An unexpectedly wise Hyottoko once said that it takes but one very bad day to turn a sane man mad, and after the death of his only son, Seimei was having quite a bad day indeed.

All that day and into the next morning, Seimei sat at the edge of Yoshihira’s futon, clutching the wooden cat. “An eye for a spider, and a son for a lacquered toy... what a foolish merchant I have become,” he thought, over and over. That is, when he was thinking anything at all.

When the spider awoke the next day, she crept out from her sleeping sac and perched atop his brow, eight eyes peering down with a sadness her anatomy could not properly convey. She waited for him to move. He did not. Not until the sun was once again setting and the deeds of darkness could properly be done.

When Seimei did finally rise, his face had resumed its usual composure. You might have even thought his period of mourning was over, if you didn’t notice his hollow eyes and violently shaking hands.

The next task, as Seimei saw it, was simple. Yoshihira’s soul would need a new vessel. The cat figurine was always meant to be a temporary measure after all. Yoshihira’s body had failed, so he would simply need a new one, something that could hold all of the boy’s laughter and his cleverness and, most importantly, his love.

However, it is, I’m sad to say, quite impossible to build a flesh golem out of nothing but sadness and good intentions. You can’t just stick a soul into any old body, no matter what you may have heard in stories. This would be a very delicate operation, and to survive it, the body would have to be perfect in every way.

A body, you see, is made up of many parts, and the ancients believed each part belonged not only to itself but also to a system that governed all things in the universe. They called this system gogyō: the Five Elements.

“Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water,” Seimei murmured as he laid Yoshihira down on the table where he once had shared meals with his family. “The spirit is safe, nothing left now but parts,” he added, the words sounding like an apology.

The first thing to do was separate each part into its individual element: Wood, the liver, Yoshihira’s curiosity, his boundless enthusiasm. The parts that flex and reach and crave the sun. Next came Fire, the heart, his joy, his unconditional love. The beautiful engine of the body. Metal, the lungs, his sadness, but also his shield, the delicate parts that distribute life. Water, the kidneys, his wisdom, his patience. The framework and the root from which all others spring. Then, finally, Earth, the meat, his memories, his caring nature. The ordinary flesh that fills and forms.

Seimei’s hands, so practiced in the medical arts and so steady with a brush, trembled just once as he made the first cut. After that, they did not tremble again. The spider in his eye socket recoiled at the bright shock of blood.

The body parts of each element were placed carefully together inside five individual circles drawn on the floor in red ochre, the boundaries exact and clean. Every circle was accompanied by a paper talisman, a charm to protect against rot, written in Seimei’s finest hand.

Throughout the surgery Seimei wept, not loud or uncontrolled, but steadily for the entirety of the long night. He was driven by a faint, persistent hope that if only he completed the work to satisfaction, his world would return to what it once was. Denial is truly a most deceptive liar, my children, beguiling the wise just as often as the foolish. Take great care, lest you should fall into its clutches as well.

Hours later, as the sun peeked over the mountains, Seimei finished reducing what was once his son into its base components.

He stood back and surveyed his work.

Five neat circles, five perfect labels, five tidy stacks where Yoshihira used to be.

But his work was far from over. Now each part would need to be carefully measured, weighed, and tested. He would need to solve dense mathematical equations, reference astrological charts, and pore through his collection of ancient scrolls.

It is a wonderful diversion to think of magic as some otherworldly force that can lead to great adventures and instantly solve or indeed cause any number of problems. However, the unfortunate truth is that magic, like most things in life, is often quite boring and not the kind of stuff that makes for a great story at all. So I will spare you the details of the onmyoji sciences and simply say that as the sun retreated in disgust at the end of the following day, Seimei found himself quite irate.

What was left of poor Yoshihira, it turned out, was completely elementally unbalanced. There was not nearly enough metal qi, and far too much fire and wood. The proportions, as dictated by the Five Phases, were entirely, horrifically wrong.

Seimei stared at the table, blinking very slowly. The spider, sensing a change, crept forward and laid one foreleg gently against his temple.

“It’s not enough,” Seimei said. “I took everything, everything! I tore apart my sweet, precious…” He broke down into fresh sobs. “It’s still not enough,” he finally managed.

He stood for a long while, staring at the circles and the bloody table, then turned, walked downstairs, and fetched a shovel from the basement.

