The night right after the funeral, I dragged a sofa up to the electric space heater in the lobby of an old inn tucked into a hot-spring town deep in the mountains.

  The heater was shaped like a fireplace. Behind its glass panel, fake orange flames wavered, but they threw no shadows—nothing in the room responded to them. They only danced, uselessly, on the far side of the glass. The smell of snow rode in on a thin draft that slipped through unseen gaps. In the air that had already gone numb with cold, the imitation fire only seemed to sharpen the chill.

  My daughter, Eri, sat on my lap and sang “Donguri Korokoro,” a children’s song in a tiny voice. It was thin, swallowed by the lobby’s spacious emptiness. My wife couldn’t make it because of work. Only Eri and I had come all the way up here for my aunt’s funeral.

  She’d died young—mid-fifties. The doctor only said “a rare illness,” and even that explanation felt vague, like something being deliberately left unspoken. The funeral itself had been… flat. Like the world had performed the motions and moved on.

  On the lobby wall hung an old paper talisman: yellowed handmade paper with a child’s face brushed in black ink. I couldn’t tell if the expression was laughing or crying. Only the eyes were too large, too emphatic. My aunt used to call it their “guardian god.”

  I’d seen it every time we visited when I was a kid, but tonight it looked—alive. As if, behind the paper, those eyes were peeking out at me. I looked away.

  When I thought we should head back to our room, the employees’ door opened and my uncle Arashi stepped in.

  He was my aunt’s younger brother. He and my aunt had run the inn together, him acting as the head clerk. Wiping his hands on the towel slung around his work jacket, he spoke in a slightly raspy voice.

  “Sorry about this. I haven’t been able to look after you properly.”

  Stubble shadowed his jaw, flecked with white. The last time I’d seen him, he’d looked ageless, almost youthful. Tonight, he seemed to have aged a decade in one go. Maybe my aunt’s death had hit him that hard. The two of them had been unusually close. Unusually close—closer than most siblings.

  “She’d already been making preparations,” he went on. “The new owner is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. The staff who were still hanging on—today was their last day.”

  He was letting the inn go.

  I’d assumed the business was doing fine. I couldn’t understand why he’d sell.

  I was about to ask, but the question caught in my throat.

  The talisman in the corner slid back into my field of view.

  For a split second, the ink-black seemed to shift with the heater’s wavering light, like the face had moved.

  Arashi sat down beside me and fell silent for a while.

  The heater’s fake flame threw a pale light across his cheeks—light without warmth, only enough to deepen the grooves of his wrinkles.

  “My sister was a strong woman,” he said at last.

  I nodded. My aunt had always felt like that. Hard to the core.

  “She built this place up with her own hands. Nobody could do what she did.” He paused. “But strong people… they push too hard somewhere. She was that kind of person.”

  His eyes went to the wall, to the talisman.

  “She believed in that talisman. Called it a guardian. Since she was a kid, she believed. When I first came to this house, the first thing she taught me was to put my hands together in front of it.”

  I felt my breath catch.

  “When you first… came here?”

  Arashi smiled slowly. It was dry. It hurt to see.

  “I’m not really her brother,” he said. “Not by blood. I’m adopted. She picked me up.”

  “Picked you up…?”

  “It was a day like this. Snowing. I was collapsed on the mountain pass. I couldn’t remember my name, or where I came from.” His voice stayed flat, but it felt like he was forcing it through a tight space inside his chest. “She said, ‘You came on a stormy day. So your name will be Arashi.’ And from that day on, I was Arashi.”

  The air in the lobby seemed to drop another degree. Snow tapped at the window.

  Arashi kept staring at the talisman as he continued, his voice sinking lower.

  “She told me, ‘There’s a child god in this house. That god is protecting you.’ I believed it. I believed it all the way until she died…”

  His last syllables trembled.

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  Cold ran through my ribs.

  Was my aunt’s death really just illness? The talisman, Arashi—together they felt like a shadow hiding something.

  I shivered, and maybe Eri, bored by the adult talk, looked up at me with the face she made when she wanted something.

  “Hey,” she said, in her small, earnest voice. “Tell me… a story?”

  I thought I should take her back to bed, and I hesitated.

  Arashi answered for me.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll tell you a story.”

  He turned toward Eri, and his voice softened.

  The air shifted.

  Even the sound of the fake fire seemed to recede, as if the lobby had leaned closer to listen.

  Holding Eri on my lap, I listened.

  “This is a story your great-aunt told me…” Arashi began.

  **“When my aunt Yoshi was little—everyone called her Yoshi-chan—there weren’t any streetlights between this village and the next. It’s all the same town now, but back then, once the sun went down, the road vanished into black. It was terrifying.”

  His voice stayed gentle, but it felt like it pulled the dark closer. I tightened my arms around Eri before I could stop myself.

  “That day, Yoshi-chan was sent on an errand to a relative’s house in the next village. Alone. Brave, right? But she stayed too long. The family ran a prosperous shop—rare sweets, beautiful dolls—and before she knew it, it was late.

  “By the time she stepped outside to head home, the sun was long gone. No moon that night. The road was nothing but darkness.”

  I remembered the talisman’s face. Those eyes, shining in the dark.

  .

  “Yoshi-chan clutched the cloth bundle she’d been entrusted with and hurried along the snowy path in straw snowshoes.

  “Crunch… crunch…”

  Arashi said the sound on purpose, like he wanted it to land in our ears.

