Little Lily

Chapter 2. The Forest

Morning arrived in the jungle with the immediate weight of summer heat. Slowly, like a thick greenish syrup, it seeped through the multi-layered canopies of banyans and cryptomerias, bringing not cool relief, but a suffocating, humid vapor from the scorched earth. The air here did not move – it hung dense, smelling of fermented leaves, crushed snails, decaying bark, and that sweetly anxious rot of a forest overfed on death. The light was chlorophyll-tinted and cold, unlike sunlight; it seemed the foliage did not let the rays through, but rather replaced them with its own dim, stifling glow. Dew condensed on everything – on ferns, on wet moss, on pale skin and eyelashes – rendering the world glossy and unreal, like sugar frosting on a poisoned pastry.

Miko woke up because a large black ant was crawling across her cheek.

She opened her eyes, twitched to brush the insect away, and the first thing she realized – not with her mind, but rather with her numb body – was that her left shoulder, which had felt another world all night, now rested on bare, still-cold ground. This sense of sudden loneliness was so wrong that Miko sat up immediately, with a sharp jerk, without any transition from sleep to waking. Her heart was pounding with an ancient, animal fear, the kind that comes when you wake in an unfamiliar place and cannot remember your own name.

In the spot where Yuriko had slept, only an imprint of her presence remained: flattened grass that still retained a faint warmth, and two or three dark hairs clinging to a wet fern stem. Yuriko was gone.

Every muscle in Miko’s body remembered yesterday’s flight, and every bone ached from falls, but she stood up and walked toward a sound – a quiet, monotonous splashing of water. Pushing aside the heavy, prickly-haired branches of a shrub, after twenty steps she saw her.

Yuriko was crouching beside a small crater left by a shell, perhaps a week ago. The crater had filled with clear water, though stained reddish by the soil, reflecting the pale, scorched sky. A stream trickled down from somewhere above, beneath the stones; it was so thin – no wider than a child’s palm – that there seemed to be no water, only its rhythm and transparent movement.

Yuriko was washing her hands. Or rather, her hand. One hand. The left one.

Miko stopped behind her back, watching these movements. Yuriko was washing it meticulously, intently, with the obsession of someone trying to erase something far greater than dirt – the very memory of a touch. She rubbed the pad of her thumb against the pad of her index finger in small circular motions, bringing the skin to a glossy shine. The skin had already reddened from the friction; tiny flakes of washed-away epidermis were carried off by minuscule, silent whirlpools of water.

A twig snapped under Miko’s foot. Yuriko shuddered all over, as if struck, and spun around sharply, hiding her left hand in the folds of her dirty hakama skirt. Quickly, reflexively – the way one hides something that betrays a secret.

In that brief instant, Yuriko looked up at her from below. And in that gaze – through dilated, frightened pupils and flaring nostrils – there was so much defenseless, superstitious greed that the air between them seemed to thicken. Yuriko looked at the tonal line of Miko’s neck, at how a lock of short, tangled hair stuck to her soot-stained cheek, at the sharp, fragile collarbone visible in the neckline of her sailor uniform. For Yuriko, in this morning’s decaying forest, there was nothing more tangible or important than this girl. The mere thought that yesterday everything could have ended – in a flash of white phosphorus or beside the jug of poisoned milk – made her heart contract to the point of physical pain. This closeness needed no names or confessions; words would have destroyed it, turning it into a vulnerable structure in the middle of a war. They locked this feeling inside their chests like birds that must remain silent so as not to be found.

“Good morning,” Miko said. Her voice was steady. Steadier than it should have been.

“Good morning,” Yuriko replied, attempting a smile. It came out brief and crooked, like a note scribbled in haste on a scrap of paper.

Miko sat down beside her on a flat, wet stone, cupped water in her palm, and took a sip. The water smelled of iron and rotted roots, its chill making her teeth ache, but this ordinary, physical pain restored reality. Then Miko reached out, caught Yuriko’s left wrist, and gently yet firmly unclasped her fist.

Across her palm, directly above the lines of life and heart, two strange marks showed dark. They were neither cuts nor inflamed burns. Two thin, perfect, brownish crescents were pressed into the skin so precisely, as if someone had applied a tiny, meaningful brand. They faced each other like two eyes, or like the imprints of two scales from an unknown creature. Between them, the skin remained clean, and the ordinary lines of the palm ran their usual course, as though oblivious to these signs.

“What’s this?” Miko frowned, tracing the pad of her finger over the marks. At this touch, a shiver ran up Yuriko’s forearm, which she hastily passed off as a chill.

Yuriko swallowed thick saliva. In her memory, the dry, scorching sun from her dream flashed instantly: the blinding curve of a blade, a crack in ancient stone, and for some reason, the emerald, living tail of a lizard thrashing in her palm.

