[cw: arson, threats of murder]
Upon putting the tape in, you felt surrounded by nothing but static at first, but you could start to hear a faint voice speaking.
W-Well, I, uhh… I always thought you were really pretty, so, uh… P-Please, go out with me!
It wasn’t a voice you recognized, and it clearly wasn’t Atsuko.
Here, I told you I’d win you that stuffed crane! I’m at ace at these festival games, you know! So… Walking out here even though you’re cold won’t be a waste, right?
Y-Your dad’s terrifying, Atsuko-chan… But I promise I won’t break your heart, ahaha! That, uhh… He wasn’t actually threatening me, was he?
Everyone’s wrong about you. They’re scared of you, but… I think you’re better than that. I really like you, you know.
Atsuko had no intention of entertaining that charade for long. It was all part of some ‘macho test,’ to confess to the scariest girl at school. Atsuko knew that. But before long, baseball team member Shunsuke Hiki had started to do something to her. He was well-meaning, doted on her, and actually gave her a genuine smile. Not like the one her father gave her, where he was always looking at Atsuko, but seeing her mother. She didn’t hate their arrangement at all.
High school second-year Atsuko was also very pleased to find that burning his things in particular provided the best rush of all. It wasn’t the same as stealing a book from the school library, or picking up some random belonging dropped by someone on the street. Knowing it belonged to Shunsuke, the boy who held affection for her, lit a fire in her heart. She could never love him more than she loved the flame, but with the two combined, she felt alive.
One day, however, Atsuko had gotten careless. She stole an old stuffed animal from Shunsuke’s room while she was visiting one day, and rushed outside to do with it as she would. With practiced hands, gloved even though it was summer time, she set the stuffed animal alight, and Shunsuke would forever wonder what happened to it.
That was how it was supposed to go, at least.
“Atsuko-chan? I-is that a fire?!”
Her head whipped up toward Shunsuke and his short, choppy black hair and bright eyes.
“Is… is that one of my stuffed animals?”
This wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t supposed to get caught. She was getting sloppy, wasn’t she? Because she was becoming increasingly desperate, increasingly reliant.
“I…” Atsuko’s throat was dry as she searched for the correct words.
“Wh-Why are you burning that?I love that thing, i-it was a gift from my grandma, you know!” Shunsuke’s voice trembled, as if he himself was trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
“…It’s okay. It’s…” Well, papa had accepted her habit. Shunsuke would, too. Right? “I was burning it because… it feels nice. When I do.”
Shunsuke was not nearly as accepting as Atsuko thought he would have been. “Wh-What’s that even supposed to mean, Atsuko-chan?! You’re just… b-burning something important to me?”
He just didn’t understand, did he? Atsuko would just have to make him understand.
“…I’m important to you, right? So this is okay…” It made sense to her this way. “So what if I take a few things here and there… I—”
“Here and there? Atsuko-chan, h-have you been doing this? Repeatedly? I-I thought I was just getting careless about losing things, and you’re telling me this whole time, you’ve been—”
“Yes I have. It’s just not the same when I’m burning other things, when I do things like this… It makes me feel so happy. At ease.” Atsuko was earnestly pleading to Shunsuke. Just understand me. Just say this is normal and okay. Because I know there’s something wrong with me, but this is the only thing that makes sense to me.
But Atsuko’s pleas fell on deaf ears. “N-No, I can’t… This isn’t normal! A-And you don’t even feel the least bit bad about this? That this is wrong?! A-Atsuko-chan, you’ve been stealing from me, b-burning my things! A-And this whole time, I—”
“Yes, and if I was important to you at all, you would accept this!” That’s how it worked to her. She wasn’t aware enough of herself or anyone else to actively manipulate Shunsuke.
“D-Don’t you try to turn this back on me! How can you even rationalize any of this?! It doesn’t make a-any sense!”
“It’s my fire! You either accept it, or I go!”
Shunsuke was completely taken aback, his expression morphing from horror to disbelief.
“You’re the one making a-an ultimatum to me?! Y-You’re crazy! You’re just as fucked up as your dad! I-I didn’t want to believe it, but everyone was right about you, Atsuko-chan! Damn it… To think that I ever liked you!”
The memory started to shatter, the only sound being muffled screams and shouts. Everything began blurring together, and Atsuko was all of a sudden back home, rummaging through her stash for her tankard of gasoline. She couldn’t take it everywhere she went, so she had it in case of emergencies—this was the definition of an emergency.
She was lugging it out of their estate when she was caught by papa.
“Little deer, where are you going?”
Atsuko didn’t have time for this.
“Shunsuke broke my heart, so I’m making good on our promise. I’m burning his house down,” Atsuko reported to her father without hesitation, voice laced with venom and ichor.
“Hold on, slow down! He did what to my little deer?”
She explained everything as best as she could, from her own biased point-of-view. Of course, papa would take her side, and Shunsuke’s house and everything and everyone he loved would be reduced to ashes just like that, and that was what he deserved for what he did.
“I see… He certainly must be punished for saying those things to you, but let’s think about this, little deer. I can keep you out of trouble, as long as your trouble doesn’t involve this much destruction. What if another building catches fire? What if people die?”
“I don’t care, papa. I don’t care who ends up getting hurt. He hurt me, and anything that happens is going to be his fault!”