  “And then,” he continued, “she heard the same sound behind her.

  “Crunch… crunch…

  “She got scared and walked faster. The sound sped up too.

  “Crunch, crunch, crunch…”

  I held my breath. With his voice, the lobby floor felt like it had turned to snow under my feet.

  “She couldn’t stand it anymore. She ran—ran as fast as she could—until she reached home. Right up until the moment she slid the door open… she could still hear it.

  “Crunch… cru~nch…”

  He stretched the last sound, slowly, like it was crawling.

  Eri listened, eyes wide and bright.

  I felt a thin line of cold sweat slide down my spine.

  “…But,” Arashi said, “Yoshi-chan didn’t drop the cloth bundle. She carried it properly. So her mother praised her. Yoshi-chan doesn’t even remember what was inside anymore.”

  When he said the story was over, Eri clapped her hands—newly learned applause, soft and proud.

  “Was Yoshi-chan okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Arashi said. “But after that, she got scared of walking at night. So whenever she had to go on errands, I always went with her…”

  “Huh,” Eri said, instantly unbothered.

  But the sound Arashi had described still echoed in my ears.

  …Come to think of it, the relatives in this town he mentioned—didn’t that branch of the family die out? No kids. Maybe that was why they’d once welcomed my aunt so warmly.

  “Well then,” Arashi said, looking genuinely pleased to be talking with Eri.

  My aunt and Arashi had both stayed single. No children. Maybe that was why Eri delighted him, I thought.

  “Hey,” Eri said again, leaning forward. “More story?”

  Her pleading voice melted into the lobby’s quiet.

  Arashi raised his face slowly.

  In that instant, I realized something had changed.

  The corners of his mouth twisted strangely. Was it a smile? A cramp? His eyes opened wide—too wide—and turned into deep pools that seemed to drink in the light.

  “Then,” he said, voice drawn out, “shall I tell you what happened after that…?”

  “Yeah! Please!” Eri chirped.

  My heart thumped once, hard.

  A numbness—like pressing a sea cucumber against my skin—slid down my back from the nape of my neck to my waist.

  Eri didn’t notice a thing.

  “You see,” Arashi said, “Yoshi-chan carried something far more important than the cloth bundle back from that house. She carried it allll the way…”

  His face began to change.

  The flesh of his cheeks shrank, slowly. His skin drew inward, losing its sag as if something was tightening it from within. The white flecks of stubble vanished one by one. His eyes grew larger still, holding a glossy black shine, drifting closer and closer to a child’s gaze.

  I tried to scream.

  My throat froze shut.

  Arashi’s body grew smaller right in front of me. His shoulders narrowed. His arms thinned. His work jacket began to hang loose, then slipped and fell to the floor.

  Standing there was a boy of about five.

  He wore a short festival coat like the inn staff’s. And somehow, it looked perfectly natural on him—like that was what he’d always been meant to wear.

  “Aah!”

  My voice finally broke free.

  The boy’s face was identical to the child on the talisman. Every line, every curve. The inked smile had found a home in living flesh.

  “There’s a child god in this house,” a voice echoed in my skull.

  Was it my aunt’s? Arashi’s? I couldn’t tell anymore.

  Eri laughed, delighted—like she’d just made a friend.

  The sound stabbed into my ears.

  I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t move. My knees had turned to ice.

  “Uncle…?” I managed, my voice shredded.

  The boy grinned.

  The corners of his mouth twisted in the same strange way Arashi’s had.

  “Uncle,” the boy said, shaking me. “If you sleep here, you’ll catch a cold!”

  My eyes snapped open.

  A bright-looking boy of about five stood in front of me, wearing the inn’s festival coat. The sight was so natural it was obscene—as if his presence here required no explanation at all.

  But inside my head, something was collapsing.

  The funeral. Arashi’s voice. The talisman’s smile—everything was melting, circling, dissolving.

  “…Ah,” I said, hoarse. “Koto-kun?”

  The name came out of nowhere. I didn’t know where I’d gotten it. But the boy grinned as if he’d been waiting to be called that.

  Arashi?

  Who was that again?

  “Sorry about that,” Koto-kun said cheerfully. Then, with the same easy certainty: “Also, from today on, you should call me Dad.”

  …Right. My aunt had been an unwed mother, and she’d raised him here.

  Wasn’t that it?

  Sleep clung to my thoughts, and yet the idea settled into me with frightening comfort. My poor little cousin—someone had to raise him.

  And hadn’t I been the one to receive the money from selling the inn?

  Of course. In exchange, I would take him in. That was my aunt’s will. That was what we’d decided.

  “Okay, Dad,” I heard myself say.

  Something inside me clicked into place.

  Yes. I was this boy’s father.

  Even as some part of me kept whispering that something was wrong, the new truth wrapped around my mind like a warm blanket.

  I turned my eyes to the talisman on the wall.

  At the edge of my vision, it swayed.

  The child’s face on the paper was smiling.

  No—what was smiling was the child in front of me.

  The two images overlapped, and became one.

  Who was I?

  A father? A nephew? A storm?

  On the sofa, Eri slept peacefully, breathing slow and even.

  “…Tell me… a story?” she murmured, like a scrap of dream.

  The fake flame in the heater wavered quietly.

  Somewhere behind me, paper whispered.

  When I looked back at the wall, there were two talismans.

  Both were smiling.

  —End—