She’s not the most superstitious of people, unlike her grandmother, who always leaves rice and salt at shrines. She doesn’t believe in spirits, friendly or otherwise, although she has no disrespect for those who do. It’s just that those traditional beliefs have little bearing on her life.
It’s springtime, and the cherry blossoms are in season. Today is a pleasant day: overcast, with a little rain in the morning, making it pleasantly cool out and giving the road a nice sheen. It’s a perfect day for a trip to the little tea shop down by the train station. It’s a small, quaint little place, just like everywhere in this village, owned by a kindly old man and his moody nephew.
She’s staying in town with her grandmother for the time being, researching for her next book. It’ll be a children’s chapter book, she thinks, about a family moving to a rural village. This place is a perfect reference, a quiet countryside town an hour or two out of the city. She finds that the tea shop is the perfect place to work, its outdoor patio providing perfect views of the village and surrounding countryside.
Looking up, she sees the train tracks that go past the shop and towards the village. Grass pokes up from between the rails. Beyond, she can see down to the village and the farming fields, and just past that are the rolling hills of the forest.
She’s heard plenty about that forest from the locals. It’s apparently a place where spirits gather. They say there’s a great camphor tree in the exact center of the wood, a place where arcane energies congregate. Beneath the tree sits a giant shrine, supposedly hundreds of years old, where travelers could leave offerings and ask for protection. Elderly folk tell stories about getting lost in the woods as children, and being led back to their homes by kodama or some such spirits. Some say the sounds of the forest make a strange, ancient-sounding music on peaceful summer nights, celebrating the season.
She doesn’t think much on the legends, but they’re fun to think about.
She stays at the tea shop until lunch. The owner sees her off with a packet of cookies (on the house, he insists, I have plenty of these as it is), and she starts back to her grandmother’s house. The road back takes her along the train tracks and up the station platform as it heads back into the village. As she walks, she pulls out her notepad to refine the outline for her book. She knows the way back well enough by now, so she’s not really watching where she’s going.
As she walks down the platform at the train station, she veers a little too close to the edge. She’s not sure what she trips on, but the next thing she knows, she’s falling towards the tracks and there’s a train coming, and she briefly thinks that this’ll be a really embarrassing way to die.
Then something yanks back on her collar, pulling her away from the edge as the train goes past. The rush of air sends her hair fluttering up around her head.
She whirls around to thank whoever had the presence of mind to pull her away from the tracks, but there’s no one there; she is all alone on the platform. There is only the grass and the trees. Somehow, it feels like they are smiling down at her.
She’s not the most superstitious of people, and she doesn’t believe in spirits, friendly or otherwise. But that night, she decides to set up a little shrine on the windowsill in her grandmother’s guest room. She’s not really sure what she’s doing; she just lights some candles, leaves a small offering, and mutters a quiet ‘thank you’.
That night, she has pleasant dreams about music in the trees.
- Sean Riddle