Hidenori Samukura knew his daughter was quite abnormal, but this was the first time she had an outburst like this. Think, Hidenori, think…
“I don’t want you to make a mess that papa can’t clean up, little deer. How about this… you put the gasoline down, and papa takes care of Shunsuke Hiki.” He could get rid of anything and anyone. He knew Atsuko trusted in his ability to at least do that.
“But I want to make him pay!” Atsuko pleaded. Please, papa, let me destroy this boy and his family, she whined.
“You will,” Papa reassured. “Just let me take care of this one, okay? I can do this without getting you in trouble.”
But she needed her flame, she needed her blaze of glory. She needed to be the one to see him burn. But even so, Atsuko relented, and everything once again started blurring together.
All that you could know for certain was that the next day at school, the teachers announced that Shunsuke Hiki had suddenly transferred away, and Atsuko never saw or heard from him again. She didn’t know if papa had him killed or just threatened his family, but it still wasn’t good enough for her. It would never be enough, the what-ifs would never quite leave Atsuko, and the effect Shunsuke’s final words to her had would never be erased, no matter how many times she told herself she was right.
———————
Static once again took over the tape, and this time, another voice started speaking. From the previous memory, you recognized this voice as belonging to Hidenori, Atsuko’s father.
[cw: animal death in metaphor, descriptions of a corpse, fire]
Little deer, there’s no need to call me such a mouthful as ‘father.’ Just ‘papa’ is fine, you know? You would have called your mother ‘mama,’ wouldn’t you?
Won’t you bleach your hair blonde, little deer? Papa thinks you’ll look so beautiful like that.
My little deer, how about these clothes? With the features of a foreign woman but the fashionable sensibility of a Japanese woman, you’ll be the most beautiful girl in Hokkaido!
…
I’d say the most beautiful woman in the world, but that title is reserved for your beloved mother.
How your papa wishes he could have met her.
Seeing her then, Atsuko understood why papa was so insistent on dressing and dolling her up the way he did.
Because her mother truly looked just like her.
She was curious about where papa had been going all this time. I’m going outside to paint, little deer, is what he had always said. And then he would get in his car and one of his men would drive them away somewhere. Did he truly have kobun whose job was something as simple as chauffeuring him to his painting destination? She had caught glimpses of drafts of the painting here and there, discarded canvas because he just couldn’t get it just right. But she needed to know the truth.
She followed the car to the frozen storehouse one day, one that papa owned. Why would he go to such a disgusting, cold place to paint? She waited there for hours until he finally decided to return home, and then pulled on her coat and headed inside.
It was unbearably cold, and every second she spent inside made her feel like her life was ticking away. But she wouldn’t be deterred, not now. Didn’t papa know his little deer was a stubborn one by now?
So she poked around inside, checking every nook and cranny of the icy box her father for some godforsaken reason had made a habit of frequenting.
Until she found the reason.
Atsuko knew nothing about her mother. Neither did papa. He found her frozen and dead by the side of the road one winter evening, clutching an infant in her arms, surrounded by ice. A snow angel—that was how he had described her to a younger, inquisitive Atsuko. The way his eyes twinkled when he talked about her didn’t sicken Atsuko back then. But thinking about how he started calling her his little deer because her mother was like a beautiful, dead mother deer he found by the side of the road was finally starting to make her stomach churn.
Because for the past 21 years, he had kept her body frozen in this warehouse, just like the day she died.
Frozen blonde hair falling over her face, glazed-over icy blue eyes straining to stay open, doomed to never shut and provide her with her rest. A perfectly baby-sized gap in her arms, where she now held nothing.
And it was like looking into a mirror. She looked just like her. This woman—her mother—looked just like her. Her eyes, the blonde hair her father insisted she bleach… She couldn’t have been beyond her early 20’s, perhaps even younger than that. And here she was, unable to pass on from her icy grave, doomed to remain frozen to serve as an enamored man’s painting reference.
For the first time in her life, Atsuko was angry at papa. At her father. At Hidenori Samukura. For dooming this woman whose name was known to no one to remain cold forever because he thought she was beautiful. He had inquired into her identity, to find anyone who might have known her. He even sent men to Russia to investigate any sort of missing person’s report that might match her description, but everything came up inconclusive. The woman was known by no one—which meant Hidenori was free to pretend this beautiful woman could have been his. All he had to do was raise that child as his own, and make her into her mother’s spitting image.
Despite the frigid air in the storehouse, Atsuko’s body felt like she was on fire. She burned with rage, with remorse. She never knew her mother, she didn’t know what kind of person she was. Neither did her father. But she knew she didn’t deserve this. The cold was nothing short of the darkest blight on this earth, and the fact that for 21 long years, that man subjected her to it—
The decision was obvious. The memories grew foggy, hazy, as she gathered what she needed. She moved like she was in a trance. Kindling. Gasoline. Matches. Flint. Her finest explosives. Anything. Everything. She would burn this entire storehouse to the ground, and finally free her mother. She didn’t care who or what was caught in the crossfire—she would give her mother the warmth she so desperately needed.
And so she watched as her mother’s frozen body finally thawed and took to the flame, her beautiful flame, erupting into hearth and waste and splendor and destruction and warmth and ash and freedom and nothing.
Papa was right.
It was the most beautiful thing Atsuko had ever seen.
So why was it that she had never felt colder?
