays, unless to scoff and deride it as superstitious nonsense. Though occasionally, a serendipitious word or turn of phrase remembered from somewhere will catch your eye once set down on paper, and you spend some time bringing down volume after volume from the shelf, trying to look for a place or a name, the source of the inspiration, before it flies from you.
You try to do this as quietly as possible, because when Youko wakes she will invariably berate you in her strident well-meaning tones for eating too little and working too hard, and even her voice will begin to grate on your nerves after several days without sleep. It is on the tip of your tongue to tell her that she might be a little happier at your improved finances, now that there is one less mouth to feed and you have started to catch up on the columns owed to the newspaper, but one look at her face when your first word turns into a yawn, and you are unable to finish.
But you do get some sleep, since you realize that your pen has smudged the paper and there is a long ink trail behind an indecipherable phrase that you must have written in your narcoleptic state, and when you squint, trying to make the words out and salvage some sense of the mess, all you see is a few characters that might be a name, or might not.
It is more difficult at night, lying on the futon in his room, surrounded by glass objects of all shapes and sizes, the reflections of yourself and the surroundings etched behind your eyelids even after you have shut your eyes; you had thought that the number rhymes and snatches of song floating in your mind would lull you into unconsciousness: they always had when you were a child and there was no one else to rock you to bed, but there is always something forgotten, the last word that would complete the rhyme and round off the story. It is then that you rise, walking through the darkened house; all the things that are familiar in the day seem strange to the eye now that he is not there, and you have to touch them to remind yourself that you are real.
You and he were writing a story together: it is a work in progress that you know will be resumed and completed one day, even if only one is left behind to tell it.