Snow flurries. In the beginning, that’s what they look like—flakes of pearl-white flesh that orbit the moon of her face, sipping fat from her cheeks until they grow large and hungry as luna moths. This is how they form, the Women who come from hangnails and lesions. They will grow into unlovable daughtersistermothers if allowed. On her best nights, Mie’s able to contain them, stuff the skin-creatures in her mouth, eat them, and claim the wings taste like powdered sugar. On her worst nights, she can only crawl on her knees to her bathroom and vomit pieces of them. If not eaten, the moths fuse into a Woman, and on her Worst worst nights, the Woman formed from the moths eats her whole.
i know because Mie’s canceled three dates for these reasons (puking up moths!!!, eaten!!!, ate too many moths!!!) and says she feels “terrible!!!!” about it. She sends me pictures as proof, buzzes my phone with notions of our mutual solitude. i never ask for them. i never ask because i don’t want them to notice me: my hands in my underwear, kneading upwards and downwards as if trying to shape dough. My fingers fumbling away from my waistband, sticky when my phone buzzes. How touching myself to the idea of her both nauseates me and flushes me with warmth. Still, when i think of Mie, i feel less alone. In some photos, she trembles naked in the thin frame, her body hunched limp over the toilet like an overcooked noodle. In others, she’s floating facedown in the river outside my apartment. Despite the unsightliness of brown water and the currents writhing with human excretion, under the pigeon-shit-ridden tunnel signs screaming “Throw No Turtles!” “Carefully Fall to the River!” She looks ethereal. The moonlight hits her just right. It’s from this perfect angle that i’m most compelled to undress her, unravel her every sliver and scar, leaving only traces of the purest spring water behind.
————————
Before Mie, the only Maker i knew was my mother. Most days, back when she was alive, mom spent most of her time in bed, the lights off, shutters closed to block out any tendrils of sun.
“My eyes are tired today,” she told me, as i laid beside her, body nestled against her body, sharing my heat. i kept myself occupied through these times by completing online, government-run classes, learning about algebra and the deepest parts of the ocean. Afterward, i'd cook dinner for us or play my favorite puzzle game. Some days, when mom had energy, she grew agitated, walking around the kitchen with scissors, convinced the Women were coming to get her. Other days, she was kind. One evening, on one of her good days, mom showed me how
to make egg drop soup: how to stir the water into a whirlpool so the eggs thinned to wisps. How when the moths orbited and ate at her, mom thinned to a wisp too. On nights when her stomach couldn’t hold down the bodies, i sat on our purple bath mat while mom shuddered and wretched up pieces of an unformed woman. i rubbed her forehead with a cloth and wiped chunks of flesh from her mouth with a paper towel.
“You take such good care of me, Ellie,” mom murmured. i unrolled a quilt for her to sleep on in the bathtub. “Don’t you get tired of this?”
“No, i love you, mom.” i set out to grab her a pillow, but she grasped my hand before i could leave.
“Don’t go. Stay with me,” she said. “It’s less lonely with you here.”
————————
i met Mie on an internet forum for chronically lonely people. i found the group on a sticker slapped under a subway ad: “A Place Perpetual Lonesome Discuss PAIN HEAD ON!!” Since my mother’s death seven years ago, i’d become a recluse, living off my mom’s life insurance and the free rent developers traded to scrap our house and build a luxury highrise. i left my apartment only once every month to stock up on packaged コンビニ¹ foods—microwave curry, nikuman, instant ramen—my only contact besides monetary exchanges with cashiers, online gaming. Still, the people i gamed with were mostly weebs and incels, people who could fill the holes in themselves with dating sims and MMORPG sex. Our lonelinesses weren’t compatible. On the forum, under my damp, smelly covers, i read posts from ex-husbands about how real love never bloomed in the city’s myriad maid sex cafes, posts by teenagers about group suicide dates near boba stalls. Taglines of “I’M TOO UGLY FOR LOVE!” and “MY COCK IS SHHHHRIVELING?!” appeared and vanished every half-hour, but i liked how there was always someone to emphasize with these human bids for attention, supportive pings like 五円² dropped from apartment rooftops: “Pang! Pain!”
————————
My phone buzzes through my jacket.
[Mie, 5:45 PM]: ellllieeee - shoving a few last moths in my mouth!!!! might be a teeny bit late for our date but i promise i’m coming this time!!!!!!
