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Hiromi Kawakami

RECORD OF A NIGHT TOO BRIEF

RECORD OF A NIGHT TOO BRIEF

What was that itch on my back? I wondered. And then I realized that it was the night—the night was nibbling into me.

It wasn’t that late, still only twilight, but the darkness seemed to have collected just above my shoulders. A black clump of it had fastened onto me, eating away at my back.

I wriggled, trying to shake it off, but the night clung fast. When I tried to rip it off with my hands, it floated away, as vapour, and I couldn’t grasp it. I grabbed at a patch, where it was most intensely black, but immediately it dispersed, and another black patch swirled up somewhere else.

The itchiness became unbearable. I scratched frantically. The more I scratched, the more the darkness ate into my back, and the more the darkness ate into my back, the more I itched.

Unable to stand still, I broke into a run.

Immediately, I was running as fast as a horse. I thought, as I ran: you get faster when the night starts eating into you. Roads, pedestrians, signs, all fly by, retreating into the distance, like scenes through a train window.

After a minute or two I grew sick of running, so I stopped. My body was giving off steam like a horse. I was breathing loudly through my nose. Some of the darkness merged with the steam, producing swirling, hazy eddies.

People, standing at a distance, stared.

The darkness mixed with the breaths I was taking in, reappearing when I breathed out, floating in long trails. When I inhaled, the dark trails near my nostrils were sucked back in. When I exhaled again, they were longer than before. The darkness grew, stretching out like endless ribbons, issuing forth from my nostrils.

“That’s a sight you don’t see every day,” an onlooker exclaimed, and then clapped, purposefully, as if summoning koi to the surface of a pond.

I grew irritated. “Get the fuck outta here!” I tried to shout.

But no words emerged from my mouth. I couldn’t get the first consonant out. Straining, blowing through my nostrils, bearing down, I tried for that first sound: “G— G— G—” But all I could manage was to snort and blow out air.

The onlookers were delighted, and clapped some more.

This infuriated me. I leapt into the air, trying to yell at them, but all that came out was a whinny—like I was a horse. I kept leaping. Landing on a roof, I whinnied again—and then again. The onlookers below were all clapping. I wasn’t going to be outdone by them, and I kept whinnying. By now I had acquired a horse’s body, and was covered with a thick black coat of hair.

“Night’s coming. The Night Horse has arrived,” an onlooker said—the first in the crowd to have clapped. At that moment the steam started to rise in clouds off my body. More darkness: spreading, covering everything.

Elated now, I whinnied over and over again. With every whinny, the darkness became blacker and more intense.

While I was walking, the number of people increased. We were all going in the same direction. I walked, swept along in the flow.