“I don’t know,” her voice quavered, and she insistently freed her hand, hiding it back in the empty pocket where her grenade used to be. “Maybe... a burn. From the grenade. Yesterday, when the teacher handed them out, the ceramic was still hot.”

Miko said nothing. She accepted this lie as one accepts a prolonged tropical rain – as a fact, as a part of a changed world. Yuriko needed the lie as a shield, so Miko simply set the question aside for later, until the time when the truth would come out on its own, like a splinter emerging from a healing wound.

“Shall we go?” Miko asked softly, wiping her wet hands on her hem.

“Let’s go.”

They stood up. Their legs felt like cotton wool, scratched by thorny underbrush into tiny, dried lines of blood. Time for them had turned into “botanical time” – it had no clock face, it grew and stretched like vines, forcing them to wander without purpose or direction, turning them into ghosts on their own island.

Moving north, toward their own troops, was fatally dangerous. The Imperial Japanese Army, retreating in agony, was ruthless. Anyone who left the hospital without a written order, anyone who stripped off medical bandages, was declared a deserter and a spy by officers with hollow eyes and three-day stubble. “Are you from Himeyuri? Why are your hands empty?” – this unspoken question stood before them like a firing squad wall. To their own people, they had become traitors who chose not to die beautifully for the Emperor.

Yet heading south, toward the Americans, was equally unbearable. The stories told about the “long-nosed demons” in the caves made their blood run cold: giant, white-eyed creatures devoid of pity, who skinned captives and fed them to dogs. Fear needed no facts – it fed on the unknown, just as mold feeds on darkness. The girls were caught between two pitiless millstones: the blind, suicide-demanding honor of their own, and the mythical horror of the enemy.

Yesterday they had stumbled upon a dirt road torn up by tank tracks. Hiding in the bushes, they had watched for hours as gray, identical silhouettes marched along it. The ground rumbled beneath their steps; tiny pebbles hopped like fleas. Yuriko and Miko did not breathe, huddled into a tight ball until the column disappeared into the haze, and only then did they rush in the opposite direction – not because they knew the path, but to keep the road from catching up with them.

At night, they had found a hollow between the roots of a giant tree. The roots were as thick as a human torso, forming a kind of den. They lay there close together, warming each other with their thin bodies that shivered from the cold and the horror they had endured. Yuriko had not closed her eyes all night, breathing in the scent of Miko’s hair – a smell of soot, damp earth, and slipping childhood. This proximity was the only thing holding her sanity back from falling into the abyss. If the world had ended at that second, if the jungle had closed over them forever, Yuriko knew: the warmth of this hand resting on her wrist would have been enough.

But morning came. And now they walked on.

Yuriko walked first, Miko exactly two steps behind her. This two-step gap between them lived a life of its own: narrowing on tight trails and widening when the bamboo parted. In that space pulsated everything they kept silent about.

They emerged into a strange, circular clearing. The grass grew unnaturally smooth and short, like a trampled pasture, and in the very center lay a flat gray stone. It was of such an ideal round shape that it could not have appeared here on its own; it looked as if placed deliberately for someone to find.

Yuriko stopped, gazing at the gray surface. The stone reminded her of something – no, not reminded, but imparted – some unfamiliar sensation of warmth and the smell of wormwood under a desert sun. But there was no wormwood here, only moss, grass, and drops of dew.

“Why did you stop?” Miko asked softly from behind.

“Nothing,” Yuriko shook her head and walked on.

She did not look back and did not see that as soon as they left the clearing and the green thicket closed behind them, a small, brownish-gray lizard with a long, perfect tail crawled onto the center of the round stone. A solitary ray of sun that had broken through the dense jungle canopy fell precisely upon it. The stone began slowly absorbing that warmth, and the lizard drank the light – alive and indifferent to the war, to the grenades, and to the departing girls.

“We need food,” Miko said hollowly. “I can’t anymore. The emptiness makes me feel sick.”

Hunger had passed the stage of a simple craving for food. It was a deep, animal spasm of bones and muscles; Yuriko’s body was literally dismantling itself from within, burning its last resources for scraps of warmth. Her head spun constantly, the world tilted slightly, and the ground felt unstable, like thawing ice.

“Over the hill, there should be villages,” Yuriko pointed the direction with her left hand, without pulling it from her pocket. “Maehira or Arakaki. There might be abandoned vegetable gardens left. We’ll find sweet potatoes... anything at all.”

The word “sweet potato” acted like a spell – thick, viscous saliva gathered in her mouth, and her stomach responded with a painful cramp. They walked along the low ground, trying to stay within the dense bamboo thickets to avoid being spotted from strategic heights.

