Their mother was the daughter of a poor calligrapher long in the grave and did herself die of a fever in the poorhouse just two years after Teshi’s birth. Komako remembered little about her. The softness of her hair in the candlelight. A sadness crinkling the eyes. Stories she used to tell some nights of yōkai and the spirit world and of the girls’ tall father, bearded, orange-haired like a dragon. All of that had faded with the years. Komako did not know anymore how much of what she remembered was real. But she would tell Teshi that their mother had cradled her in the night in a giant wooden shoe, and had sung to her, her little cricket, and she would watch her sister’s face in the moonlight for the dream creeping over her features. Sometimes she would tell how she, Komako, only five years old, had carried Teshi through the rainy streets day after day and snuck into a theater for the heat and there crouched in the back listening to the kabuki and when it was all over how she’d hid under a bench and kept her sister quiet with a finger in her mouth. When they were caught she clung to Teshi and screamed and kicked out at the stagehand who’d been sweeping the house but was dragged backstage all the same. The old master just sat very still in his white makeup, staring. He asked nothing. With his wig already removed and the great folds of his robes pouring out around him he had looked like a living demon and Komako had been terrified. At last the master grunted, smoothed out his whiskers.
“That is your brother, little mouse?” he said, in his slow deep voice.
Komako clutched her sister closer.
“Sister, sir,” she whispered.
“Hm,” he murmured. He looked over at the stagehand kneeling at the screen. “There are already mice here in the walls. I do not think two more will matter.”
* * *
“You must not ever talk about it,” she used to tell her little sister. “Not what I can do. Not ever.”
“But what if it helped people? What if there was a fire, and you could save someone?”
“How could I save anyone?”
“You could put out the fire. With the dust.”
She shook her head firmly. “It doesn’t work like that, Teshi. And they wouldn’t understand, they’d be too afraid.”
She said this in part because she herself was afraid. It was a kind of wrongness in her and it had never not been a part of her. Even as a very young girl she’d feared it, feared the door in her mind, the door into the dark. That’s how she thought of it. If she held her palms over dust, that door would swing open inside her, and pull her through, and she would stand trembling in an absolute blackness turning her wrists blindly, blood loud in her ears while a chill set its hooks in her flesh. What she could do was not witchcraft; the dust was like a living thing. She’d believed for years it was a part of the spirit world she was glimpsing, but there was no beauty in it, and therefore it could not be so. Her gift worked only on dust, not on sand, not on dirt. But with dust she could twist and lift and turn and give life, creating silver ribbons in the darkness, blossoms of ash, and the older she grew the more precise her control. Always her little sister’s eyes would be shining and she’d grip the edges of her threadbare kimono and stare and Komako would stare also, almost like it wasn’t her doing it at all, almost like the dust had its own desires, and the two girls would just see whatever it was the dust wanted them to see.
“What’s it like, Ko?” Teshi whispered one night. “Is it very awful for you?”
Komako ran her chapped fingers through her sister’s hair. Those fingers were red and sore all the time and she wrapped them in strips of linen to hide their appearance. “Imagine a darkness,” she murmured. “Imagine that darkness is inside you, but it’s not a part of you. You feel it there. It’s always waiting.”
Teshi shivered. “Does it scare you?”
“Sometimes. Not always.”
But Teshi didn’t understand about fear, not truly. Komako knew this. The first time she ever saw Komako working the dust, she shrieked with laughter. That was before she started to get sick. She was three years old and holding an apple and the apple fell to the polished floor, but Teshi just stood, stunned, watchful, staring at Komako’s hands, at the intricate forms they made in the air, at the dust in its dancing, and then she grinned a huge grin and clapped her hands together and shrieked.
“Komako, Ko! Look what you can do!” For her, Ko’s gift was play. Everything was play. She’d poke her face through the wall where Komako squatted over the night pot, peeing, and giggle. Or stack boxes in the actors’ room below and climb teetering to the top and reach up through the cracks in the ceiling with her fingers to wiggle them spookily beside her sister’s tatami until Komako caught sight of them and screamed.