"It's your turn Seishin."
At the foot of the shrine, I looked up the flight of hundreds of stairs to the top, where the Kamidana looked as if it was a birdhouse perched atop the steep incline. My legs were already aching from where I stood, weighted with shackles, and shame.
"He's beautiful." It couldn't be denied. The priest was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, carrying a heavy iron pot of water, and a small scoop with a long handle. He tipped my chin up with a finger, but I cast my eyes downwards so he couldn't see the devil in me.
"Bring his hands to the front." I smirked as he dipped the finger that had touched me into the pot of water, cleansing the residue of me away. He took the water up in the scoop and poured it over both my hands, letting it run to the cobblestone ground from the tips of my fingers. I took pity on the priest. I was far too soiled, and I would never again be clean.
"Come into the shrine, child."
Every step I took rang through every bone in my body. My weight was tremendous as I climbed, my muscles like frayed rope unwilling to flex and burning with pain. The samurais marched behind me unwavering, and I felt as if I had been sentenced to an exorcism. I prayed to myself for the Kami to be kind to the demons in me once they were erased. They were part of me, I had first trapped them within me but I had loved them. I had learned to love them dearly as if they would wrap their tangled limbs around my heart and my soul deep within me, and give me a kind existence. Now they would be wrenched from me, as they would dig their talons into my flesh to hang on.
My breath came raggedly as I placed my foot upon the last of the stairs. The air was still and thick, humid with the melting snow and break of spring. Nothing moved, and no sound would travel if I would scream. The shrine had somehow grown large enough to accommodate my party and the party already within, somewhere along the way while I bid the evil farewell. No longer a simple birdhouse, the shrine seemed to breathe with life and expected power. Two men were seated inside, in priest's attire, and as the priest before me joined them to make three. You'll need more than this small army to rid this body of impurities, I thought.
A rough hand atop my head steered me to a corner of the shrine. My gaze slid to the corners of my eyes to catch the scene. The priests fed the fire under boiling water. Air bubbles rushed to the surface and exploded like bombs, echoing in the stillness so loud I reached to shield my ears, and when the fire was out of my view, I was a child scared and hopeless. The sultry in me dissipated, the beauty gave me no confidence, and my coarseness meant nothing. In a house of God, I was a worm.
I was forced to my knees before the fire, all I could hear was the rumble of the boiling water. One of the priests looked down his nose at me, as if setting his holy gaze on me directly would turn him to stone. My eyes burned, trying to ferment him. Swiftly, his fingertips threw water from the pot onto my face, the droplets scalding where they touched. I shook my head to dull the sting, reduced once again, I thought, a dog. A worm.
"A sacrifice for purity." The priest scoffed the words as if he was embarrassed. "What a shallow practice for Shinto. Unbind him."
It was my chance to hold my head up. I pulled the closure of my kimono open to expose my chest and spread my arms wide, offering my vulnerability. "I'm the worst creature in history." I said, without shame, without hesitation. "I alone can save Shinto from becoming shallow with my purification."
Another one of the priests grasped the collar of my kimono from behind me, and stripped it from my skin. A ghostly whisper of air passed through the shrine, crawling along the length of me as I was pulled to lay backward on the floorboards. A shiver passed through me as if the cold had settled on me and would sink in. My wrists were bound again, above my head, and I couldn't move my arms no matter how my muscles burned. My gaze darted frantically without my conscious effort, drinking in as much of the situation as I could, trying to calm my mind and my breath racing.
I had never doubted those devils in me, I never caged them, I never shut them out of reason. But they had fled from me in that moment where their torture of my mind was threatened. There was nothing left for me to do but laugh. I laughed for my exposure, for the corruption that I had become. I laughed for the child of me that died when I first opened my eyes to the world. Then, I laughed louder, louder, until that laughter was swallowed by fear, and became a scream.
The priest took up a cup of the boiling water from the large pot, and through the shreds of my voice breaking, I could hear him chant. The water came down on me like a fall from the highest point of a mountain, tearing my flesh to blisters. Burning like the rage in me. And I screamed all the more. Again it came down, like a rain of fire. Again, I screamed for my soul.
"Yamerou!" Stop this, because you're mad. I ceased my screams at the shout of the voice, as I saw the three priests turn to the doorway.
The shape of the samurai became clear, the edges hardening into a concrete form as he crossed the floor. The whimpers of my company came like dogs as they were shoved aside, thrown away from me. A slap of a katana against the ground, and the muscles in my arms could relax.
"I want nothing more than to see you tortured for that comment you passed to me and damage you've done to my integrity." His fist closed around the closure of my kimono, lifting my upper body from the stone floor. My head fell back with the weight of my damp hair. "But I've been handed a large sum of money to throw you out."
The samurai turned his attention to the priests. "This kind of torture is below you. Below even dogs on the streets. This creature is not worth the good name you will sacrifice with him."
I was a rag doll pulled to my feet, forced to stagger into the outside world far from the dark sanctuary of the torment. I could have remained motionless on the floor, and been shown love. I could have, because the stones of the prison didn't reflect my face like the floorboards of my room, and there was no reminder to feel regret or guilt. There would have been nothing except the pleasure I made, the desire I controlled.
The samurai pushed my back against the outside wall of the prison with the hold he had on my kimono, stepping in to follow the force of my impact. "You should run." He told me. "I won't give the bribe back if someone drags you in here again, and I won't give you another chance."
I rolled against the wall, out from under his invading presence, pressing my palms against the wall and sliding my gaze sparingly parallel to my shoulder. The air was fresh, I could feel it course through me from where I drew breath to the very ends of my body. Energy. Stability. Borrowed from the earth to walk rooted and challenge the elements. I slipped away, covered by the shrouding of clouds over the sky.