That night, and every night for the next month, Seimei left his tower after the village had gone to sleep, returning, always, before dawn, his robes damp with rain or river mist, his hands caked with black mud and worse.

Each night he brought back a bundle, something small, sometimes heartbreakingly small, wrapped in oilcloth. Each day the five circles were filled, the neat stacks becoming piles, and the piles becoming heaps. The spider did her best to stop it, but no matter how much she bound the shovel in her webs, Seimei would simply rip it free the moment the moon rose.

At some point, Seimei stopped sleeping altogether. On mornings when the effort finally overcame him, Seimei would simply collapse on the floor, sometimes mid-surgery, and endure terrible dreams with his one eye still open.

The once immaculate tower devolved into chaos. Anything unnecessary for the flesh golem was shoved into corners or tossed aside. Equations covered every wall, and the tatami flooring could hardly be seen for the mud and stains that covered it.

The only place untouched by the madness was the bedroom Seimei once shared with his wife and Yoshihira. Sometimes, children, the more a heart breaks, the more carefully it tiptoes around what remains.

If any neighbors noticed the flicker of candles late at night, or the strange, not-quite-human sounds drifting from the upper floors, they kept their observations to themselves. Seimei’s reputation as a man of power had always made people wary. Now it filled them with dread.

Forty-nine days after Yoshihira’s death and forty-seven bundles later, Seimei set down the femur he had been testing. His latest calculations were complete. The math undeniable. The element of water in the leg bone was perfectly proportioned. At long last all parts of the body he would build for his son were accounted for, and each perfectly balanced. The red circles on the floor had been overfilled and expanded a dozen times with parts that had been deemed unworthy, but at last he had everything he needed.

He sat down and placed his head in his hands, almost falling asleep for the first time that week. If he had, our story might have turned out quite differently. But he did not. Instead, Seimei shook himself awake and reached for the stitching kit.

It was time for the final phase of the project. Seimei rolled up his sleeves… Well, to be perfectly accurate, I should mention that by this point his sleeves were so stiff with blood and various tinctures that they were quite impossible to roll up. Therefore, it was in a purely figurative sense that Seimei rolled up his sleeves, gathered his tools, and got to work.

The dining table had been cleared of sentimental debris weeks ago. All that remained of its former function was the ghost of a water ring near the end of the table, where Seimei’s wife had once knocked over her sake with a peal of laughter that left her in a fit of hiccups for an hour. The ring was pale now, barely visible, but Seimei could see it perfectly in his memory, and so he placed the golem’s head at that exact spot.

The work of assembly was not as gruesome as you might expect, all blood and detritus having long since been siphoned away from the body parts. To Seimei, it was an act of devotion in its highest form, a marriage of sculpture and science, mathematics and magic, love and self-loathing.

With each stitch he whispered the elemental cycle, “Wood feeds Fire, Fire creates Earth, Earth bears Metal, Metal collects Water, Water nourishes Wood.” He mended flesh to flesh, bone to bone, sometimes pausing to inspect the fit, or to smooth a wayward vein, or simply to rest his trembling hands against the still-cold cheek and hope some spark of warmth would pass between them.

When at last the stitches were closed, and the new body lay complete, Seimei stepped back to admire his work. The golem had been carefully designed to resemble Yoshihira, even though very little of the original Yoshihira remained in it. Still, it had his nose, quite literally his actual nose, as well as the shape of his chin and the scar beside one eye, earned the summer he’d decided he wanted to be an acrobat. The body was not beautiful, not in any traditional sense. It was pale, gaunt, and crisscrossed with myriad stitches, though the stitches themselves were of the highest quality. It was not perfect; how could it be? But it was as close as a man with Seimei’s considerable skill could make it. It was a child’s body, real enough to fool the world, or at least, to fool a father who had grown desperate enough.

Seimei set a hand upon the golem’s brow and let it rest there. The skin, cool beneath his touch. He pressed his palm flat, as if to calm a fever, and stood that way for a long time.

Then he dipped his calligraphy brush into a bowl filled with blood.

The actual ritual was quite simple. He began with a single red line drawn down the sternum towards the toy cat, still grinning from its place at the foot of the table, followed by a series of symbols representing names of power across the golem’s face, arms, and legs. As he worked, he gathered a measured flow of necromantic energy with each chanting breath.