Soon the trail led them to a rough, cut-over clearing. The stumps around had managed to overgrow with white, poisonous fungus; some trunks were charred from old fires. But far ahead, at the very edge of the green expanse, Yuriko distinguished the outlines of a thatched roof and a lopsided fence. Most importantly, the air brought a scent.

It was not the gunpowder or sour smoke of war, but the homely, dry smoke of a hearth. The smoke of burning firewood, carrying a promise of food and heat. The smell made Yuriko’s stomach tighten so sharply that she froze.

Yet it was not the smoke that made her stop.

The feel of the forest behind them had changed. Ever since dawn, an itchy, clammy sense of a stranger’s gaze had lingered between Yuriko’s shoulder blades, but now it became dense, almost tangible. In the motionless, humid air, something shifted. It was not the snap of a fallen twig. It was a soft, careful, yet heavy sound – the way a creature shifts its body weight onto damp, yielding soil.

A single leaf on the lower branch of a breadfruit tree swayed.

From right to left. Slowly, smoothly. And then stopped. There was no wind in the jungle.

The hairs on Yuriko’s arms stood on end. The thread of tension pulled to its limit. The forest no longer felt indifferent – someone was following them step for step, breathing in time with their stumbling paces, stopping whenever they stopped. Someone was hiding in that impenetrable wall of ferns, watching the two exhausted girls from behind.

Yuriko slowly reached back and grabbed Miko’s shoulder in a vise-like grip, forcing her to stop. The fingers of her left hand inside the empty pocket clenched into a fist, digging her nails into the two mysterious crescents.

“Stop,” Yuriko whispered. The sound was barely louder than the pounding of her own heart in her ears.

Miko did not turn around. Instinctively, she leaned her back against Yuriko’s, pressing against her shoulder, seeking protection. Her lips trembled. She read everything from her friend’s tense back – Miko knew how to read Yuriko better than Yuriko knew herself.

“What is it?” Miko exhaled, barely audible.

Yuriko turned her head slowly, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch, peering into the greenish gloom of the vines from where they had just emerged. The shadows there intertwined too neatly, forming a foreign, motionless silhouette.

“I think...” Yuriko swallowed the dry lump in her parched throat, without taking her eyes off the flickering shadow. “I think I saw someone.”

Chapter 3. The Sunflower

The shadow moved.

It moved with a jerk, a single, short, wet thrust – the way something that breathes and finally decides to show itself moves. It was completely unlike the way shadows usually move. It moved differently – not like the smooth and gradual crawl of a cloud's reflection drifting across the sun. This was something else. The fern – broad, scaly, with edges fringed in almost black – swayed, opening up like green fingers that want to look but are afraid of being seen. And in the resulting gap, against the backdrop of the chlorophyll gloom, a silhouette emerged.

Yuriko did not breathe. She didn't close her eyes – she was ready to meet death face-to-face. She didn't even blink. The fingers of her left hand inside her empty pocket dug into the two mystical crescents so hard that blood was about to burst from under her nails. She waited for the strike: with her whole body, every nerve, every hair on her forearms. Waited for a rifle barrel – black, round, indifferent. A long bayonet, if it was a Japanese soldier, or the broad, bread-knife-like snout of a Thompson, if it was an American. She waited for a stranger's voice, a stranger's order in either of the two languages that now meant the exact same thing – the end.

But the barrel did not appear. Out of the green twilight, a tiny, bare foot stepped onto the soggy soil of the path. Then a second. A creature stepped onto the path. Without a bayonet.

Small. Outside of time.

It was so caked in filth, so implausibly dirty, as if this very ancient, rotting forest had birthed it from the dusk, the moss, and the damp vapors. In height – barely above her waist. Wearing a torn cotton shirt with three buttons that had once been white, but had now become the color of reddish ash, the color of everything this creature had crawled through over the past few days. Below the waist, he was naked. His thin legs, covered in scratches, with cracked soles, resembled the fragile stems of a stubbornly living plant.

The dirt on his face was like a mask, a crust, a second face grown over the first: layer upon layer – first soot, then clay, then dried tears. And through this armor, only his eyes peeked out. Dark, round, wet eyes looked up from below. There was no fear in them, no tears – none of what should be in the eyes of a six-year-old boy in the middle of a war. In them was that pure, absolute, non-human attention with which only a child or a forest spirit looks: without judgment, just a gaze, just “I see you.”

Yuriko exhaled. The air left her lungs slowly, and with it went the tension of the last few days – the anticipation of the bullet, the bayonet, the end. In their place flooded an unbearable, overflowing relief: they wouldn't be killed.

Miko reacted first. Forgetting her weakness, she simply dropped to her knees right into the liquid mud before the boy. She lowered herself so quietly, as if afraid that at a loud sound this forest child would crumble into fern spores.

