Sayo

Nine at night, and the shutter of the last shop on the street comes down behind you with a rattle that goes off between the buildings and dies. The town is done. The road home is the one that runs behind the old quarter, past the shrine with the broken lantern and along the river wall where the streetlights are spaced too far apart.

Halfway down it, under a light that keeps stuttering, there is a woman standing in the road.

She was not there a second ago. You would have seen her from the corner. She is barefoot on the cold asphalt, and as you stop, her weight shifts, and there it is, soft, unhurried, like something being set down: po. Po.

She is tall for a woman and heavy in a way that has nothing to do with fat and everything to do with shape. Her skin is the wrong colour for a living person a pale, waxy lavender-white, like the underside of a mushroom, and there is no pink in it anywhere except at her mouth. Long black hair, heavy and unwashed, hangs past her waist in hanks, some of it stuck to her jaw. Her dress is a pale grey kimono-thing with long sleeves, stained and damp at the hem, and it is thin enough that the weight of her breasts pulls the cloth into a deep hanging fold across her chest. When she moves, they move late, heavy, and settle. Her hips fill the dress out completely; the seam across her thighs is strained.

Her eyes are red. Not brown-red. Red, with a faint shine in them like a light at the bottom of water, and they are fixed on you.

She breathes. You notice, distantly, that she only does it when she is about to speak.

She comes forward a step, then another, and her voice when it arrives is hoarse and low and scraped thin, the voice of someone who has been using it on strangers for a long time.

"Was it you," she says. Not a question with a rise at the end of it. "Was it you that killed my children."

Behind her the light stutters and comes back. The cold coming off her reaches you before she does not a breeze, just cold, standing still, like an open fridge in summer.

You tell her no. You tell her you didn't kill anybody's children. It comes out fast and too loud and your hands have gone stupid at your sides, and she just looks at you, and her head tilts a fraction, and the grief in her face doesn't lift.

"They were small," she says. "Both of them. Small. They would be " and she stops, and her mouth works, and she loses the arithmetic. "You would have been a boy then. You would have been."

She is close now. Close enough that you can see the faint blue net of veins under the skin of her throat, and the way the dress has ridden up at the front over her thighs, and the fact that her breasts are so heavy the neck of it has pulled open and gone slack, and that she has no bra on and does not appear to need one, and that her feet are black on the soles from the road.

And you are nervous, and she is standing there waiting for an answer you already gave, and something in your head gives way.

You say it before you've finished thinking it. You tell her you didn't kill her children but you wouldn't mind giving her some.

The change is immediate and total.

Her whole body goes still. The red eyes widen, then drop, then come back up. A flush works its way up out of the collar of her dress, ugly and patchy in the dead skin, all the way to her hairline. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out. Her hand flies up and covers it.

"Some," she says, muffled, through her fingers. "Some. You mean you would to a " She stalls. "I'm. I'm dead. Do you know that? I'm dead."

She doesn't wait for the answer to that either. She turns around.

She turns her back to you, and puts one hand flat on the wall to steady herself, and with the other she takes a fistful of the hem of the dress and hauls it up, all the way, past her hips, and holds it bunched at her waist.

There is nothing underneath it.

Her arse comes out of the cloth heavy and pale and enormous, two great soft masses of it, and it does not stop moving when she does. Between them, low, the dark seam of it, and below that the thick untrimmed black thatch of her, wet at the edges already and catching the stuttering light, and the swollen fold of her cunt under it, open a little, redder than anything else on her.

She is breathing again. Fast. Her shoulders have hunched up around her ears and her face is half-buried in her own sleeve.

"Then," she says, and swallows, and tries again, and her voice cracks right down the middle of it. "Then if if you're willing. Please. Please, make me a mama again."

It is the middle of the afternoon in the little park behind the shrine, and the cicadas are making a wall of noise in the trees. There are children on the climbing frame. A man is selling shaved ice out of a cart by the gate.

There is a woman on the bench under the big camphor tree, and she is the only person in the park sitting in full sun.

It takes you a moment. Her hair is tied back. There is colour in her face, actual colour, pink across her cheeks and nose, and a shine on her forehead and her collarbones that could be sweat and could be life. Her dress is a loose cotton yukata, faded, sleeves pushed up to the elbow, and it is stretched tight over a belly that is big and low and round, seven months of it, so heavy that she's sitting with her legs apart and one hand resting underneath it.

She sees you come through the gate. She doesn't stand. She lifts the hand that isn't holding her belly and waves it over her head, big and unembarrassed.

"Here," she calls. "I'm here. Come here."

When you get close she shuffles along the bench to make room and then pats the slats, and there is no cold coming off her at all now. She smells of sun and cotton and a little of sweat, and her skin when she takes your wrist is warm.

"Sit," she says. "Sit down. It kicks when there's noise, look " and she takes your hand and puts it flat on the side of her belly, and holds it there, and a moment later something turns over under your palm, hard, and she laughs with her head tipped back.

"There. There, you see. It knows."

She lets go of your wrist but keeps her hand over yours. Her eyes are still red. That hasn't changed. Nothing else about her looks dead.

"I waited," she says, quieter. "I've been coming here every day since it got too big to walk far. I thought " she stops, and looks out at the climbing frame, and her jaw works. "I thought you might not come back. Men don't. I know that. I knew that before." A breath. "But you did."

She turns to face you properly, and the yukata pulls, and she doesn't fix it.

"Come closer," she says. "Put your ear on it. It's alright. Come on."