The sigh of collective relief passed over the green and gold stalks of the rice paddy like a wave. Mae was safe. Pink or red, the sandal found was as good as a herring, belonging instead to some anonymous farmer’s daughter. None of the nesting doll variety of forest trolls sought this missing child, this girl who wasn’t Satsuki’s sister. Not a soot sprite could be spared for the effort. And the hubbub over the sandal found floating in the pond died as I did, drowned beneath the surface of daily concerns. After the frogs and snails and medaka fish (all my many friends) had eaten their fill, and the rest of my flesh returned to the earth, interred beneath the pond that feeds the flooded fields, my remaining sandal adorned bare bones, tarsals to phalanges, until it too fell away beneath the ravages of scavengers and decomposition.

My parents noted my absence, but assumed I’d run off to the city as some of my much older siblings had. There were enough of us that my disappearance amounted to a rounding error in the math of how many mouths to feed. She would wonder about me in her later years, my mother, a Granny herself by then, to her own brood and to the matriarch-deprived descendants of a certain Kusakabe clan, as she served her garden vegetables to those children over bowls of steaming rice, enriched by the nutritional wellspring of my very bones. If anything has kept this drowned spirit from joining the legions of yokai, it is not any great rest or lasting peace I’ve found, nor the interminable appearances of however-so-many Totoros can dance on the head of a flying, magical top, but this: the humble act of bringing what sustenance I can offer to these characters, these cursory nieces and tertiary nephews of mine, who exist alongside our principals in precipitous anonymity, ever one sandal-footed misstep from joining me, rotting dead between the reeds, in my forgotten grave beneath the pond.

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T. M. Boone is a writer in Vermont. His work has been featured in Aôthen Magazine, Citywide Lunch, and HAD. Follow him on X: @tmboone21