Kodokushi

The sun prints its photons on my physique

I

melt my gaze into it

The wind shakes the crowns of the trees

I

grow

(my mold)

inside her limbs

I wake up in pollen flakes, away from home. Up there, their sun is the only star in visible space. Amniotic yolk covers her new shell, from where I take my place as a guest. With leaves and twigs I brush the tar off our body, but it is more afraid of the gentle breeze.

black drying scales, scaly skin, true me

I think of serpents I see crawling in the weeds, that seek a hole to live in and lay their eggs. I think of my own eggs, polluted. This body doesn't work because she died. Hers float in the isolation of her barren womb like stellar dust in the upper wild. Her body will only work for a while.

Ahead: Isolation in the fields. Rocks, life, and tumbleweeds rotate, collide, and dance in the wheat, before their Earth’s workings. She was left here to die, I perceive.

Kodokushi... I'm beneath her skin

peeking through pores

gnawing caramel nerves

one with her DNA

I recollect some images from her stolen brain:

Fingers wrapping my throat. Hers. Oily fingertips. Sharpened nails. Memories. Hers.

Apoptosis: perishing to neuron death. Fingers digging through flesh. Hers.

silver

then

red

*

Home is not home

when you don't belong there

Hoshi, that was her name

I...

I walked back home in black sweat.

Every house in the neighborhood is a copy of itself arranged next to one another. Pastel colors on the walls. BBQ smoke stinging the sky. The same model car in their parking lots. And mowed greenery growing against the pavement.

I had arrived there from wherever she was dumped to rot.

As I walk, my feet leave black prints on the ground. I see neither blood nor tar, but something higher. Martian.

Mars. Not their Mars but mine.

Kids play outside. Parents shape bushes in their own image. Juicy gossip and country music in the air. Bees and hummingbirds in quavering clouds, spreading Earth’s disease.

And teenagers skateboarding, who are stopped by my bareness.

“Is it that hotty jap wife?,” some ask, “didn't she die?”

“Look at that black jizz,” they approach.

“Nah,” another replies, “it’s normal for their type to leave and come back.”

I get attention. The inhabitants come at me. Their human activities are left on hold. Wives with perfectly done nails stretch their bony hands at me as if accusing. Long fingers that end in red. They gasp. Pittiness comes. Husbands poke at each other and chuckle in arousal.

Blue and green, clear eyes bite me. Crowds of strangers swarm me. Legs, heads, and arms fuse into an amorphous mass due to the swift motion of each individual. A familiar silhouette under a Summer sun.

At the end of the street, there’s my house. Hers. Outside, my man is stepping out of his car in his favorite office suit I didn't iron that morning. I walk towards him. Mothers close the children’s eyes and yell, and fathers crack a gap in the multitude’ skin for me to cross through, cheering with their sons an untold fetishism.

My man looks back at me and opens his eyes. Tears surge. Jaw trembles. He drops his suitcase. I get closer ignoring the fiery pavement that boils my bare feet and melt my gaze into him. He can't believe I’m back to him, so I embrace him and let my fluids smudge his frame:

“Did you miss me?” I ask.

*

My first shower takes place that night. Arthur leaves the door of the bathroom open as I slid into the shower. It is the only light on in the house. He hasn't said anything, but lets me come into their home in complete awe. He takes my hand and leads me inside, as the loud inquiries of the gossip-starved neighbors continue behind. They knock on the main door without hesitation, as if they also belonged to that house and had been evicted, asking questions and trying to peek into the interior. Their bestial shadows move frenetically on the other side of the yellow curtains, which drape the living room’s window. He leads me upwards without taking his bloodshot eyes off of me. His lips wobble.

Now, the water dampens their voices. I sense his silhouette sitting on the bed’s edge, under the darkness of the bathroom’s door frame.

The tar-like substance naturally escapes from the water. It doesn't run off but evaporates like steam, becoming one with the vapor of the hot water that fills the small space, and my sight.

