It was late; the stress of being unable to see her was making the salarymanhave trouble sleeping. He slowly dressed and began his walk to the emergency staircase.
The landlady’s door burst open. “Things didn’t work out?” she asks, making him jump.
“I, uh, what?” He stutters.
“The girl, the pretty one—she broke up with you?” At 11 at night she has a big cup of coffee and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth.
“I don’t know; it feels like it,” he says.
“Well, you better find out; she was far too cute to let slip away,” she says with a smile. She taps him on the shoulder. “If not, you and I can always hook up.” She laughs a human laugh with edges of cackling.
He slips outside, horrified. The cool autumnal air feels nice on his skin.
Even at night his street is busy. He carefully crosses and walks into the park. The large park is strange, but stranger is that he has never been here before.
The reason he decided he needed to visit is because he remembered the kitsune looking out his window at the garden. He walks around the big loop looking at the variety of trees and stone features.
Like a ghost, he sees a gently spinning parasol. He hears the wooden shoes click on the ground. He sees a woman wearing a gold-edged and bright kimono. His gut instinct drives him forward.
The parasol moves out of the way for an instant. Their eyes meet but only for a moment. He can see her sadness as she transforms into a pile of kimono and a fox.
“Yoko, wait,” he shouts, reaching out to her. He stands where she just was.
The salaryman, heartbroken again, clutches the pile of clothes to his chest like they are talismans capable of feats of magic, and maybe they are, and maybe it’s just an old kimono and a cheap paper umbrella.
2 hours later Yoko sneaks to his window and watches him sleep. He has her kimono neatly folded up and held tightly to his chest. The contract yanks at her, dragging her away from him.
But she puts everything she has into it. She looks through the window as he sleeps. The contract threatened to throw her off the air conditioner.
Yoko sneezes in her fox form, the noise loud enough to wake the man. He looks around confused until his eyes focus on his window. A pair of bright eyes watching him.
He rushes to the window, slipping and falling and tripping as he escapes his blanket to talk to her to ask her what happened and, more importantly, how she got 2 stories up on the air conditioner. But before he can get a hand on the window, he watches her jump away, landing on the power line and quickly out of sight.
He slides the window open and yells, “Yoko.”
But there is no response. After 20 minutes he climbs back in bed, but he leaves the window open. He mutters to the outside world, “Yoko is always welcome here.”
Yokos ears twitch as she sits on a nearby apartment building, looking back at the window and the bed she misses. ‘I need to break the contract, but is that even possible?’.
She remembers the conversation. “You will never interact with that man again,” the maitre d’ screamed in her face. The contract is literally binding.
She paces back and forth. She remembers the stranglehold of the compulsion to flee. ‘I just have to wait for him to sleep; I will return tomorrow.’
The next night he leaves the window open again and looks out into the cityscape. “I miss you,” he whispers into the world and climbs into his bed.
He lies there thinking of her, trying to sleep; he dreams of a life with her. The wedding, the kids, the house.
He dozes in and out of sleep, hoping she will return and look through the window.
Yoko doesn’t disappoint; he hears her claws climbing up the building and the click of them on his floor. She climbs up and sits on his blanket, watching for signs he is awake.
When she is satisfied he is asleep, she curls up and falls asleep between his legs.
He sighs and finally, exhausted, falls into a deep sleep, too afraid to move. He feels her warmth through the blanket in the crisp autumn air.
He wakes to her being gone; this time it feels less hollow. His life feels full again; he has meaning again, and every night he gets to be with her, even if they never speak.
One night he wakes and has to pee. He holds it and tries to go back to sleep. But he wakes up 5 minutes later, desperate. He tries to move her, wrapping his arms around her to move her out of the way.
Yoko is dreaming about the day the contract was struck. A warm Japanese summer day chasing grasshoppers playfully in the field. A sack dropped over her head. She transformed and screamed for help; she kicked and clawed and bit. But they took her blood and signed the contract.
She woke in the sack again. Someone was going to take away everything again. She lashed out, clawing at the man holding her. She fled to the window and, without looking, leapt. her mind still waking up.
She hits the ground and runs up the nearest building; only then does she fully wake up.
The scent of blood on her claws—his blood. She weeps under the full moon.
For him there is the memory of a flash of pain and a hazy memory of stumbling down the hallway and falling into the landlady’s apartment as she opens the door.
The landlady stitched the scratches closed.
“You’re lucky…,” she says, her nostrils flaring like a dragon as she exhales.
“How?” he mumbles.
“That you didn’t lose an eye,” she sighs.
He doesn’t say anything.
“Was it that cutie? Did she do this?” She scowls. “Looks like claw marks from an animal, a nasty one.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” he whispers.
“Well,” she breathes out. The more he looks at her, the more she looks like a dragon. “I don’t think she is good for you.” She ties off the last of the infinitely fine thread.
She lights another cigarette and looks him over. “Well, get out,” she says, pointing at the door.
