into the wiry mane and twisted my fingers through the warm, oily ink.
The swirls dissipated as my fingers slid through, curving away into new clouds.
“Ready?” Tomohiro said, but he didn’t wait for my answer. He kicked in his heels and the horse lurched forward.
I almost fell into its neck. I tangled my hands into the mane and gripped its stomach hard with my legs.
The Yayoi huts blurred around us as we galloped forward.
Tomohiro’s shoulders pressed against mine as his bare arms reached for the mane to steady himself. The humid air pressed against my skin as we raced through Toro Iseki, Tomohiro’s laugh ringing in my ears.
We galloped to the southern edge of forest, where the horse slowed to a trot. He wound through the trees and broke through the other side, where the newer excavations were taking place. I held my breath as the horse narrowly missed the pits in the dirt, the tools sprawled around the site. When we reached the end of the clearing, the back of the Toro Iseki Museum, Tomohiro dug his heels in and the horse turned, galloping north again. We went around so many times that everything blurred, everything but the whizzing of the air as it went past and Tomohiro’s breath against my cheek.
He hadn’t thought to draw any reins or saddle on the horse, but somehow the horse went exactly where Tomohiro wanted him to. Maybe he was right that the horse wasn’t entirely alive but an extension of him. Tomohiro tensed and the horse reacted; he turned his head left and the horse followed. It suddenly hit me how much control he had and how little I did. I had no choice but to trust him, and the feeling left me unsettled.
The horse began to cough and shake with the effort, ink trickling down his white neck like black sweat. Tomohiro halted him by the notebook with no effort. A giant grin plastered on his face, he leaped down and I followed, glad to be on the ground and in control again.
“What did you think?” He laughed, stroking the horse’s nose.
“Amazing,” I said, but anxiety began to spread through my thoughts.
“I should have tried this earlier!”
“Yeah, but you practiced a lot to get to this point.”
“And this is only the beginning of what I can draw,” he said, and I saw in his eyes how giddy he was, how intoxicated by his own ability.
“We should take it slowly,” I said. “Don’t forget what happened to Koji.” He held out his hand and I passed him the folded paper from my pocket. He collapsed on the grass and drew through the picture of the horse with his pen. The scraping sound almost made me sick.
The horse stretched his leg out to the front and lowered his head, resting his muzzle against his hoof. He sighed, a long shudder that rattled through his rib cage, and then his eyes lost the depth of their light. He collapsed on his side and dissolved into swirls of ink, nothing left on the grass but a sheen of oily black.
“Yeah, but I was too young then. Did you see it?” he said.
“It didn’t try to hurt anything. It was entirely under my control.”
“Yeah,” I said, but his tone was making me nervous. “Let’s go have some melon ice to celebrate.” But he didn’t hear me.
He reached into his book bag and pulled out the velvet pouch, shaking the brush and inkwell into his hand.
Shivers ran up the back of my neck. “Tomo.”
He pulled the lid from the ink and dipped in the brush.
“Tomo, stop.” I stared, my skin pulsing with fear, my ears buzzing.
He flipped to a clean page in his notebook, and the bristles of the brush bent backward as he stroked the stark black across the paper. The ink sank in and spread in little tendrils of black, the pigment too thick for the notebook paper. He was like some kind of addict, completely lost to the thrill of it. He wasn’t thinking straight. Whatever control he’d talked about, it was slipping—he’d never acted like this before, at least not with me.
“What are you drawing?” I said, my throat dry.
“You think the horse was amazing,” he said, “but anyone can have that experience. I want to give you something that only Kami can feel. Something others can’t do.”
I watched him draw the expert curves, as if he’d only left calligraphy yesterday. The long strokes snaked across the paper as I desperately tried to guess what he was drawing. What could Kami have that other people couldn’t? My mind raced.
I looked at his face, and his eyes startled me. They looked like the horse’s, thick and ghostly, vacant of anything familiar. The eyes that had stared me down in the courtyard, that had lit up with his bright laugh in the cafe—they were gone, replaced by these alien pools of black that stared down at the paper with intensity.
His hand moved faster and faster, the strokes more and more desperate.
My voice was shaky, and I realized my hands were shaking, too. “Tomo, you’re scaring me.”
“The pen was too weak,” he said, but the voice wasn’t his.
It was raspy, and he panted for breath as he painted faster and faster. “I see that now. It was just the reflection in the water.”
“Stop it,” I said and grabbed the end of the brush. My wrist hit the inkwell and it tipped over, pouring ink down the side of the notebook and onto the grass. But Tomohiro was stronger than me, and he kept drawing as I tried to pull the brush tip off the paper.
“You know what Kami can do?” he said in the raspy and desperate voice that wasn’t his. “What Kami can do but others can’t?”
He dropped his voice to a whisper.
“Fly.”
He was drawing a dragon, long and angular, and it wriggled on the page like a snake, like the scrap I had picked up that day. The sun glinted on its mouth full of shiny teeth and my whole body went cold.
I struggled to snatch the brush from him, but it was like it didn’t take any effort to fight me off No way was I that weak, but it was like Tomohiro suddenly got stronger. A lot stronger. He stared down at the paper with his big, vacant eyes, a horrible grin twisting his lips. And suddenly the dragon’s jaws turned on the page, and with a blur they pushed through the paper and clenched down on Tomohiro’s wrist.
Tomohiro shrieked as he wrenched his arm out of the dragon’s razor teeth. The brush tumbled into the grass, forgotten as he grasped at his wrist. The dragon snapped his paper jaws over and over, just out of reach, while the jagged gash vanished under a torrent of blood, overflowing onto the paper and the ground, onto Tomohiro’s clean white shirt. I screamed and reached for my handkerchief, ramming it against the slash
and pressing until my fingertips turned white. Tomohiro kept shouting and shouting, but I couldn’t hear the words over my own panic. It was like I’d gone deaf or forgotten all my Japanese. I couldn’t make sense of anything he said. His eyes weren’t vacant anymore but wide and filled with terror.
“The kami!” he shouted. “The kami!”
I stared as my handkerchief soaked up the blood, the pretty pattern on it staining a deep crimson.
“The kami!” he shouted again, and it finally registered.
The paper.
Dark clouds unfurled above, and rain pelted the clearing.
Thunder rumbled and flashes of lightning shot through the sky.
“Destroy the drawing!” he shrieked. T he blood leaked through the edges of my handkerchief
I fumbled through the grass for the brush, the rain drenching through my shirt and my hair falling in tangles into my eyes. I screamed as my fingers ran through something wet. I lifted them up-ink.
With my fingers I drew thick lines through the dragon.
“Don’t go near his mouth!” Tomohiro shouted. The drawing snapped at me as I sliced its tail from its body with a thick line of ink. The sketch moved so quickly that my head throbbed to watch. I wasn’t used to it like Tomohiro, and I thought I might throw up. I hesitated, terrified, then drew a line through its rear legs.
Desperate, I ripped the whole page out and crumpled it, tearing it to shreds. But as the scraps fluttered from my hands, I could see the ink moving and twisting on them.
“It’s not working!” I shouted through the thick rain. Tomohiro’s copper hair was flattened to his head in awkward spikes.