"Get out of my room." I paid no attention to the form of her, the features of her face, as the back of my hand connected with her. She tumbled to the floor, keeping her head down, shielded from my view. I continued to walk past her, unconcerned if she remained in discipline.
"My apologies Seishin-sama, I didn't expect you to come back after I saw the samurai arrest you." Out of the corner of my scorching gaze, I could see her drawing her appendages inwards, gathering the excesses of her kimono.
The fire was burning to boil the water in my tea pot, steam escaping from the spout, on the brink of boiling dry. They all looked the same to me. I didn't know who she was, or where in my life she fit. I knew that every woman in Edo had visited me in my room, they all knew where to find me and they all knew my terms of service. They thought they had no reason to fear me when they sought my company. All they saw was the lonely soul masking the monster inside.
"Then why are you here if not for me?"
I couldn't see through her thickly made up lashes, the black outlining the shape of her eyes. She kept herself from me in a way that few ever did, masking that it meant there was something more than just seduction in her eyes. I was beautiful. It was easy to mistake that for love. "What did they do to you?" She asked, timidly, ashamed of her concern.
My attention was drawn to the tea pot, the white steam billowing from the spout, signalling that there was purity inside to burn away the demons in the world. The knock of porcelain against the wood floor seemed to echo as she put a second cup down beside the first, implying that she was inviting me to drink with her, though she was a guest in my home. The world slowed, the sounds echoed, and my heart began to race in anticipation.
"They tried to love me." I smiled at her, the sweetest smile I could bear to show, while my hands reached for her and her body seemed to be pulled with my invisible force. "Just like you. Because they wanted to control me." Intimidate. Terrify. Overpower. All the things done to me, I would now return.
Her chest rose to my touch as my fingertips tangled with her hair. Her eyes closed as they slid barely touching the side of her face. Her head tipped as I grazed the tendon in her neck, and came to rest upon the curve of her collar bone, her skin stretched so thinly. My mind left me, and simplicity took hold of the void it created in my instinct, the flesh I craved was the only thing I could see. The taste, as I ran my tongue over it, from the closure of her kimono back to the base of her neck, swallowed me. And I let it all go. The full moon was watching me through the part in the curtain, and as I could drink it in from the tired slit of my eye, anger painted the night over in red.
While my tongue traveled, her fingers reached to grasp the kimono at my chest, letting her weight lower to the floor and pulling me with her. Swiftly, I matched the grip she had on me, pressing my weight into her chest and watching as her eyes became confused and clouded. "Seishin?"
"Nai, koi." No, dear. "Yasashii ai o misenai yo." I won't show you sweet love.
I leaned down over her, my knees pressing against the floor on both sides of her hips, pressing in the parallel lines of the floor. We were parallel, her and I. We were monsters, one and the same. We both wanted the same thing. Beauty. The only difference was that she wanted me to show her a beautiful way to live, and I wanted to give her a beautiful way to die. She wanted me to show her beautiful pleasure, and I was a sexual disgrace.
Arching my back, letting my hands slide across the floor next to her body, I could feel her hips raise to my falling weight. I smirked, and let some slight of laughter slip through me. Her hands became desperately clinging to the folds of my kimono at my sides, as she tried to pull me straight through her body, to trap me inside her soul. She wanted to paralyze me before I could wrap her in my web.
So easily, she had me. She knew where to push and pull, she knew what she craved and not for the first time, I was made a slave. As every sigh escaped me, as every muscle began to ache, so too did my anger grow and it coiled around me to bind me to that pleasure.
I wrenched myself from her, moving like mist, surrounding her and choking out the life without another word spoken. I could feel the skin of my face pulse crimson as I threw down her lifeless body. I planted my feet flat on the floor, bending my knees, and draped my hands over them. Blood dripped from my fingertips onto the floor, and I reached down with a finger to spread it out, forming characters and spelling out prayers. I laughed when I was finished my game, shaking my hair out of my face. I tugged at a corner of my lip with a tooth, scraping off the blood that had dried there, tasting the iron in it.
"Where are you?" I let my head drop. "This is all because of you."
I had fought for everything. I peered out over the windowsill, every muscle aching. Looking back, the night carried on as if my life had never been tested, but they would come for me. They would hunt for me, and when they found me they would rain torment on me to be sure that my limbs would ache more than my desire to run, and my heart would beat so shallow every ounce of energy would be wasted in breath. There were moments while that night poured on where I thought I would help them. I thought I would hurt myself, bleed myself dry. But I had fought. There was reasoning somewhere in my mind, somewhere hidden and far away, and I reached through the window waiting for something to touch me.
Radiance.
Elegance.
Wrapped into something inside of me that would never escape. It left me floating, melting, burning all at once, and I lost my sight. I lost my beauty. I lost my way. I lost the light that let me wander through the dark of my mind. I wondered what love was, why I had been let to feel it, why I had become a slave to it. And all these memories slept soundly behind my eyes as I woke, to the blinding rush of a day that meant nothing. But I tapped the gate of the shrine all the same, I prayed like I had never a reason to. I spoke to a spirit me so it would find me.
The silence around me was drowning, the greenery pressing, all into a crevasse of my waking that would somehow destroy me. "I won't come back for you." I folded my fingers together, the sweat between my palms sliding, an effort to keep my comfort. "I'm taking you, and I'm staying here, and you're going in my place." The wind shook the bell, and I felt it course through me, the vibrations of the anger from above me and within me. But I was for myself. And always had been.
"Because you're pure."
"And I should die here."
Things that would forever elude me.