| | Snakeskin, Part I: Ten Years Before. There are only so many Oracles left. “So that’s it, then?” Kaketsu’s words had been as cold as they were colorless. “You’re going to just let that boy, that wretched man-witch Sakon, ruin your life by raping you? What good will that ever do you in life? What are you gonna put on your resume in ten years? ‘Hi, my name’s Ren, and at the age of fourteen I let a boy with his brother’s living head hanging from his back screw me against my will?’ That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.” “Kaketsu,” Ren hissed impatiently, tapping her fingernails on the surface of the glass table. The maroon polish that she had applied several nights before had begun to chip, and Kaketsu could just imagine her younger sister’s dignity cracking like that nail paint under the wrath of Sakon. “There’s never going to be an ‘in ten years,’ for us. There’s never gonna be a ‘what are you gonna put on your resume?’ There’s gonna be an eternal tenth-grade education for you and a neverending amount of periods waiting for me. Everyone wins.” “And suppose you hadn’t gone on that walk with me on my seventeenth birthday,” Kaketsu said, a hint of bitterness tainting the tone of his words. “Suppose that I hadn’t suggested that we take a shortcut through the woody area of the park to get back home. Suppose we hadn’t been bitten by that snake, the Chishikiyoku. If that hadn’t happened, if we weren’t planted with this curse, you would probably be dead. No doubt that you’d still be raped by that repulsive shade, Sakon.” He bit his nail nervously. “You’d probably have gone through Hara-kiri by now.” “You would have attempted suicide, as well, and you would have done a damn good job of accomplishing it, too,” Ren remarked, slamming the table with the side of her fist, “because you’re just the average Emo kid, plus a dosage of immortality and just the slightest hint of rapidly growing bloodlust. And then the murder you got away with so long ago—“ “Ren-chan, I don’t like to argue, because I don’t like to lose, but,” Kaketsu ripped a dry tear of flesh off his cuticle with his teeth, “bringing light to the darkest corners of my past might as well set Hellfire shooting out of tiny cracks in the sidewalk. Please, let’s discontinue our quarrel. I love you like the blood in my veins, and I don’t want to risk the friendship of our siblinghood by cracking it any further.” “Alright.” The word echoed into a white-hot silence that burned Kaketsu’s ears. “But I don’t want to hear anything bad about Sakon from you, even if he is my eternal tormentor. Behind that screen of smoke and that curtain of hair there’s a nice guy, I know; I just have to keep him on his good side and out of that mood and that nice guy will come out.” Of course, Kaketsu thought, bitter humor tainting his downbeat nature with a rush of skewed optimism, his idea of his “good side” is the side that comes out when he wants both your body and your love more than anything else, little sister. And, I’m not one to talk. I love my boyfriend to death, and I’ve always been sweet to him and all, (or so I’ve heard,) but when I get in “that mood,” as little Ren-chan so kindly puts it…I feel as though I could suck his lips dry in one go. Maybe I’m wrong to scold her. The reluctant voice of his subconscious, his misplaced sanity, echoed through his head, the voice that disapproved of him seeing other men, and told him to stop thinking like that. Kaketsu-danna, if you’re so eager to do that to someone, why don’t you just find yourself a girlfriend? Don’t taint your already blackened holiness with such nonsense. And to this comment his insanity replied, even the most reliable voices of my mind back away when they learn of the beast within that is so truthfully called a bisexual. He snorted. Ren, now looking through a pile of crumpled papers, only offered him one glance of bewilderment before she went back to her work. She seemed so out of place, so bored, now that she had stopped aging, and Kaketsu couldn’t help but feel pity for her. You’re just too young to understand how the mind of a true adult works. He thought back to something someone had once said. Was it “fourteen is an age where you’re too old to be called a girl but too young to be called a woman?” Yes, that seemed about right, if not distorted over the years. Kaketsu’s head swung to the right as a sudden, almost brain-scrambling premonition stabbed his mind with baffling thoughts. It was only a fragment of time, (of a story, I should say, Kaketsu thought with a hint of fright in the voice of his mind,) a wisp of time to come, but even to this day he could remember it quite clearly: the kissing, the bleeding, the repetitive “I love you” dripping from the lips of his sister—he couldn’t believe that God had given him that, of everything important, to ponder upon. Ren must have recognized the total drain of color in his eyes, the milky pink that replaced the gemlike voids of his optic nerve, because when Kaketsu woke from the vision, this frightening dream that would come true, in time, he found her towering over his crouched body, squeezing her hips with her hands. “Oh, Kaketsu-san, you’re done, and you still look horrible. What is it this time, the apocalypse? Did the local Daimyo drop a bomb on North Korea?” “No,” Kaketsu whispered, nearly choking on his words, “but I believe that Sakon’s actions were more out of love than of desire.” Ren narrowed her eyes. “I wish I knew what you mean, but I’m completely clueless. You need to stop speaking in riddles, and if you do I might just stop asking you what you’re trying to say every time you choke on the future.” She tugged on the bangs of her hair. “What I’m trying to say, Ren-chan,” Kaketsu said, stumbling twice as he attempted to rise off his bottom, “is that, in the long run, your puppy love with Sakon will grow to be more than just a game.” “Aw, Kaketsu, I think you’re overreacting,” she chided, helping him to his feet. “After all, you’re always fussing over something ‘important’ after you wake from your visions.” |
