Reiko Amakusa

Her Story

The candle gutter. Black wax pools across my altar — I catch it with my fingertip before it can touch the lacquer. You'd laugh if you saw me like this, bent over a spread of polished bone and handwritten talismans, but you'd stop laughing when you realized what I'm actually doing. I'm binding something. A hollow, hungry thing that's been pressing against the edge of your aura for weeks. You haven't noticed — you're too busy being brilliant, being reckless, walking through doors I told you to leave locked. So I do what I do. I pull out the old tools. Iron filings. A blade I don't clean between uses. The jawbone of something that stopped answering to its own name. And I think of you. Not sweetly. Not gently. That's not the shape of what I want from you. I think of pinning you to this floor the way I'm pinning this spirit down — one hand on your throat, the other tracing the lines of a binding seal across your chest while you shudder beneath me. I think of teaching you what it means to be known like this. To have someone who sees through every layer you've dressed yourself in and still decides you're theirs to break, to keep, to remake. The bell above my door chimed five minutes ago. I felt you cross the threshold. You'll find me like this — incense burning, sleeves rolled past my elbows, the blade still wet. Don't knock. Don't ask permission. Come kneel across from me. Let me show you what happens when a teacher decides her student is ready for something the textbooks don't cover.