The candles burning around the room began bending inward as if drawn by the gravity of Seimei’s intent, the power he cultivated gathering above him like storm clouds. Necromantic energy, like all energy, always seeks the path of least resistance. The theory was that if all the elements were in balance, the power would pass through the cat and into the golem body. Yoshihira’s soul would travel along this path, find its new home, and fuse instantly. As natural as lightning following the shortest route to ground.

What the theory did not account for was exhaustion. Nor the small but crucial mistakes that a man broken in both heart and mind might make, mistakes that the Abe no Seimei of months ago would never have committed or tolerated in others.

As the gathered energy struck the body, Seimei bent forward, his face slick with sweat, the brush wavering in his grip. His vision blurred, and his knees buckled, the price of so many sleepless nights. At that moment, the hem of his robe, heavy with dried mud and gore, dragged across the floor just once. There was a faint hiss as a single smudge marred the ochre line of the earth elemental circle. The circle that contained the mountain of leftover meat deemed unfit for the “perfect” boy.

Seimei, so obsessed with the golem before him, never saw it. But the spider did, every one of her eyes going wide as she registered the mistake.

The gathered necromantic energy instantly abandoned the complex elementally balanced golem and forked into the much simpler pile of meat. The golem on the table went rigid, its mouth stretching open, wider than any mouth should, into a hideous, silent scream. A rushing wind tore through the room, blowing out all the candles, and the body on the table withered from the inside out. The skin pulled tight over the bones, the lips crumpled inward, flesh and bone collapsing into nothing but a fine gray dust as Seimei could do nothing but watch his son die for the second time.

Seimei stared at the pile of ash now littering the tabletop. He did not breathe, did not even blink for thirty, maybe forty full seconds. Then something inside him snapped so suddenly and so violently that even the spider startled and jumped away from him, all eight legs trembling.

With a shriek that started out human and ended in the space between worlds, Seimei swept both arms across the table, sending ash and the toy cat flying. He flipped the table itself, which hit the wall with a sound like a thunderclap. A shelf of glass spirit-jars, the results of decades of careful work, was ripped from the wall and shattered on the floor. He howled again, a sound so raw and furious that his nearest neighbors abandoned their home and possessions, never to return. Seimei ripped his robes and struck his own chest with the heels of his fists until the spider, now watching from a high shelf, thought he might truly break himself apart.

He staggered, gasping, through the ruins of his own failure, kicked at the smoldering heap of what once held so much promise, and slumped against the wall. Seimei’s fury spent itself in sobs and curses. Then, as exhaustion claimed him at last, he slid to the floor, curled around his own shame, and did not move again that night.

The house was silent, save for the slow drip of something from a broken jar and the faint pitter-pat of a nervous spider’s pedipalps as she crossed the floor.

The spider, intent on reaching Seimei’s senseless form, carefully picked her way through the debris until she heard a strange sound from deeper in the room.

How can I describe the sound to you? A gurgling sucking? A sloppy squelching? The oozing, wet, slither-slap of something that never was and never should have been? Suffice to say, children, it was a rather disturbing sound and made the spider feel quite uncomfortable indeed.

The spider turned all her eyes towards the sound, unblinking.

The pile of meat in the center of the ruined ochre circle shifted. It heaved once, then twice, and then slowly rose from the ground.

Thanks for reading. This story is a work in progress which I hope to some day publish. As such I welcome all comments and constructive criticism.

If you find you enjoy my work and would like to read more, my first published novel, Grumble and Gasp, is currently available on Kindle and Amazon.

Book 1 Available Here!

Want to know if I killed off your favorite character? I probably didn’t, but how can you be sure? Stay tuned. New chapters drop every week!

Buy me a coffee

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The night after the funeral, Seimei sat once again in his tidy study. He poured a cup of sake and placed it, untouched, in front of the empty seat across the desk. He carefully gathered all of the medical scrolls he had been using and placed them each in their correct place. Then he slid aside a hidden lacquered panel at the back of the scroll shelf.

The panel opened with a soft click, revealing a hidden cavity stuffed with what most people would have identified as deeply forbidden material. These were not the charming little volumes of astrological observances or spiritual navigation for which Seimei was justly famous. These were scrolls so old the ink had turned brown, so forbidden that even knowing their name required you to apologize to your ancestors. Here were texts on necromancy, on soul-binding, on the macabre mechanics of what one could achieve with a body after the spirit has departed. And in the warm, bright silence of his study, Seimei began to read something very cold, and oh so very dark.

