Girls in Closets
A modern Bluebeard tale, of sorts. PG-13, 845.

Two months after she’s moved in, Yelena rises from the bed she shares with Akira and notices that he isn’t there.

He’s away often enough on missions or on business (although she’s been going over the Mitsugi financial records in her overabundant free time and thinks she might need to have a word with him about some of the decisions he’s made), but he’s supposed to be at the compound tonight. He doesn’t have a mission; the only Mitsugi authorized to be outside the compound tonight are Shiba and Kasumi. She dons a pair of slippers and slides into a light robe. Today, she’s able to put the robe on correctly without assistance.

She lights a candle and slides open the paper door that separates Akira’s room from the hallway. She’s talked to him often enough lately about the impracticalities of using fire for illumination in a house made of paper and wood. Electricity would be much less dangerous. He says that the Mitsugi have always done things that way, and they’ve avoided mishaps so far. Besides, too much electrical current in the main house would interfere with the seers’ visions, or so he claims. She tries to point out that the doctor’s wing uses more than its share of modern conveniences without impairing the seers’ abilities, but he stops listening by then.

The candle gutters and dies as she approaches the door near the end of the hall, the one she’s forbidden to enter. Her lips twitch slightly as she remembers Akira’s warning. It sounds like something straight from the folktales her grandmother loved to tell. Perhaps she’d find dismembered women in there, previous wives who’d thought they could outsmart Bluebeard.

Of course, Akira is clean-shaven. And he hasn’t entrusted her with an egg to hold her to her promise.

Light spills from the crack beneath the door. She steps closer, praying that her slippers will help muffle the noise from her feet. If Akira’s inside that room, of course, he’s probably heard her already. Still, caution never hurts when you’re going places that you shouldn’t, she reasons. She grasps the brass knob and pulls slowly, slowly—and starts when the door gives way.

Don’t creak, she instructs it. She grabs the knob so tightly that her fingers start to ache and draws it closer as slowly as she can, millimeter by millimeter. After an eternity, and just as her fingers feel like they’re about to fall off, the door opens wide enough to let her through if she squeezes. She slips inside, perhaps not with the grace of a true Mitsugi, but with skill enough for an extended member of their family.

Akira’s there, but he hasn’t noticed her. His attention seems to be fixed on something else. She looks up to see what could captivate him so, and almost immediately wishes that she hadn’t.

A beautiful woman with long hair black as night and skin white as the stars stares benevolently down at the two of them—or she would if her eyes weren’t made of glass. Her lips are painted the same shade of red as her kimono, and unless Yelena’s imagination is running away with her, the corner of her mouth turns upwards in catlike satisfaction. Yelena knows that if she touched the hand peeking out elegantly from the wide sleeves of the kimono, the skin would be frozen and dead and all too real. She looks for sunken cheeks, yellowed skin, loosening hair, anything to prove that this woman won’t rotate her head and turn those glass eyes on Yelena.

If it were a portrait, she thinks numbly, I could stare for hours—but this—she’s not alive, she can’t be…

“Reika,” Akira says softly, almost too softly to be heard. Yelena backs towards the door.

“Tennozu Reika,” he repeats, louder this time. “My first wife, and Keiko’s mother.”

Yelena knows that she was intended to hear that part. Images flash before her eyes of girls with their eyes gouged out, girls with their heads chopped off and blood matting the hair around their jagged necklines, girls’ lifeless, stiff fingers strung on a necklace like beads—and as she looks at Akira’s hunched shoulders and bowed head, they fade.

He doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t think that he can. She should leave.

She walks forward, stepping heel-toe, heel-toe to minimize the noise her feet make against the wooden floor. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, she wraps her arms around his shoulders, reaches a hand around to stroke his cheek. It’s damp.

Akira still says nothing. His shoulders stay locked, but now that she’s this close, she can feel them trembling rapidly, like a hummingbird’s wings might. He doesn’t pull away from her, though, so she keeps holding him. After a few minutes, she rests her cheek against his back. She thinks she can hear his heart beat. It’s a steady, heavy sound, the footsteps of a giant marching steadily on.

He won’t give her anything, but he won’t take anything away, either, and maybe she can live like this.