The Shape of a Missing Person

The first was a card player who owed money to half the bunkhouse. His futon was empty one morning, bag gone. Everyone assumed he ran off on the supply boat. An easy story, so everyone believed it.

The second was the elder of the two sisters.

The younger sister woke to find her gone. Her bag was still under the shelf, wages still sewn into the hem of her spare kimono. The poor girl unpicked the stitching in front of everyone, as if the money might explain something. And by the bunkhouse door, set neatly side by side, toes pointing toward the sea, were her sister's sandals.

Nobody had an easy story to believe about that. So nobody said anything at all.

Chiyo carried those sandals around in her head for a week. Then she added a line to the secret page of her diary, crossed it out, and wrote it again.

"People don't leave their sandals," she said to Itsuki on the breakwater, her voice low, though there wasn't a soul within a hundred paces. "And I asked the canteen auntie where all the workers go when their contracts are up. If anyone ever actually sails home rich."

She turned to him, and her quick eyes weren't quick right then. They were just dark. "She smiled at me, Itsuki. She smiled and said, the island provides for everyone. That's all."

The sun was sinking behind him while she talked. Chiyo glanced up against the light, and for a split second there was a rope draped across his shoulders. Fat braided straw, like the kind at the shrine, lying over him like a priest's stole. Then it was gone. Only his collar and the fading sunset.

Get some sleep, Chiyo told herself. You haven't been sleeping. She didn't write that moment down in her notebook. Some things you just don't give ink to, or they may manifest.

Because the strangeness was collecting on him, and she was running out of ways to ignore it. A gutting knife sliced his palm to the bone; she saw it happen; by lunchtime there wasn't even a scar. He wore a bandage for a week anyway, so nobody would ask. She noticed that he hid the healing, and couldn't decide if that made it better or worse.

And twice a day, Mr. Sakaki counted the room until his eyes landed on Itsuki, and stopped there, the way an abacus clicks into place on a final sum.

The second one found Itsuki on a late shift in the boiler room: a young man leaning against the glowing furnace door, inside the heat, comfortable as a cat on a warm wall. He had the same useless beauty as the woman at the well, eyes gleaming like embers, idly rolling a live coal across his bare palm like a chestnut.

"They put you on a line," he said, like the punchline of a joke that had stopped being funny. "Lord of the deep current, gutting mackerel for coins. The whales still sing the grieving-songs for you, do you know that? Ten years now. Come home. What's left for you here? They live a handful of winters and break."

He turned the coal over. "That girl you drink tea with? She's a kagero, my lord. A mayfly. It's the same word we use for the shimmer over hot coals: the name we give to things you can only see because they are already disappearing. Warm your hands at her fire if you want. But you can't keep a kagero. You can only watch it stop."

"Then I'll watch," Itsuki said, his voice not entirely his own. "And you will leave the way you came."

The stoker held the ember up between two fingers. "This has been burning since before your island had a name. It will burn long after the name is forgotten. And in all that time, do you know, it has never once felt warm."

He spoke lightly, in the tone Chiyo reserved for true things, and that was the part Itsuki hated. "That is what home is, my lord. The fire that never ends."

"Your fire never ends," Itsuki countered, "because it isn't cooking anything."

The stoker laughed at that, a real laugh, delight and sorrow together. Then he bowed with a hand over his heart and stepped backward into the open furnace. The coals flared white and settled as if nothing had happened.

Itsuki stood alone in the red dark, fists shaking. Not fear. It was the raw effort of refusing.

He didn't tell Chiyo. Protecting her, he told himself, which is the comforting lie everyone tells. That was his one deception of the summer, and it did what lies do. It grew.

Then the festival arrived: the island's small Bon. Paper lanterns along the harbor, a single drum, one old man singing verses nobody under sixty could follow.

Itsuki danced badly, Chiyo laughed until she had to sit down, and for one whole evening the island did such a perfect impression of an ordinary place that everyone gladly believed it.

Afterward they took a paper lantern down to the waterline for her mother, six years dead, and crouched together in the damp sand, watching the little light bob out toward all the others.