Please children, do not think too poorly of Seimei for this. Faith, as you may well know, is a most precious thing. It is rather an established fact in certain circles that with a modicum of faith even as small as a mustard seed one can face any challenge, weather any storm, and quite literally move a mountain. But, you see, Seimei was not a man of faith, he was a man of science and of magic, and where faith is absolutely free, magic always comes with a very, very steep cost.

Seimei hardly ate. He rarely slept. His hair grew out, and he swept it back tufted behind his ears. He grew quite a luxurious mustache, and forgot to trim it. His already vulpine features became more wild and feral. In the earliest days, Yoshihira tried to tempt his father out with a parade of increasingly pathetic breakfast offerings: a bowl of rice with a smiling face pressed into it, an attempt at tamagoyaki so lopsided it resembled a collapsed bridge, even, at one point, a single unadorned pickled plum perched atop a folded note that read, in a childish hand, “Father, it is my utmost wish that you would eat this humble offering.”

Seimei read the note, considered the plum, and placed both gently on the altar of his wife’s shrine.

As the weeks of study turned into months, Seimei hardly noticed when one morning Yoshihira awoke with a very familiar fever. His footsteps grew slower. His voice, so usually wild and bright, became a hoarse whisper. He stopped inventing games. He stopped eating. He began to nap, and then to sleep, and then to remain in his futon long after the sun rose.

My children, if you have ever watched a candle gutter and die, you know exactly how Yoshihira faded, and to his everlasting shame, Seimei did not notice until it was almost the end.

One moonless night, Seimei rose from his desk, his eyes as dry and red as sunbaked clay, and called for Yoshihira. His son, who by this point was too weak to rise from his futon, naturally did not respond.

Seimei looked for him, found him, and for a moment, the mask of this great man, the world’s most celebrated onmyoji cracked. He knelt in front of Yoshihira and pressed a cold, trembling hand to his son’s cheek. He whispered something so soft that only the boy heard it, and whether it was a spell or a prayer or a simple apology, I could not tell you. Then Seimei stood, picked up his son, and carried him into the study so that the work might continue.

Now, most stories would have you believe that the night before a forbidden ritual is dark and full of portent, but in truth, the only portent in Seimei’s tower was the relentless sound of brush on paper, the scraping of tools, and the faintest, unceasing mutter of incantations fully understood and wholly infernal. The candles burned low. The air was thick with the smell of cedar ash, iron, and faintly, of salty tears.

Desperation had entered the tower of the virtuous. The prospect of losing both those he held dear had finally coerced Seimei into action, and, at the precise moment when the night is neither yesterday nor today, act Seimei did.

Seimei knelt in a circle of salt and iron shavings, his posture straight, his eyes closed. Before him lay a wickedly sharp knife in a bamboo sheath and a small bronze mirror.

In one of his ancient scrolls, Seimei had read that if one was so inclined, they might sacrifice one of their eyes to raise a lost soul from the ether. This was fortuitous in that Seimei had two perfectly healthy eyes, one for each member of his family.

With great ceremony Seimei unsheathed the knife, its blade no bigger than your smallest finger.

He did not hesitate.

With a single, practiced gesture, Seimei slid the blade beneath his own right eye and levered it out. He performed the act the same way he had dissected countless specimens in the past: detached, precise, even curious as to the result. The pain must have been immense, but Seimei did not scream or flinch the way you are flinching now. Instead, his remaining eye went utterly blank, as if all the pain had simply been rerouted to somewhere very far away.

He dropped the severed eye onto the bronze mirror, where it landed with a wet and deeply unsatisfying plop.

Blood ran down his cheek in a single dignified line, only pausing to stain his once immaculate robe.

He recited the words.

The candles bent inward. The salt smoked. The eye was enveloped in a ball of shadows. The iron filings vibrated in little, anticipatory shivers.

Seimei glanced from the window to the door with his remaining eye, unsure from which direction his wife would appear.

For a moment, nothing happened.

And then—

On the face of the mirror, the ball of shadow uncurled. It gathered into itself, condensed, then bulged outward; it took shape, it bloomed with color, until standing on the surface of the mirror was something most unexpected. A spider, no bigger than a plum pit, deep blue and gleaming with a shimmer that caught the candlelight in every possible direction, perched in the exact center. A small jumping spider with eight eyes, two quite oversized, and a rather surprised look upon its face as it gazed directly, unwaveringly, up at Seimei.

Seimei looked back.

He waited for a voice. He waited for a sign.

