Atsushi is born of sin. Throughout her entire life, this has been an irrevocable fact. Her existence, flesh straining over frail bones, and an aching stomach, is inherently immoral. Before she’d even exited the womb, Atsushi sunk her toothless gums into an apple, beguiled by a golden fanged serpent. She is hapless, dull-nailed and blunt-toothed, wailing but she is also sacrilegious. Behind her ribs, it burns like hell. Between her teeth, she clenches her soul, trying to wring out whatever foul part of herself that makes the headmaster and everyone else detest her so much.
But no matter how hard Atsushi tries, it’s never enough. Vomiting acid and blood, fragmenting bones, a hammer, a nail, and her foot crushed and molded to splintering wood, and it’s never enough. She’s had both blood and water and agony in her lungs and still, she is a vile affront to nature but the headmaster, the nuns, and the priests still tell her that it is never enough.
“Do you want to play kemari with me?”
Atsushi doesn’t even lift her forehead from her knees. If she clutches her arms tight enough around her legs, she thinks it almost feels as if somebody else is hugging her. The voice is whimsical and floating like pink clouds, but Atsushi knows nobody is talking to her. Yet, she feels a dainty hand push gently at her knee.
“Hello?” She hears.
Before the greeting has even finished, Atsushi’s head is flying up. Touch is never a gentle thing. Hands on her skin spell punishment. Before Atsushi even knows her sin, her gaze is contrite. Her lips, bitten raw, open and shut, preparing apologies. “I – I’m sorry?”
“Wanna play kemari with me?” The girl repeats. Atsushi understands the words yet they still feel like gibberish. Honey seeping into lavender irises flicker as Atsushi sucks in a trembling breath and just stares. The heels of her hands press into her calves and fingers lock, tucking her legs in tighter. Fluffy and shoulder-length black hair wild around a cherub face and determined brown eyes. Plush cheeks etched with pink offsetted by a petulant pout on rosy lips. A foot nudges Atsushi’s own, but it doesn’t feel like violence. It feels determined and certain. “You. I’m asking if you want to play with me!” The girl’s arm is curled around a ball that Atsushi has had thrown at her many times, but never actually played with.
This is a new face. Atsushi’s lips press together. Of course. This girl doesn’t understand. “You should play with somebody else,” Atsushi mumbles in spite of the way her heart aches. “Anyone other than me.”
Almost as soon as Atsushi's words finish, she receives, “Shut up. I’m asking you to play, dummy.”
Air is held captive in Atsushi’s chest. Gobsmacked, she nods and scrambles up.
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Her name is Miyuu. They play and play anytime Atsushi is actually permitted to spend time outdoors with the other children. Always in tucked away corners, secretive allowances of childhood absent of reality and brutality. Within these simple moments Atsushi feels nothing more than a girl rather than a sin. Under the veil of night, Atsushi can clutch her clasped fist to her chest and rasp, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In fading sunsets, Atsushi will toss and kick a ball with Miyuu and strive to be as good a girl like her can be. Like letters flown by pigeons, Atsushi keeps those moments bloodily clutched between her ribs, below her heart but never received.
With her ankle angled outwards, Atsushi nudges her foot forward, sending the weathered ball back to Miyuu. Gossip about boys (which, honestly, Atsushi cannot relate to, considering Miyuu is the only person her age that chats with her) flows between them. “Isamu is dumb,” Atsushi says, “He’s missing out. He didn’t want to kiss you! That’s dumb.” Focusing on her feet while awaiting the ball to be sent back to her, Atsushi continues, “I’d kiss you.”
When the ball isn’t sent back to her, Atsushi looks up. Miyuu’s expression is tight. Almost uncomfortable, if Atsushi had to guess. A strained chuckle is what Miyuu eventually gives her after a long silence, her feet firmly planted on the ground, leaving the ball stationary. “That’s kind of weird, Atsushi,” she replies, “Girls don’t kiss girls.”
Miyuu doesn’t play with her anymore after that.
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Fingers stretch tight over a cup of genmacha tea. Normally Atsushi gets coffee but for some reason when she was asked what she had wanted, Atsushi said genmacha tea and when the drink had arrived, she’d added a few cubes of sugar. Across the table, Yosano pierces her fork into a delicate and delicious slice of cheesecake. “We don’t get many chances to have breaks together, huh?” Yosano notes.
Her tea is still too hot and it scalds her tongue, but Atsushi takes a sip. “We don’t,” she agrees, her voice cracking.
“We should do it more often. Us girls need to stick together, you know?”
Atsushi’s breath hitches. The rim of her cup is still pressed to her lips and Atsushi swallows another gulp, dribbling liquid from the corners of her mouth before firmly setting her cup down as she chokes. She’s a mess, as always. Mouth wet and drooling as she coughs into a weak fist before wiping her mouth. Fuck. Coffee is so much better than this shit. Why does Akutagawa like it so much? Her tongue is scalding, but in the drink, Atsushi feels as though she tastes Akutagawa. “Y-yeah,” Atsushi agrees. Her gaze dips down to a drink that Atsushi doesn’t even like but had ordered anyway. Her voice is quiet as she asks, “I heard you talking to Ranpo about a date, recently. How was it?”
