Blossoms of The Forgotten Day Chapter 20: Chapter 20

Read chapter 20 of Blossoms of The Forgotten Day by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

We left on a Sunday morning, three weeks after I found the brooch. I had spent those three weeks finding out what I could about the village. It sat in a mountain region three hours north by train, small enough that it did not appear on most maps without zooming in, the kind of place that exists in the spaces between larger places. The earthquake seven years ago had taken a significant portion of it. What remained had been rebuilt slowly, quietly, the way communities rebuild when the world has moved on and the cameras have gone and there is nothing left but the work itself. I had found a record of the memorial site on a regional preservation website, a small page with a photograph of a stone marker on a slope above the village, surrounded by bare trees, the valley visible below. The caption said it had been erected for the residents lost in the disaster. I had looked at that photograph for a long time. The slope in it. The way the trees stood. The valley below carrying the shape of a river I did not know. Something about it pulled at me the same way the clearing had pulled at me on that first morning. Present. Not yet clear. I told Haruki and Asahi the night before we left. Not asking. Just telling them the time of the first train and which station and that I was going. Haruki had looked at me for exactly one second and then said what time do we need to leave to get there. Asahi had said he would bring food for the train. Neither of them made it a discussion. That was the thing about the two of them. When it mattered they did not make it a discussion. The train was quiet at that hour, mostly empty, the Sunday morning stillness of a city not yet fully awake. We sat together in a row of seats by the window, Asahi's bag of convenience store food between us, the city sliding past outside and then thinning gradually into suburbs and then into the wider open shapes of countryside, fields and low hills and the occasional farmhouse set back from the tracks. Nobody talked much. Haruki had her chin in her hand and was watching the window. Asahi ate a rice ball with the focused calm of someone who understood that the best thing he could offer right now was simply his presence, warm and solid and without demand. I held the brooch in my coat pocket. My fingers found it every few minutes without deciding to, the cool silver, the bent pin, the small blue stone. Outside the window the hills were getting larger. The trees along the tracks were bare still, winter not yet finished at this latitude, but here and there on a southern slope you could see the first pale suggestions of color, the world considering spring without committing to it yet. She had always liked spring best of all. I turned from the window and looked at my hands. We changed trains at a regional junction and took a smaller line north, the carriages older and slower, the landscape outside more serious now, the hills higher and closer together, the valleys between them deeper and darker with shadow even in the morning light. The village station was the last stop on the line. A single platform, a small shelter, a timetable on the wall with four departures a day. We were the only people who got off. The air was different here. Colder and thinner and carrying the particular clarity of high places, the kind that makes sounds travel differently and colors seem more precise. The mountains above the village were still holding their snow at the upper elevations, the white of it clean and sharp against the pale sky. I stood on the platform for a moment and breathed it in. "Which way?" Haruki asked. I looked up the slope above the village. The trees were dense there, bare-branched, the path through them not visible from here but present, I was certain of it, the way I was certain of things that lived in me without requiring proof. "Up," I said. We found the path at the edge of the village, past the last of the rebuilt houses and through a small gate with a wooden marker that I could not fu