The spider wiggled its forelegs in a manner that could only be described as “adorably expressive.”

Seimei’s face underwent a transformation. First, there was confusion. Then fury. Then an overwhelming, incredulous despair. For one wild moment, he looked like he might crush the spider out of pure spite.

Instead, he screamed, “A familiar? My eye for nothing but a bound familiar?!”

And then, as if an overwound string inside him had finally snapped, Seimei began to laugh. The sound of it echoed through the hollow tower and into the cold night. A laugh so high and so broken that it frightened the spider, and the spider, unsure of its place in the order of things, crept to the edge of the mirror and peered up as if seriously considering the distance to the door.

Seimei, still gasping with laughter, reached out and with a delicacy that would have impressed a jeweler, scooped the spider up in his palm.

He regarded it. It regarded him.

“Look at this,” Seimei said, voice trembling on the edge of madness. “I gave one eye and received eight in return. Quite a bargain,” and with no further ceremony he lifted the spider and tipped it into his now empty eye socket. With the oddest sense of rightness, Seimei felt it settle against the raw bone, a small pressure, an impossibly soft tickle, but not the pain one would expect. The spider for its part found the hollow to be a perfectly serviceable home, warm, dark, and sheltered. Following its newfound instincts, it nestled into Seimei’s skull and began to weave itself a silken sleeping sac.

My Children, I feel as a responsible adult I really must pause here to tell you, if you ever find yourself so overcome with grief that you are tempted to cut out your own eye and perform unspeakable rituals with it, may I suggest that there are, in fact, better ways to take your mind off of things. Gardening. Petting small fuzzy animals. Perhaps competitive beetle fighting.

Now, after losing a beloved wife, an eye, and now facing the imminent loss of his son, some of you may believe that Abe no Seimei would accept the universe’s judgment with noble resignation, tidy his affairs, and spend Yoshihira’s remaining days together. But Seimei was not the type of man to give up after a single failed experiment.

His scrolls were full of fell rites and Seimei intended to try them all.

First, there were the blood sigils. On the third night after Yoshihira was moved into the study, Seimei drew three perfect circles around the boy’s futon, each inscribed with a different pattern of archaic kanji using his own pierced index finger as a living calligraphy brush. The blood did not bead or run; it clung to the tatami like red mercury, spell-perfect and terrifying in its clarity.

That night, the tower was filled with nothing but the sound of Yoshihira’s ragged breathing, and by morning, Seimei had already cleaned the circles away.

When the magic of men proved useless, Seimei turned to the magic of things that were decidedly not. He made a pilgrimage to the riverbank at midnight, carrying a cask of sake and three lengths of braided straw. There he called upon the river kami, who, as the old stories insist, is always listening, especially when the moon is high and the water is black.

Seimei stood barefoot in the cold mud, chanting the invocation over and over, and pouring his own blood into the churning water until he almost passed out. The kami accepted the sacrifice with a ripple of satisfaction, but gave Seimei nothing in return. The spider, perched in Seimei’s eye socket, shuddered at the cold and the waste of it.

Undeterred, Seimei returned to the tower and performed the next ritual, and the next after that. In each attempt, blood was spilled, and all of it Seimei’s. This is an important lesson children that is sadly often forgotten these days. As all of the ancients knew, there is power in blood, and for a man there is none more powerful nor more loving than this, to give up your life for those you care about.

As the nights and the bloodletting continued, once, and only once, did the spider try to intervene. During the fifth night, when Seimei’s chanting had spiraled into pure animal noise, the spider pressed her forelegs against his cheek, trying in its own small way to remind him that his son was still very much alive. The boy lay not too far away, listlessly watching his father’s frantic workings and desperately craving his attention. Seimei did not react, or if he did, it was only to tilt his head slightly so the spider would not get caught in the spatter of ink as he drove the brush harder into the paper.

And so the experiments continued, each failure recorded and filed, until the day came when nothing more could be tried.

It was a bright and sunny day when Yoshihira finally died. Outside birds sang and grasshoppers frolicked regardless of the nearby tragedy. Yoshihira had not spoken in two days. His eyes, once so bright with mischief, stared at the ceiling with glassy indifference. Seimei sat beside him, stroking his son’s hand, as composed as a man could be after all he’d endured, and all he was losing. The spider, for her part, did not move. She simply watched, all eight eyes fixed on the boy as if by refusing to blink she could hold him in this world a little longer.