Atsushi doesn’t lift her gaze from the still and stagnant liquid of her drink. So she doesn’t see Yosano’s soft eyes and bemused smile before the doctor answers, “It was good. We only got coffee together since it was our first date. I like to keep things casual in the beginning and ease into it. She was nice, though. We’ve already made plans for a second date.”
She, she, she. Atsushi’s mind latches and claws onto the simple word, maiming it into tatters. Three simple letters strung into one mundane word that makes her feeble heart rupture. Her knobby fingers clutch desperately tight onto her cup. If Atsushi isn’t careful, it’ll shatter. Simmering in her fawn bones is a tiger’s brawn. The beast of the Earth cloaked by the flesh of a girl. A tiger caged, sinew taunt, and a girl flinches. Three inch fangs ache to pursue the tender flesh of a woman’s throat and a girl extinguishes her carnivorous heart, burning and aching.
Girls don’t kiss girls. “How,” Atsushi begins, suffocating on her words. Her sentence dies off and eyes saturated with shame flicker down to stare at her lap. A jumbled question floats and rattles in her skull but Atsushi doesn’t know what she actually wants to ask.
“Atsushi,” Yosano says and as if a leash is tugging at Atsushi’s throat, she looks back up. Magenta eyes are melting soft and Atsushi just simply thinks she doesn’t deserve the kindness she receives from Yosano’s gaze. Were Atsushi’s body fashioned out of stone then Yosano’s look is a forgiving pickaxe. Chipping its way to nothing, because Atsushi houses neither diamonds nor opals. She’s just wasted effort. When Yosano says, “It’s okay,” Atsushi crumbles with gentleness.
“I think I like girls,” Atsushi blurts. Instead of feeling relieved with the admission, her chest feels tight. It’s not an abnormal sensation for her. Oftentimes, Atsushi is rife with anxiety. “Sometimes, I – I like boys. I’ve found a few cute. But I… I think the same thing about girls.” Her face twist up from the pain of saying it. Crushes are not abnormal for Atsushi. She can catch eyes with the charming barista who hands her a coffee, brushing fingers, and wonder how it’d feel to hold his hand. She can nudge shoulders with Lucy and daydream about snuggling beneath a blanket with her while watching some dumb American sitcom Atsushi doesn’t understand.
She can lay awake in her closet and wonder if Akutagawa kisses as brusquely as the woman speaks. If Akutagawa’s mouth is curt or ravenous. If Akutagawa's fingers would brand like a red-hot iron poker because Akutagawa just takes, takes, takes, without abandon and Atsushi has always admired that about her. How Akutagawa’s shoulders never bow despite the weight of this cruel world they’re both subject to, bearing savagely down onto them. How she bites and claws and fights, much more a beast than Atsushi is.
It’s breathtaking. It’s bewitching. It’s religious.
Yosano asks patiently, “So you like men and women?”
Atsushi leans back in the booth. She doesn’t dare look at Yosano across the table from her, as her fingers trail around the rim of her cooling tea, not even half gone. “I think so,” she whispers.
Her mind still whispers, girls don’t kiss girls. It screams, repent! Like a belt cracking on her back. A hand curls around one of her own. Slowly, it squeezes. “It’s okay,” Yosano repeats, robbing Atsushi’s eyes of clarity as they mist. “Atsushi, it’s okay.”
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Atsushi’s actions are a silent language. The way her bitten nails scratch at the nape of Akutagawa’s neck is syntax. Her fumbling hands are stammering words and swallowed sentences. But Atsushi has always been a wanting and wretched creature. Even if she didn’t deserve life, she clung onto it anyway. Even the runt of the litter tries to suckle at its mother’s teat, thirsty to live.
Unabashed, Akutagawa bites. Never before has the woman found it shameful to live. She just is, and she always will be, and should she die, it was simply survival of the fittest. Akutagawa’s palm is a steady weight on Atsushi’s hip. Her touch is not always kind but it is always enough. The tips of Akutagawa’s fingers pen poetry, seared into Atsushi’s flesh.
Atsushi knows. That, from now on, whenever she stands naked in front of the mirror in her bathroom and looks at herself bared, she’ll always see the ink of Akutagawa’s touch more predominantly than the striped rows of burn scars on her abdomen.
“You’re stupid,” Akutagawa murmurs, hushed beneath the heaviness of this room with only the two of them in it, hidden beneath a comforter. Atsushi can barely hear her over the noise of a tunnel fan. Curtains block out the setting sun.
“Why am I stupid?”
Akutagawa lurches forward and Atsushi thinks the weight of the woman on top of her is more comforting than the blanket ever will be. Against Atsushi’s mouth, Akutagawa rasps, “You just are.”