Kuchisake-onna

Listen, there is nothing to it, the truth about love is simple. She was a lady at court – beautiful, smart, cultured. She did not want a circumscribed life. But love was greedy and would rather sacrifice than share. So one tragic night he cut her face from ear to ear.

He was here again, my new, shy lover-to-be. There were chaste caresses, his warm breath on my neck, the palm of his hand in the small of my back… And as usual, we ran through the city desperate with desire, looking for our secret hideaway, only to find strangers everywhere – under the bridge, in the alleys, in the hallways of dark apartment buildings after midnight. Even the closets and bathrooms teemed with revelers absorbed in their bacchanalia, oblivious to our need, our lonely, melancholy hunger to touch our wounds in the ink-black night. How I wanted him to ask: tell me something that will make me love you. And how I wanted to tell him about that evening ten years ago when I sat alone with my emptied heart; how I dialed the familiar number, but the voice on the other end was not. I’m entertaining, he said, not without triumph, as a woman’s voice laughed in the background.

So you see, it’s rather simple. It was months before my lacerations healed enough for me to eat solid food, and now I can only come out in secret. I suppose my lover can never trace the wound – not only because it’s so ancient, but also because neither one of us wants to risk dying.