User blog:LexPetitxVampire/After the Shrine

My mother and my father are both Americans who had moved to Japan; my younger sister and I had been born in the country, but while we were Japanese citizens – as are my parents – we looked nothing like the rest of the Japanese people.

Though, that doesn’t really matter much. When my mother fell pregnant with my unborn brother, a two-bedroom apartment wasn’t exactly an ideal living area, so he managed to find an old traditional house on the outskirts of the city where we had lived in the two-bedroom apartment; that way my daddy wouldn’t have to commute or find a new job and me nor my sister would have to attend a new school.

Though, I kind of wished we had attended a different school. My sister and I were bullied by a group of upperclassmen girls who bullied us because we didn’t look Asian but we were forced into Japanese school uniforms, and speaking and writing the language.

My sister and I had the option of going to English school, but my mother had taught us Japanese rather than English, I actually know very few English words, but I do know how to say mommy and daddy. My typing and writing of the English language is far more superior than that of my skills of speaking English. But that never stopped me from putting on a kimono and enjoying the festivals, as I saw it, the Japanese culture was my culture, I was born into and my eye shape shouldn’t matter.

I had left the shrine after saying my prayers to my great-grandmother, a woman who passed away when my mother was only five months old; the shrine I went to think of her was atop a hill, giving me a wonderful view of the city, and I could see far enough to the ocean. I think she would really like this view. My phone told me it was almost dinner time and my mother must be worried about me as I had said I’d be home an hour ago. I raced down the staircase and into the little neighborhood where I lived. The lights were just popping on and their glitter made me dizzy and I squeezed my eyes closed for a moment, gripped by vertigo.

The moment I stepped into the little neighborhood where I lived – a real concrete jungle of a maze where the homes looked nearly identical – the world around me became red, like looking through a red lens. I became a bit scared at the sudden change in the world around me and knew I had to get home sooner rather than later. Down a little alleyway, I saw a little girl with stringy black hair and the color of skin that I had only seen on decomposing bodies on Rotten.com, a site I had only seen when I visited my aunt in the states, freezing me with a look of such hostility.

“Are you okay?” I called out.

The young girl came charging after me and I fled the scene. A roar rose from her fragile and cooked looking throat, like thunder. I saw my home in the distance and knew I could make it inside before that girl creature could touch me; as I neared the house, a body fell to the ground below, splattering in a shower of blood the way a water balloon pops in a shower of hose water. It was my younger sister, Keiko! I looked up to our second floor balcony and saw my father disappear inside the house.

I was almost too frightened to step into the home; afraid my father would shove me off the balcony! But I was too frightened to stay outside with that girl creature. I figured chancing things with my father might have a better outcome, maybe Keiko slipped? And with how dark the home was when I entered, she must have slipped and my mother and father went out to see if she was okay! But little did I know, I found myself in the darkest danger.

“Chichi? Haha?” I called out in Japanese, though my parents would respond to mommy and daddy as well as chichi and haha. The red from outside was seeping into the home like blood draining into a clean area of a tub. “Is Keiko okay?”

The phone began to ring which made me jump out of my skin, the house had been deathly still and deathly quiet, and the phone was loud and jarring. I picked it up. “Moshimoshi.”

“Hitomi, chichi has gone mad! He’s already murdered Etsko!” quivered the voice of my little sister, Keiko. Etsko was our baby sister who hadn’t even been born yet, haha was only a couple of months into her pregnancy. “He keeps talking about this girl with black hair and rotting flesh, saying she’s telling him to murder!”

The phone line went dead and my heart stopped. I dropped the phone and tears began to prick my eyes. A loud pounding is coming from the door. I’ve been stuck here for days in a Schizophrenic like state, my food is slowly running out and the pounding hasn’t stopped! What should I do?