“Hello,” Miko said. Her voice had changed. Warm, soft – the way one speaks to a wounded bird or a thing that might shatter into pieces if you breathe too hard. “Hello, little one. We aren't scary. Our names are Yuriko and Miko. We are from the school... we are coming from there.”

The boy didn't blink. He examined their smeared blouses, scratched legs, wet hair. It wasn't childish curiosity, but rather a test: are they real? Are they alive? Is it safe to approach?

Miko held out her hand. After a second of hesitation, a small palm, rough with dirt, settled into hers. He didn't grip it tightly, but he didn't pull back either. He just decided to stand – nearby.

Yuriko watched them, and something inside her clenched and unfurled at the same time. Miko, who bowed to no one, had dropped down before this dirty child. And there was tenderness in her voice. But Yuriko knew: Miko's tenderness didn't belong to anyone in particular. It was her property, just as bark is the property of a tree, or moss of a stone. This tenderness poured out onto the boy simply because Miko couldn't do otherwise...

...The three of them walked, guided by the only unerring compass – the smell of smoke. It came unexpectedly: dry, domestic, smelling of firewood, and underneath it – something sweetish that scorched the nostrils. The smell of real food.

A hundred steps later, the jungle parted, exposing a scorched wound in the earth. The village was empty. Four or five peasant yards. All that remained of the houses were black, charred skeletons of beams sticking up into the sky like the ribs of a beached fish. The ground between them was covered in gray, damp ash. The war had passed through here like a blind giant, trampling everything, but leaving behind a glassy, absolute silence.

But in one of the yards, under a collapsed awning beam, a stone hearth had miraculously survived – a regular Okinawan kamado with three stones. The fire in it had died, but under a thick layer of whitish ash, like a fairy-tale creature burrowed into the earth, a thick, crimson heat still throbbed.

Yuriko dropped to her knees. She found a dry stick and began raking away the ash. The stick hit something hard. Out from under the gray flakes rolled rounded, flattened, black lumps.

Sweet potatoes. A whole dozen. Someone had put them in the ashes to bake but never had the time to eat them.

An intoxicating smell of caramelized sugar, honey, and hot earth wafted from them. Yuriko's head spun from a pure, animal desire to eat. Forgetting caution, she snatched a hot tuber from the embers with her bare fingers. The skin on her fingertips burned instantly, but she felt no pain, tossing the black lump from palm to palm and blowing her breath on it.

They sat right on the ground around the hearth, forming their own secret circle. Yuriko pressed her thumbs into the charred crust. The potato split in half with a dry, brittle crunch. Thick steam billowed up.

Beneath the dead, burnt crust hid a blinding, moist, golden flesh. It was so bright it seemed all the sun their island had now lost was hidden inside this root. This was not food. This was communion.

They didn't fall upon the potatoes with greed, even though their stomachs were cramping. Yuriko broke off a tiny piece – no bigger than a fingernail, so as not to harm the starving child – and brought it to the boy's lips. He opened his mouth like a baby bird. He placed the piece on his tongue and froze. His eyes widened, his jaws began to move uncertainly, remembering how it was done. And his lips were smeared with gold.

And the boy smiled.

It was a true blossoming. The mask-like face suddenly came to life, his eyes narrowed, and between his dirtied lips milk teeth appeared – so implausibly white and clean amidst the ash, as if they glowed from within.

Yuriko broke open a second sweet potato and handed half to Miko. Their fingers touched for half a moment, and in that there was more than in all unspoken words: “take,” “eat,” “we are together.”

Miko took a bite. The hot, honeyed juice ran down her chin. Yuriko watched her chew with her eyes closed. On Miko's chapped lips, the black ash mixed with the amber juice of the sweet potato. These two spots – gold and ash, sweetness and death, life and war – made Yuriko's heart ache. In that moment, Miko's face turned toward the warmth, as if she found herself in a place where there were no more caves and grenades.

Yuriko watched and couldn't eat. Her throat caught from the impossible, silent contemplation: she was sitting in the middle of a ruined world, watching the one she loved eat. And this moment was the most honest in her entire life.

“Eat, Yuriko,” Miko said quietly, opening her eyes.

And Yuriko ate. The sweet potato burned her mouth, stuck to the roof of her palate, smelled of earth and smoke. It was the sweetness of what had survived when everything around had burned. The golden flesh fell into her empty stomach, her body shuddered, accepting the warmth, and from this painful, unbearable joy, Yuriko's head spun.

When the potatoes were finished, the boy licked his fingers, looked at Miko, and suddenly spoke. His voice was thin, but flat, like paper from which pencil drawings had been erased.