[Me, 5:56 PM]: No worries. R u sure ur still gonna want ramen after that?
[Mie, 5:57 PM]: ofc!!!! AFURI’s my fave and i have the stomach capacity of a water buffalo, silly <3
[Me, 6:03 PM]: Okay, cool :) I’m stoked to meet you.
[Mie, 6:04 PM]: yayayaya!!!! eeeeee!!!!!! see u in 30!!!!!!!
i slip my phone into my pocket, take the elevator down from my apartment, and search for subway entrances. The closest one is by the tunnel built over the Suishi river, just a few minutes’ walk from my complex. Mie posted about trying to drown herself in there, once, and then another time, and how some strange current always pushed her out.
Vending machines line the route to the station, some selling beer and hot milk tea. Back when i couldn’t make it to the convenience store in the deepest lows of my depression, sometimes i’d buy a few cans of corn potage and bring them home. Other times, i’d buy a few chicken gizzard skewers from the yakitori vendor when he set up shop outside my building and eat them hot on my bathroom floor, but sadness made everything taste like iron and mud. Nowadays, i can go out more, even for leisure walks. The station is an easy distance for me when i have a reason to leave. A mango-sized whirlpool forms as i cross the walkway by the river—a too-big carp, a baby turtle. This is the scale of what most residents believe lurks under that tunnel, but there’s something more monstrous swimming in the Suishi.
————————
When i was little, my mom would warn me of the river’s dangers. “Child-eating cucumber monsters, bull sharks with left balls bigger than you,” she’d hiss, shaking a paring knife at my mossy teeth. Sometimes i wondered about the river and my origins, how i could create little waves in a mug of tea without touching it, draw ants in a line to a cup of tap water. How sometimes, my armpits secreted mud after rainfall. Later, mom sent me blog posts from spiritualists about how rivers compelled people to drown themselves and names of novels as proof: The Awakening, The Hours, To The River, how strange girls like me were especially susceptible. But really, this was where she’d go to drown the Women. At first, she tried hiding her undoings from me: trips to the supermarket, leaving her laundry to dry by the riverside. but she’d always come back basketless or with one sour peach. i was an observant child. i watched and wondered. But i knew because i knew
everything the river knew.
————————
i can’t recall exactly how mom found out my knowing. A strange upturn of my mouth, maybe, or a slip of the tongue in my sleep. What i do remember is what transpired after: mom made me a cup of tea—Genmai, one rock of sugar, a bit too sweet. She wore a sweater white as Fuji’s snowcap. As i sipped from my spot in the kitchen, my tongue curled at the taste of another powder, startling and bitter as yarrow. Still, the tea was warm, and i became lulled by the scent of sea salt and yuzu around us. When my eyelids grew heavy as a child’s on Lunar New Year, mom wrapped her hands around my waist and rubbed me.
“Mommy’s little secret,” she whispered, before heading one last time to the river. Now, this is my biggest one.
————————
The first train delays for a brake issue. i’m left waiting on the platform, scarfless with snowflakes swarming my face. Time moves slowly, strangely as it does in these transitional places. i catch a few fat flakes on my tongue, then hop on the second train where i’m jostled by sake-scented passengers. Between windows, posters caution not to accept dates with us Made Women or to take us home. “CAREFUL! WILL DEVOUR!” one says. “REMIND!!! IT IS YOUR RIGHT TO SHOOT IT IN SELF-DEFENSE!” warns another. When i arrive three stops and a short walk later, Mie’s there. i spot her leaning against the hinoki ramen-counter, so short she barely reaches the top of it, but otherwise, she looks exactly like she does in her pictures. She doesn’t notice me. In front of her, the shop is full of drunk salarymen and cataclysmically loud singles despite its twelve-person seating capacity. Cigarette smoke billows from every wanting mouth. The air is thick as always with sweet miso and pork fat, the bodied steam of a second home. As Mie spots me, a blush spreads across her round cheeks. She rushes to hold the front door open for me, and i let her.
“Hi!!!!!” She greets me, giving my towering body a light squeeze before tucking a strand of shoulder-length, seaweed-green hair behind her ear.
i open my mouth to say hi, but instead ask: “are you okay with Made Women?”
She snakes her small hand into mine and squeezes it, slips past the restaurant’s two tables, takes a seat at the counter, and smiles. “How about we start with tea?”