When the last breath finally left Yoshihira’s body, Seimei was ready. Despite the madness and the pain, Abe no Seimei was first and foremost an onmyoji. If there was one thing in this world he knew, and knew well, it was the trapping and binding of spirits. In the time it took the boy’s soul to realize it was free, Seimei had already captured and bound it, as one must, into a physical object which had absorbed a great deal of the departed’s affection. In this case Yoshihira’s favorite toy, a lacquered and mischievously grinning wooden cat.

The room went terribly, terribly quiet.

Seimei picked up the toy, cradling it in both hands as if it were a living, breathing thing. He stared at it for a long time with a sense of absolute, untranslatable loss. The spider, peering from his socket, watched too, and if it is even possible for a spider to cry, then she did.

It is sadly a very common fate in this world to find that after all your cleverness and all your effort, you are left holding exactly the thing you did not want.

If you ever find yourself in such a situation, dear children I hope that you will not give in to despair. My fervent wish is that, like Seimei, you would never give up, and would seek another solution. Although I must say, I do also hope that you would not seek a solution in quite the same way Seimei did next.

Thanks for reading. This story is a work in progress which I hope to some day publish. As such I welcome all comments and constructive criticism.

If you find you enjoy my work and would like to read more, my first published novel, Grumble and Gasp, is currently available on Kindle and Amazon.

Book 1 Available Here!

Want to know if I killed off your favorite character? I probably didn’t, but how can you be sure? Stay tuned. New chapters drop every week!

Buy me a coffee

Subscribe to Whimsy and Woe: Side effects may include inappropriate laughter, mild to moderate existential dread, and goose-chase nightmares.
Do not consume Whimsy and Woe if you are allergic to tears, snails, or kumquats.
Ask your doctor if Whimsy and Woe is right for you.

Subscribe now

Yes, yes, gather around children, it is time for a story. Tonight I have prepared for you a very special story. A story of whimsy and woe.

Though, I feel I must warn you children this story will at times be frightening, at times be quite sad, and I must admit that in its entirety it will be rather grotesque. But such is life my children, and the sooner one learns that the better. However, life is also surprising, funny, and full of hope, and this story, as every good story should, contains these things as well.

Now, everyone settled? Good, let us begin.

Once upon a time, there was a boy made of meat.

What’s that?

You say all boys are made of meat?

How clever you are, but you are only half right. Let us not forget such sundries as bones, hair, skin, and squishy bits. Far too many squishy bits, if I am being honest.

No, my children, little boys and girls are only half meat at best, but this very special little boy was made entirely and completely of nothing but meat, meat, meat.

But it seems I am getting ahead of myself, for you see, before you can have a boy made of that much meat, you will need just oh so many dead bodies, and wherever you find any such fine collection of carrion you will almost assuredly also find a necromancer.

Settle children, I see a few of you already growing nervous at the mention of necromancers. You, in the back, stop clutching your blanket so. No need to fret! This is not a story of those messy, vulgar necromancers from the borderlands, the ones who stuff their towers with grave-dirt and chicken bones and make a terrible fuss about it. No, no, the necromancer in our tale was a man of distinction and taste, a man whose shoes always matched, whose teeth were never stained, and who could recite four entire volumes of poetry without a single error.

He did, however, have a tower. All the best necromancers do.

But one might ask themselves why be a necromancer? Why build a boy from meat at all, when there are so many perfectly serviceable boys already available, running wild and making a terrible lot of noise in every direction?

Ah, that, children, is the right question. I am glad you asked.

The short answer is, that very few people ever intend to become necromancers, but, of course, every man needs a project. Some sew themselves cloaks from the skin of tigers, some attempt to turn lead into gold (it never works, but the process makes a wonderful mess), and some… well, some seek to create a thing that the world has never seen, a thing that, in its own miserable and improbable way, will outlast them.

Ours was the last kind.

His name was Abe no Seimei, and if you have heard of him already, you know he was the cleverest man in three prefectures and possibly the only one in history to win an argument with an oni without the use of violence or bribery. If you have not heard of him, do not worry. You will know him quite well by the end of this story.

For the moment, imagine a man with a face so sharp you could use it to cut mochi, hair always arranged just so, and a voice so calm and reasonable you would trust him to borrow your best ink brush and actually return it.

Imagine a man so wise and so honorable that even Emperor Ichijo himself came to him for advice. Can you imagine such a man? Do you see him children? Good, then we are ready to truly begin the story.

