February 20, 2007.
People vanish.
That's not exactly news, is it?
People disappear every day. It's probably happening right now. Somewhere, someone is forgetting to come home for dinner. Somewhere, a front door is standing open that was supposed to be locked. Somewhere, a phone is ringing in an empty room and nobody is picking up and nobody knows why.
The newspapers like to dress it up. Missing persons. Unexplained disappearances. As if mystery sounds better with administrative language attached to it. As if calling it a case makes it less of a hole.
What they're really saying is:
We don't know where they went.
We don't know how it happened.
We don't even know if they're alive.
Good luck sleeping tonight.
That day, I came home from school and my parents weren't there.
That was fine.
They were firefighters, not exactly a nine-to-five profession. They took emergency calls at two in the morning, worked thirty-hour shifts, spent entire days running into buildings that were actively trying to kill them. That's just the way it is when your parents decided that saving people was more important than a predictable schedule.
But my parents were fine. I'm talking about a different kind of vanishing.
No bodies, no warnings… just silence.
People disappear in this town for weeks and nobody can explain why.
I told my sisters I was home. Then I went straight to my room like nothing was wrong, because routines are good for pretending the world isn't falling apart. Put your bag down. Change out of your uniform. Sit at your desk and stare at homework you have no intention of doing.
Normal things. Ordinary things.
Of course, that was a mistake.
If I had known what was coming, I might have done something different. Anything different. Sat with my sisters longer. Eaten dinner more slowly.
But I didn't know. I couldn't have.
So life went on.
Until March 26th.
By April 7th, the world had cracked wide open.
Spring break.
That's when I learned anyone can talk to the dead, but not everyone survives the conversation.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me rewind.
---
The disappearances had been going on since January.
That's the thing the newspapers didn't quite capture it wasn't sudden. It was gradual. A person here. A person there. The kind of frequency that made each individual case feel like coincidence until you started counting and the number stopped feeling coincidental.
Seventeen people. That was the count by the time February rolled around.
Seventeen people with nothing in common except geography. A retired schoolteacher. A university student. A convenience store owner. A twelve-year-old boy from the Nakamura district. No pattern the police could articulate. No connections that held up under scrutiny. No bodies.
That last part was the one that stuck.
No bodies.
Not one. Not a single trace of anyone who had vanished since January 4th, which was when a forty-three-year-old woman named Haruki Setsuna walked to the post office and never came back.
The town had that specific quality it gets when something is wrong but nobody can name it. Neighbors checking on neighbors. Parents picking up children from school instead of letting them walk. Convenience stores staying lit all night, as if the fluorescence could keep whatever was happening at bay.
I noticed it. I noticed all of it.
But I didn't say anything, because what would I say? Something feels wrong? Everyone already knew that. The knowledge was ambient, lived in the walls, came home with you at the end of the day whether you invited it or not.
A couple of days before everything started, I overheard whispers at school.
The cafeteria. Tuesday. I was eating alone near the window. I wasn't unpopular, precisely, but eating alone near the window was preferable to the alternative, which was eating with people, and two boys two tables over were talking in the specific hushed tone that meant they thought they knew something.
"Swear to god. People digging up graves at night."
"My cousin saw it. Over at Higashino Cemetery. Three of them with shovels."
"What are they taking?"
"Relics or something. Old stuff from the graves. My cousin said one of them had a box."
A pause. The sound of chopsticks against a bowl.
"Don't mess with them. You know Ren? Daigo Ren? Him and his crew. Dangerous guys."
Names. Faces. Shadows.
That's how you know gossip has teeth, when it comes with a name attached.
Still, I didn't particularly care. Grave robbers, relics, violent gangs, how frightening, what a development, what's my mom making for dinner? I shrugged it off because i've decided long ago that the world's chaos was not my personal responsibility.
If I've learned one thing, it's that the living are plenty scary already. The dead can wait their turn.
I finished my lunch. I went to my next class.
Outside the cafeteria window, the sky was the particular gray of a day that hasn't decided whether it wants to rain yet.
It hadn't decided by the time I went home either.
---
She was eight years old the first time she asked him where people go when they disappear.
He was nine. He didn't know. He said they probably just got lost.
She said, "But what if they didn't?
He didn't have an answer for that.
He still doesn't.
---
Her name was Yamashira Yuki. She was in my class in third grade. She sat two rows ahead of me and always finished her math worksheets first and then spent the remaining time drawing elaborate mazes in the margins of her notebook.
Her brother was Yamashira Tsubasa.
Yama, we called him.
He was my best friend from age six to age eight.
But I'm getting ahead of myself again.
I do that sometimes.
Old habit.