————————
In my dreams, when my mother drowns herself, she wades slowly into the river. She kneads its belly with her toes and is surprised by the warmth of the river’s bottom, how each grain of sand seems to suction and hold each toe. She wades deeper. A school of minnows tickles her knees.
She submerges her waist and her hips brush some slippery substance—a strand of Egeria, an outgrowth of freshwater kelp. The weights tied to her ankles begin to weigh her down. This is when she takes her Ambien. In my dreams, mom thinks of the day we caught a snapping turtle and i held it like a burger in my hands. She laughs at the way its neck stretched like a slinky as it tried to bite my nose. That day, the river was full of families and children, but this night is quiet, graced by calm. In my dreams, she closes her eyes and thinks of the day she made me. She doesn’t think of what led her here, her defective daughter, the harm i caused. Instead, she wraps her arms around her chest as if holding my body for the first time, then closes her eyes and lets go.
————————
Before our waiter arrives, Mie tells me she was Born in a ski lodge in Hokkaido, and i tell her i was Made from the banks of Suishi. This is why she writes “I” and i write “i,” but she’s okay to eat with me despite the rumors about us Made Women. Between sips from a Daiso cup, Mie scans the list before deciding on a tonkotsu ramen. i order a spicy miso. When our bowls come big, brown, and boiling, we swap broths.
“Have you ever killed a Woman?” i ask, shoving a spoonful of salty bamboo shoots into my mouth.
“No.” She blows on her soup. “Have you?”
“How are your noodles?”
“Ellie.”
“i don’t know.” i try to explain that my mother’s Women stole pieces of her. Skin sheets—eyeballs—anything she could reform and regrow. Unannounced, the Women would swarm like Furies through our kitchen, reeking of feces and rotten pigs, flesh falling from them in stinking slime piles. Begging. Sometimes, one of the Women’s lungs would stretch away from her collagen and squelch onto the floor, and the lungless Woman would begin flopping, drowning. When she recovered her lung, she’d lunge at my mother’s heart with foot-long teeth. Each invasion, i trembled under a table or in my closet or under mom’s bed. Afterwards, i wanted to stop them, to prevent them from causing any more harm.
“You have to understand—the Women were hungry, angry, trying to survive—that this is what happens when a Maker cannot love their own creations,” mother tried to explain. Beloved, i would gaze at the invading Women, at their sallow eyes and ruptured hearts, and see only monsters. Perhaps this was why i did what i did.
————————
My mother Made me when my waves poured into a hangnail she pulled off of a peach stem. Knees deep in the banks of the Suishi, she leaned over to investigate the round, floating fruit. i was clean, then—many would play, swim, and splash in me, most on summer vacations, most in love. When she finally caught the fruit, nectar spilled from the peach and dappled her finger with sap-sticky sweetness. A trickle of me spilled into the wound, and i sprung out, spherical as a melon.
“Ellie,” she named me. “My little jelly belly.” i was the closest she’d ever come to a Born child, and so she spun me around, loved me as one. And as beloved things love in return, i loved her as any Born child would.
————————
The moon was full on the night my mother drowned her first Woman. A sharp wind whipped through her curtains—a splatter of rain—then a Woman crawled through the window and demanded my mom’s eyes. Wouldn’t it be nice, mother thought, to go and swim in the Suishi?
The thought came suddenly to her. She felt compelled, queerly, to revisit the sight of my birth. Strange, because it wasn’t her thought. It was mine.
————————
Mie finishes her ramen and doesn’t look at me once i’m done telling her about my drownings. “I think you need some serious help, Ellie.”
My stomach clutches. She grabs her coat and stands, her eyes darting back and forth fast as fireflies.
“I think I’m going to have to leave now. I think I’m going to need some time.”
“Wait—” My throat hitches. “i’m special—i like you—” i want to say, but my mouth is as dry as my cracked banks. i dart for the door, twisting, tearing at her ribcage. But Mie’s already gone, a white moth melting in winter snow.
Footnotes:
“Kombini” convenience store
“Go-en” a five yen coin
Logan Hoffman-Smith is a Chinese American Adoptee with a degree in Politics from Mount Holyoke College. They are a prose MFA candidate at the University of Iowa and a Kundiman fiction fellow. You can find them speculating about shrimp and mola molas on Twitter @wcnderwcnder and on Instagram @pseudobutch.
Photo by Bruno Thethe from Pexels