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Shining Eyes
By: ShimoAneue
x-----SA-----x
‘Will you promise to come back and visit someday?’
“Yes. I promise.”
I had kept that promise. I stand on the bottom step of the old abandoned house I had lived in as a child. It was me, my sister Jade, my mother and my father.
The year was 1990, I was ten at the time, and we lived in this rundown old looking house since before I could remember. It was a three story in the heart of gloomy culdesac and it had that ‘haunted house’ feel to it. You walked by and a shiver would run down your spine and you would never want to come back. But to my family and me, it was home.
I had a room off of the attic in the house. It was fairly clean inside with its occasional infestation of silverfish but nothing more than that. Cobwebs here and there housing Daddy Long Legs that ate all the smaller pests that infested our cool house in the summer. It was peaceful, it was quiet, and it was haunted.
No one believed me. Not my friends, not my family, not even myself at first. But gradually, the spirit that had made its home in the attic since the early 1800s, I began to get to know her. I learned her entire story.
She was a teenager, about sixteen, and there was this epidemic that ran over the neighborhood. It was deadly and she caught it. Her room used to be the attic as well and she died in her sleep from suffocation. From what she told me, the disease caused her lungs to compress and close, hence not allowing her to get any oxygen. She suffocated in her sleep and was found the next morning by her nine-year-old brother who did all he could to wake her up. When she tried to comfort him, he rejected her and told his parents about her ghost. They didn’t believe him and they ended up being torn away from their home.
About a century or so later, my family came along. I grabbed the attic first and the first night she came to me, thinking that I was her brother come back to apologize. After a while, she realized I wasn’t her brother and the two of us became friends. She was able to speak to me like a person and I could see her hovering over me as I laid in my bed. She told me stories from her time and sang me to sleep when I was upset or scared about something.
Then, what I conceived to be the most horrible day of my life, my dad said he was promoted in his job and we had to move away to England. By this time, I was ten and I didn’t want to leave. I begged with my parents to stay, but they wouldn’t have it.
I ran to my room and slammed my door. I started crying. I couldn’t help it.
I felt her wrap her arms around me from behind in a gentle hug and I leaned into her. Let me tell you though, she was almost as real as a human. She had definition and color and I mistook her for a human the first time she came to me. And I was the only one she allowed to see her.
‘Why are you crying?’ she asked.
“I have to leave, and I don’t want to!” I cried into my pillow. She then said something I never expected.
‘But your family needs the financial aid,’ she said. ‘The only way to get that is if your father goes on that promotion. So go and be with your family. Help them too.’
I turned to face her. Since I was still a boy then, I really didn’t understand girls and how they act. But she was really pretty. And she was unique. Almond shaped eyes, long black hair, tanned skin. She was Japanese living in America in the 1800s. That was a very rare thing back then. But she was comforting and she hummed an old hymn from her native land, which calmed me down, and I was getting drowsy.
‘Promise that you’ll come back and visit in the future?’ she said. I looked at her.
“Can’t you come?” I asked. “You have to. I don’t want to be alone.”
‘You won’t be alone. You have your mother and father and your sister Jade. You’re not alone. And I can’t come because this is like my prison. I’ve tried to leave, but I never really found a way out.’
“How are you gonna get out?” I asked. She didn’t answer me. She continued to hum the song and I was soon fast asleep. And before I knew it, I was on a plane headed for England.
And now as I stand here on that bottom step, I looked at the house before me. it was poorly kept and falling apart. Seemed that the people we sold the house to did a few upgrades but never kept it up at all in the ten years I’ve been away.
I walked up the stairs and opened the door with a push of my hand. I walked inside and looked around at the dirty rooms. I could see the kitchen down the hall and the stairs that led to the attic. I walked up the creaking stairs, running my hands over the dusty rails and the dirty walls. The pictures from the previous owners’ still littered the walls.
I made it up to the door that led to the attic. I opened that and too the stairs there to what was once my bedroom. The room was completely different from when I left it. I had light blue walls with nothing on them, but the walls were now the darkest black I’d ever seen with ripped posters of some crazy metal band.
The bed was a box spring and a mattress on the floor with moth-eaten sheets and the floor was littered with ripped pages of playboy magazines and newspapers. This was not my room, but the presence was all the same. She was still there. And she was huddled in the far corner of the room.
She sat against the wall, her knees to her chest and her head resting on her knees with her hair creating a shield around her face. She was sitting like a statue, unmoving, cold. But she knew I was there.
“You never answered my last question,” I said. She snickered gently at that.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘To put it simply, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t go until I found the one I loved. I was naïve when I said that, but it’s too late and look where it left me…’
“How long has it been?” I asked kneeling down beside her.
‘One hundred and sixty-eight years,’ she said. ‘But it seems a lot longer.’
“I’m sure.”
We were silent. She still didn’t pick her head up to look at me. I don’t know why she was avoiding my eyes, since she never did that when I still lived here. Come to think of it, there was one last question I wanted to ask her before I left, but it was so sudden, I never got the chance. Now I had the chance.
