I look at him. Despite everything—the weight in my chest, the twenty-one days and the empty bench and the flowers that haven’t come—something almost like a laugh moves through me. Small and involuntary and real, the kind that surprises you, the kind that feels almost like a betrayal of the grief and then doesn’t.
“That’s your solution,” I say. “Things on sticks?”
“I’ve solved problems with less.” He picks up his keys from the counter with the deliberatefinality of someone who has made a decision and is not reopening it for discussion. “Get dressed. Wear something Japanese. I don’t know what that means, but I feel like you’ll figure it out.”
“Ian.”
“Sophia.”
“What if?—”
“Get dressed.” His voice is gentle now. Stripped of everything except the truth of it. “Please.”
I look at him for one more moment—at the careful hope in his face, the exhaustion underneath it—and I nod and go get dressed.
We find a festival two towns over, a small local bon odori tucked between a parking lot and a shrine, paper lanterns strung in long amber rows between wooden posts, swaying in the last of the summer heat.
We smell it before we see it—yakitori smoke and sugar and something frying in hot oil—and Ian rolls down the car window like a dog on a road trip and says ‘there it is’with such genuine satisfaction that something in me loosens, just slightly, like a knot finding the smallest amount of slack.
It’s not a grand festival. It’s not the kind of thing that makes travel guides. It’s a neighborhood affair, the kind that exists for the people who live there rather than the people who visit, and that makes it better—more real, less performance.
There are children in yukata chasing each other between the stalls. There’s a group of elderly women doing the bon odori dance in practiced, unhurried unison, their movements so familiar to each other they don’t need to look.
Ian buys us both yakitori within approximately fourminutes of arriving, hands me a skewer with the ceremony of someone presenting something important and says“told you”before he’s even taken a bite.
“You’ve literally said nothing that this proves,” I tell him.
“I said things on sticks. These are things on sticks. I’m proven.”
He tries the ring toss. He fails, comprehensively, and then stands at the stall for an additional three minutes constructing a detailed case for structural rigging that involves the wordscoefficient of frictionandconsumer protection lawsand the teenager running the game going from amused to confused to genuinely uncertain whether he should be taking notes.
I watch it happen and feel the laugh building in my chest and let it out, finally, small and real and aching slightly at the edges because laughter that arrives in the middle of fear always does.
“You lost,” I tell him, when he finally concedes.
“I was robbed. There’s a difference.”
He buys me a ceramic swan from a craft stall. Small, glazed white, with an expression of such profound and specific aggression that I laugh again when I see it, the real kind, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and surprised.
“His name is Gerald,” Ian says solemnly.
“You named him?”
“He came with a name. You can feel it.”
I hold Gerald the ceramic aggressive swan and watch the dancers move through their slow, practiced circles. The graceful, disciplined movements remind me of Reth—the way he moves like violence given perfect form, lethal and beautiful at once.
My chest tightens with missing him, with the phantom press of his hands on my hips, the way he’d pin me down and fuck me like the world could burn around us.
I let myself feel the full weight of it without pushing it down. Because Ian is beside me eating his third stick of yakitori and pretending very hard that today is a normal day, and the least I can do is let him pretend. Let this festival be what it is for four hours—paper lanterns and summer heat and the unique grace of people dancing a dance they’ve known their whole lives.
We drive back in the dark with the windows down, the warm late-summer air moving through the car smelling of fields and the faint residue of festival smoke.
Ian has the radio on low, something Japanese, and neither of us speaks. The silence is different from the silence in the kitchen—looser, less weight-bearing. He glances at me once, at a red light, and I look back, and whatever passes between us doesn’t need words. It saysI see you and I know and we’re still hereand that’s enough. It’s enough for the drive home.
3
SOPHIA