I'm clean. She’s clean. The husband gets closer once more and takes off his clothes. Light and blue appear alternatively in the exterior of the bedroom’s windows, like twinkling stars. Not quite the same.

It’s the police.

He gets into the shower with me. His body is hairless and reddish. A good balance of fat and muscle cover his skeleton, and the one from his genitals is even more splendid. Shiny.

He grabs my right hand and flips it over multiple times. He finds nothing but the last traces of tar taking off. With a finger, he caresses a place between the middle and ring finger, as if digging. His brown eyes shimmer with an innocent curiosity. Pain has faded.

He looks down to me since he is taller, and poses his forehead on mine, closing his eyes. So do i.

No sounds but that of the artificial rain, and the sirens that echo in the secret atmosphere of a marital space.

We both ask, aware of something unspoken:

“Who are you?”

*

Camera flashes shudder my skin. Gas and supernovas in the metallic heart of their tubes. Xenon, like my Mars’ twin.

Interviews at regional TV shows, radio stations, and newspapers. I should not agree with this since I should be quiet in my doings, but the world deserves how enchanting this woman is, and what my man took to bed before I disappeared. He is never with me now. Busy with work and my in-laws.

I appear in multiple books. Either on strange supernatural cases of people kidnapped by aliens, without me being conscious of it, or yellow journalistic books that get nothing out of me, but facts that any other migrant has experienced in life.

I

(she)

was a child

from

faraway lands

“I’m a foreigner who got stranded in an American town,” I once told a woman who worked for an extremist, “and met my husband.”

Hoshi Yume Mason. I finally learned. From some Asian country, as my in laws said. They came once after hearing the news of my arrival, while in my hospital room.

“I hope you can finally give us a grandson,” the husband’s mother said, “now that you're back.”

And left.

*

Medical exams. Doctor Livermann, my psychiatrist, attends me to evaluate my current mental state, due to being a possible victim of a cruel sexual cult or serial rapist, no other theory, despite having told everyone I wasn't: I only suffer from a case of temporary memory loss, which has no other explanation than me not being the owner of this body.

“I see a black hole on the other side of the bed,” I lied to him, in one of our sessions, but not, “it tickles my toes and absorbs me, but not yet.”

My dear Mars. Are you still there?

Dr. Marsh was my gynecologist, until I decided not to continue with any treatment but living a normal life. In the first and only visit, she inspected my lower part and stood in silence for a couple of minutes, looking straight into my holes like a scientist examining an extraneous alien trapped in a jar. Those frozen eggs of Hoshi’s? Fear and curiosity, in those expanded irides of hers. Commotion for sure, but she doesn't tell anyone what she found down there and we don't see each other again.

After months, the news of a boy who sacrificed himself to save his family got the spotlight. Reasonable. Good at best. I spent most of the time at home acting like a good wife, so I wondered how Hoshi could do all this without grabbing a knife and extracting her brains piece by piece until reaching her frightened soul, dumped in a tiny corner of her skull.

I thought of my home a lot. Their Mars is fire that ignites crimson when gazing with the right eyes. Mine. Cold fire yet still, without more than toxic dust and dull rocks. But mine...

a frigid

God

exhausting

its spell to an

event horizon.

With spatial whales swatting sea flies and stars, about to be eaten by a bigger mouth in the universe's darkness. And mold spores being harvested in its exosphere, that flee to seek another home.

*

Someone calls as I cook his favorite dinner. An Italian recipe of his family. I overhear:

“They found her body!!!” he yells.

Things fall to the floor and his footsteps get louder as he reaches the kitchen. With my Martian-glitter lip-gloss on, I stop cutting onions and grasp the knife to kill the man; to flee and steal another shell and mind: like one of many.

You want it darker when it’s quiet outside and the bitch slits his throat to shut him up.

There’s martian mold under her skin. She is who she is.

KODOKUSHI

She wants it lighter when it rains outside and the flesh is heavy on the back.

There's tar seething her shell and knockings on the gate.

Morning light.