“What’s your name?”
She didn’t move or look at me. all she did was fidget with her hands a little, like she was thinking about what to tell me. a few minutes passed and she still didn’t answer, so I nudged her a little with my elbow. That made her move.
‘My name… is Hitomi… Muhiko Hitomi.’
I took a class on the meaning of names. Her name meant something like ‘beautiful eyes’. I reached over and picked up her chin… she shied away from me a little and I chuckled.
“You were never afraid of me when I touched you before,” I said. “Why the suddenness?”
‘What are you trying to do?’
“I just want to see your eyes, that’s all.”
‘Why?’
“I just wanna see ‘em. Can I, please?”
After a few moments of what seemed like thinking… she slowly lifted her head and faced me. Like her name suggests, she had beautiful eyes I never really took into consideration when I was ten. I was a boy who knew nothing about girls so I only saw her as a companion of my imagination. But she’s still here and now I knew she’s real. Dead… and trapped in this house, but real.
“I love your eyes,” I said. And I saw her blush. “And I didn’t know you could blush.”
‘Neither did i. I feel… different. And you grew. You’re not the little Chris I sang to sleep ten years ago.’
My hand was still on her chin, and we stared at each other for a few minutes. Her eyes, black and slightly shining, connected with mine and it felt like I needed to do something. Something important. And I knew exactly what it was.
I leaned in close to her and I placed my lips on hers. She didn’t move, didn’t shy away, but she didn’t lean in either. She just stayed there with me, our lips connected in a gentle caress.
I pulled away to look at her face. She had her eyes closed, but she was calm; the calmest I’ve ever seen her. She finally opened her eyes and smiled gently at me. she took my hand from her chin and held it. And she was warm. She actually felt warm and alive. And she glowed. Her skin was actually brighter.
And her eyes shined. They shined with a light I’ve never seen before, but seeing that completed something in me. And I knew what it was when she stood up and walked over to the mattress where the bed was where she died and laid down in it.
The room changed. The sun and moon outside moved backwards, turning back time to that time where she died. When the sun and the moon stopped moving, I was back at the exact moment of her death.
I stood back in awe as I watched her lay in bed, another boy by her side and gently speaking to her.
“Look, I have to go away. There’s nothing I can do about it. And if you can’t take it, I suggest you forget we ever happened.”
He spoke really roughly to her, and it somewhat made me upset that anyone would talk to her like that. But the look she had in her eyes made me sad, she looked ready to cry.
“You promised you’d never leave my side,” she said weakly. “Why?”
the man said nothing but just slipped his hand from hers and walked out without another look. She started crying, and she started coughing. Choking really. I rushed over to her and scooped her into my arms. She grabbed me and looked into my eyes, and I smiled at her.
“I’ll be here for you,” I said. “And that is a promise I will keep to the end of time.”
She stopped breathing at that point, but she was smiling as she laid back against the bed. The sun and moon rushed me back to my present time and I looked down to the mattress and box springs. There was a skeleton there, about the same size as Hitomi. I had this feeling it was her. I looked around the room. It was a little brighter, and Hitomi was nowhere to be seen. Not her spirit at least.
But the calm feeling in my heart told me that something had happened that was for the best. I gathered up the bones from the bed and took them down into the kitchen. I placed them in a box and took it outside into the backyard near the large Sakura tree that we planted there a while ago. It was large now, having had ten years to grow strong. I buried her remains at the base of the tree. Because I felt it was a right thing to do. I paid my last respects and went on my way.
-----
Three years later, I was back in my apartment in New Your City. I was working on a design for a new car model when I realized I needed to refill my cupboards and my refrigerator. So I headed out of the building and down the street to the nearest corner store.
I was walking down an aisle, my eyes glued to the shelves of items and I didn’t see anyone come down the other way. We crashed into each other and all of our things fell to the floor. We both bent down with that automatic ‘I’m sorry’ and started picking up our things and separating them. When our hands accidentally touched, we looked at each other, my blue eyes staring into her dark brown eyes.
It was a Japanese girl with long black hair wearing a red tank top with an orange dragon and a pair of black jeans. We looked at each other for a few minutes, like our souls knew each other from somewhere. Then I registered where I had seen her before.
“I’m Asami,” she said.
“I’m Chris.” We shook hands and smiled at each other.
“It feels like I should know you,” she told me as we headed to the checkout. “Ya know, like I met you somewhere before. But I can’t remember.”
“I feel the same way,” I answered. “Here’s my number. Maybe we could get together again and talk, maybe for lunch or something?”
“That sounds good, Chris.”
We exchanged numbers and said our goodbyes, and as I watched her walk down the street, her soul separated from her body and walked beside her. She looked back, as did the soul and smiled that stunning smile I knew from all that time ago.
It seems that Hitomi had found me again.
-ShimoAneue