"My grandmother always said the dead ride these lanterns back home," Chiyo said. "I used to think that was the saddest thing I'd ever heard. A whole year away, just one night back, and then right back to the sea again."

The flame inside the paper lantern wobbled, caught its balance, and kept going.

"But maybe that's what makes the one night worth anything," she said quietly. "If she could stay forever, it wouldn't be a visit anymore. She'd just be furniture."

Itsuki looked out at the dark water. "You'd really take one night over forever?"

"I'd take one real night over a forever of pretending." She spoke plainly, watching the little light grow smaller. "Things that end are the only things you can actually hold, Itsuki. Everything else is holding you."

Then she caught herself and snorted. "Two cups of festival sake and suddenly I'm a philosopher."

Kagero, the stoker had called her. And here she was, half a cup in, answering him by accident, and winning.

Whatever the sea took from me, he thought, watching the lantern until he couldn't tell it from the stars on the water, it can keep it. I'd rather have this.

That was the night the fog closed.

The worst part was how quietly it all happened.

The supply boat was due on the seventh. It never arrived. By the ninth, still nothing. The company launch went looking and came back four hours later from the wrong direction; the pilot had held a compass course the whole way, and the fog had turned him around in his own wake like a leaf in a bucket.

The telegraph lines went dead that same week. Storm damage, Mr. Sakaki explained, still smiling his usual smile. But there hadn't been a storm.

A dozen workers rushed the boats one dawn and rowed for the mainland in relays. By afternoon, the fog handed them gently back to the beach, boats and all, like a mother setting down a wandering toddler.

The men refused to talk about the shadow that had kept pace beneath them out there, longer than the hull and the wrong shape for a whale. Nobody said anything.

Chiyo asked Itsuko point-blank on the breakwater, because sideways wasn't working anymore.

"Have you been here before? Before the boat."

"No," he said simply. Then, because it was her, he pushed past the easy answer. "But nothing here surprises me, Chiyo. Not the lanes, not the weather, not even how the natives treat me. It's like reading a letter I wrote and forgot writing. I don't know what that means. I'd tell you if I did."

"Okay," she said.

And that night she wrote the line again: I believe him. That's the strange part.

Itsuki loved her by then. He figured it out the way you notice the tide has turned: everything was moving the other way, and had been for a while.

The third one came on a night of warm rain, out on the breakwater.

A child sat alone on the wet stones: a little boy in an old-fashioned white robe, bare feet tucked under him, hair flat from the rains. He was crying the way children cry when they've given up on anyone coming: quietly, in a steady rhythm, like work.

Itsuki crouched down beside him without thinking. "Hey. Hey, where's your—"

"Please eat," the child sobbed. Up close his face had the same beautiful, freezing detachment as the others, and his tears fell the wrong way: thin silver lines running upward into the rain.

"Please, lord. It's been ten years. The lamp is almost dry. If you won't take what's yours, the door will close, and you'll have to go back down, where nothing has hands."

"Gods don't get to stay the way people stay. People stay held. People get their graves swept, a lantern once a year, someone who still does their laugh at dinner. That's what keeps a dead person somebody."

"Nobody sweeps a god's grave. We don't get graves. We just stop being believed, and the sea forgets our name, and then—"

He screwed his small fists into his eyes. "I don't want the deep to go dark again. They're already bringing it to you. All you have to do is not refuse. Eat."

"Bringing what?" Itsuki asked, his mouth going dry. "What are they bringing?"

But the child only cried, up into the rain, until the next wave's spray washed through him, and there was nothing but the open sea.

All you have to do is not refuse. Eat.

In the morning, notices in Mr. Sakaki's beautiful brush hand appeared on every door:

In gratitude for a prosperous season, all workers are invited to a ceremony of thanksgiving at the hill shrine. The night of the new moon. Attendance will be taken.

Chiyo found him reading it. She slid her hand into his for the first time: chapped fingers, a grip as firm as a sailor's.

"Whatever this is," she said, very quietly, "we will stay together. Promise me."

"I promise," Itsuki said.

That was the second lie he told her. He didn't know it yet, which is the only kind of excuse a liar ever gets.