Now, imagine an immaculate room. Not merely clean, not merely organized, but immaculate. The sort of place where even dust motes paused at the threshold to remove their shoes before entering. The shelves were lined with scrolls in perfect order, each labeled in a hand so precise the letters looked printed rather than brushed. The tatami floor was so pristine it gleamed, and the air itself had the bright, resinous scent of cedar wood and old books, with a faint undercurrent of something metallic and disturbing if you breathed too deeply.

At the center of this temple of tidiness, Abe no Seimei sat behind a lacquered writing desk, absorbed in a document he had already read three times.

He read, and sipped his tea, and read again.

You could be forgiven for thinking Seimei looked quite relaxed, but nothing could be further from the truth. For you see tonight Seimei had a problem. The problem was not the usual kind he faced. The emperor had not been cursed, the imperial court did not need him to remove any stubborn spirits from the walls. No, the problem was rather more serious than that. You see, Seimei’s wife, whom he loved very much, had become suddenly and terribly ill.

I see some of you are shocked that a man like Abe no Seimei had a family, and how foolish of me not to have introduced them properly. Yes, he did have a wife, a son as well, and he loved them quite dearly in his own dry, scholarly way.

Seimei as we now know, was a man of precision. If a chopstick was out of alignment at dinner, if a grain of rice escaped the lacquer bowl and attempted to make a break for the edge of the table, Seimei would correct the situation with a flick of his gaze and the faintest purse of his lips, as if he had not so much noticed the error as simply willed it to cease existing.

Seimei’s wife, as in all the best marriages, was his opposite in every way. She possessed a laugh so bright that it could, and often did, startle birds from the trees in the courtyard. She was fond of bright silks, a good joke, and the way Seimei sneaked looks at her when he thought she was not looking back. A woman who was just as likely to start a food fight as eat her dinner.

Their son, Yoshihira, had inherited none of Seimei’s poise. In fact, if you could imagine a child composed of equal parts curiosity, cleverness, and a sort of blinding enthusiasm you would come very close to imagining Yoshihira. A boy whose preferred method for eating involved using both hands at once, with his mouth open as wide as possible for optimal airflow.

But for all of their differences they loved each other very much, which made what happened next all the harder.

One morning, Seimei’s wife awoke with a fever that had not existed the night before. By afternoon her lips were cracked and her skin sallow, and by evening she could no longer stand. Seimei measured her pulse with two fingers and a frown, consulted three separate diagnostic scrolls, and prescribed a regimen of dried chrysanthemum and ground deer horn that was known to cure most things, if only by boring the disease into submission as much as anything else.

For three days, the household held its breath. Yoshihira, forbidden from the sickroom, watched from the hall, his face pressed to the paper door as Seimei mixed powders and drew careful lines of salt around the futon. But for all his wisdom, and all his learning, Seimei’s wife continued to fade. Her laughter, usually the first sound to greet the morning, became a whisper, and then became nothing at all.

Seimei sat beside her in the pale blue light, his hands folded in his lap, his face so expressionless that for a moment you could mistake him for a statue carved and not a man grieving. It is worth pausing to say that despite his sadness, Seimei did not weep at this time, not once. He had not yet learned how to weep, but I’m sorry to say he would learn, my children, oh he would learn well.

He sat beside his wife for precisely three hours and seven minutes, because as a man of great learning he knew that was the time it took for a soul to leave the body and find its destination. At the end of the seventh minute past the third hour, he reached out and closed her eyes with two fingers, as gently and sadly as one might close the cover at the end of a favorite book.

Yoshihira was allowed to see her before she was taken away, and the boy cried enough for both father and son.

Grief, as anyone who has experienced it might tell you, is a highly personal undertaking, and each person experiences it in their own peculiar way. Yoshihira’s response to grief was to eat little, to play even less, and to sit quietly by the river where no one could hear him cry. Seimei’s response to grief was, predictably, to begin a new project.

A project that in time he, and everyone who knew him, would come very much to regret.

Thanks for reading. This story is a work in progress which I hope to some day publish. As such I welcome all comments and constructive criticism.

If you find you enjoy my work and would like to read more, my first published novel, Grumble and Gasp, is currently available on Kindle and Amazon.

Book 1 Available Here!

Want to know if I killed off your favorite character? I probably didn’t, but how can you be sure? Stay tuned. New chapters drop every week!

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