Aberrant: 200X - Two Vignettes: Mourning and Bitter Regret

[Aušrinė]

A cemetery in Vilnius, Lithuania

A woman walks purposefully between rows of tombstones, looking neither right nor left; her eyes distant yet very focused. She is, to all appearances (even ones relying on so-called ‘quantum senses’) a baseline, but even in this age of nova demigods she is extraordinarily beautiful, if not quite superhumanly so. The difference, however, is slight enough that a few of the other mourners she passes on her way through the cemetery wonder to themselves if she isn’t, perhaps, a nova herself. Whether the woman is or not (perhaps she is simply ‘dorming’, as they call it), she is beautiful, and her presence in the graveyard is like an angelic visitation.

She carries a small bouquet of snowball bush flowers with her as she walks. They were her mother’s favorite. The sky above her is overcast today – that non-color that doesn’t quite qualify as white, gray, bruised, or anything really. It is just the color of clouds that have forgotten what they are. As the senile clouds descend they push aside the sky below them, causing a cold wind to blow that makes the woman’s hair float about her head in strands and curls, and that causes the snowball bushes in her hands to flutter and thrum like the wings of many troubled butterflies. The woman, her beauty ethereal against the drabness all around her, pushes some wayward curls of her long auburn hair out of her eyes with one hand and there she sees it: her target, a large headstone, obviously marking the final place of rest for more than a single person. Two persons is likeliest.

Picture her as she reaches the headstone and stops before it, like a person who has reached the end of their endurance, not their journey. See her face and the expression on it as she drops gracefully to her knees before the gravestone that has captured all her attention until it has become her entire world in this moment. Imagine, if you can, the weight of the bouquet of snowball flowers in her hands as she places it on the well-trimmed grass before the headstone in place of a burden she cannot let go of. Read with her the words engraved into the cold surface of the gravestone: Here lie Daina Vasiliauskiene and Kastytis Vasiliauskas, inseparable in death as they were in life. They were the very best parents a daughter could ask for.

Turn your attention away now, for Aušrine Vasiliauskiute is crying, and it is unseemly to stare at those in mourning.

[Kazuo]

A small apartment, Shinjuku special ward, Tokyo, Japan

The apartment is small, even by the standards of Japan. The woman seated at the low table in the center of it is drifting slowly into her later years. Looking at her now, it is obvious that she was attractive in her youth, but there is a hardness to the edges and lines of her face now that saps whatever beauty might otherwise have remained. But for that hardness, and a weariness that informs her face and body at all levels like a terminal condition, there is little remarkable about her.

She holds a cigarette to her mouth with one hand and a letter over the table’s top with the other. A bowl of ramen noodles sits nearby, slowly going cold, the noodles expanding even more slowly as they absorb ever more moisture. All around the woman is her apartment, which is tidy but somehow not quite clean. An ashtray shares table space with the bowl of noodles and it is filled almost to overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes, though not a speck of ash litters the table itself. There are also a number of beer bottles in the apartment; most of them gathered around the kitchen’s sink, but a few still sitting where they were last left on various flat surfaces around the apartment, one of them, with some liquid still inside, also sharing table space with the ashtray and ramen bowl.

The woman regards the letter in her hand with an expression that is one part hopefully expectant, one part regretfully sad, and two parts bitterly disdainful. She pulls her cigarette from her mouth so that she can blow an exasperated cloud of smoke into the apartment’s close air and takes to tapping the letter forcefully against the tabletop. She does this for a few moments until she becomes annoyed at the noise, as though it were someone else’s hand repeatedly thumping the envelope’s corner into the table and not her own. She slaps the rectangle of paper down with restrained violence and frustration and runs her now-free hand through her frizzy, salt-and-pepper hair as she stares out a window at something that, judging from the look in her eyes, she wishes she couldn’t see.

Finally she turns back to the table, runs her hand through her hair again, picks up the envelope with a palpable sense of hesitation, and then tosses her cigarette into the untouched bowl of ramen, deliberately ignoring the full ashtray a foot or so to one side of it. She regards the letter, now held in both hands, for another moment and then, obviously coming to some final decision, she grips its corners with renewed purpose and rips it in half. Then she tears it again, and then again, until the envelope and its contents have been reduced to small ragged rectangles of useless paper. The woman then gathers up the scraps, stands, and walks over to her trash can to dispose of the mess.

This is not the first such letter she has disposed of in this way. One shows up on her mailbox every year at around the same time. Each one has been from her son, to judge from the return address at least, and though she sometimes wonders what words they might contain she has yet to open a single one of them to find out.

The widow Kanai is an old and very bitter woman, and any room there may once have been in her heart for the love of a mother for her son shriveled up a long, long time ago. She has no son.