Melancholy Bliss

By: Luis Medina

"Takashi, please hurry into the house. It's too cold to be standing outside." A man yelled in front of a door of a two-story house while holding a brown box.

A boy stands in the middle of a white road with flakes falling gently from the grey clouded sky, staring at the ice covered ground, watching his reflection. Then with his look towards his father at the door as white as the snow falling, he looks back down at the reflection showing the face of a woman with similar features stuck under the ice with skin of bluish tint and the darkest red that is almost purple dripping from her face that is pushed up against the ice. Takashi simply weeps, with no fear of the vanishing woman in the ice and walks slowly to his new home in Spassk Danly, Russia.

Inside, there is a small table sitting in a tight spaced kitchen with a fridge that's older than the house it stands in, with 13 boxes towering in the compact living room. Takashi, a 12 year old boy who is half Russian and half Japanese, sits in the kitchen with a black knitted beanie covering his obvious bald head, lost in the snow sprinkling outside the window next to the fridge, above the sink.

"Son, please, eat something. You need to keep your strength up. What would your mother say if she saw you starving yourse…?"

"She's dead, just like I'll be soon," Takashi says to him.

Takashi's mother had died 9 months before in the great East Japan Earthquake under the rubble of the hospital she worked in as a nurse. Akemi Gray was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan and had met her future husband, John Gray, and married him 6 months after meeting. Four months later they had their child Takashi, named after his grandfather who had fought in WWII for the Japanese navy. John Gray, Takashi's father, was a local of Spassk Danly and had traveled to Japan as a tourist; he is a shy, pale, skinny man with very little personality but he attracted Akemi nonetheless.

Takashi grabs his black coat, red gloves, and combat boots to ready himself for the liquid freezing air outside. He walks through the back door towards the forest blanketed with God's cotton candy over every bush, tree, and animal that is able to live through this harsh temperature.

A mile in to the forest, Takashi beats an old rotted tree with one of its own branches furiously until it snaps. He stares at his hand which is cut from the broken branch and studies how every individual snowflake avoids the wound. He moves his lips as if to speak, then he hears a scream from a man who is at least 20 years old. It sparks his curiosity so he runs towards the cowardly shriek. He comes across a tree that stands 40ft. taller than any other tree. The tree sits alone with the other trees moved a quarter mile away as if they were running from it. He notices the distant trees and has a colder feeling in his stomach than the freezing weather outside. Even with this questioning feeling he pushes 10 ft. forward and speaks to who might have screamed earlier.

"Hello? Is anybody hurt? Hello, I heard a scream so I thought" He begins, and is interrupted by a voice that shatters the ice hanging from the tree branches,

"What do you want"!

With the volume of the voice Takashi, with fear, falls back two feet from where he is standing. He stands slowly, shaking with fear, and goes around to the other side of the tree trunk with caution to find a hole in it the size of a doorway. He stops and looks, from a distance, at the opening. He stands petrified from the glance of glowing red eyes staring back at him. A foot, that obviously belongs to a girl due to the soft, gentle step it takes, barefoot, into the snow brings out a young girl that looks no older than 20. She wears a worn out Nazi officer uniform torn on the left leg up to the kneecap, also torn from the right shoulder to her right breast revealing her black bra. She stands tall with crimson red liquid frozen around her mouth and on her upper torso. Her hair is black as night and short with bangs that covers her left eye.

"Are you ok, Ms.", he asks, almost swallowing his tongue.

"I asked you already, what do you want?"

Her voice sounds less threatening than before, but it still resembles a demonic frequency, like it contains over a thousand other voices speaking at the same time.

"I heard a scream, so I thought someone was in trouble or something."

"Go away kid, before something bad happens to you". She replies.

"Like what"? Takashi asks while she turned back to the tree.

She looks over her shoulder and tells him… "Like you dying"!

Takashi looks down at the snow then his hand with the cut from earlier.

"I'm already dying, from cancer. I only have a few years left".

The young girl stops and stands in place for several moments.

"What's your name", she asked him.

"My name is Takashi Gray, and yours?"

"My name is…,she pauses.

It's, Liraz Eblis."

Takashi smiles, but then he holds his stomach in pain and falls to his knees. From his mouth he pukes red on to the white snow. Liraz turns and watches him in pain, then walks over to him and kneels down. She dips her finger into the puddle of the red body fluid and brings up to her chapped lips and licks it off her finger. She scrunches her face in disgust as if she had never liked the taste. She helps him up. She looks at him. Now, like her, Takashi has frozen plasma around his mouth. Liraz helps him home 30 minutes away. When arriving she stops in front of the door.

"This is where I have to leave", she tells him.

Takashi puts his hand on the door handle and unlocks it with the key that was stuffed in his boot. He opens it only two inches then stops to turn around to thank Liraz, but she is gone, vanishing as if she was never there.

Two hours later, Takashi's father comes home exhausted from his job as an electrician and getting ready for a long night as a snow plow man. Takashi, with neglect, shies away from him waiting for the ghost of a man to leave.

"Takashi, I left you a baked chicken in the microwave, ok, so please eat. Also, lock the doors and windows; there have been some strange disappearances lately. I don't want anything to happen to you."

Takashi simply looks the other way and his Dad sighs softly then kisses Takashi on the head. John opens the door revealing a blackened white world outside. Takashi runs to a window to see his Dads' truck drive away, and when he no longer sees the head lights of the truck he quickly puts on his beanie, jacket, boots, and gloves. He also grabs a flash light and throws his chicken in a plastic bowl and covers it with a lid. He finally runs out the back door towards the forest.

Takashi runs to the lonely tree in the forest. He walks around to the other side that's hollowed out and sees a red trail inside and an imprinted path like someone was dragged through the snow. He calls out her name.

"Liraz?"

He walks cautiously towards the trunk, shining the light inside. He finds body parts frozen inside. Legs, arms, even heads lay stiff on the ground, torn apart viciously by the indication of the flesh hanging from limbs. Takashi loses his color and drops the flashlight. He bends over to pick it up then turns around to see Liraz holding a man's head two feet away from him. He tears, trying to hold it back, but not because he has saw what only few, maybe in war, have seen, but because he saw his mother standing behind Liraz. Takashi begins seeing everything spin and he falls back, blacking out.

Takashi wakes inside his house in the kitchen.

"It was only a dream?" He asks himself.

He looks at the time. He was asleep for 13 hours. His father is already at work again. Takashi decides to go outside to wander the forest. He doesn't travel far this time. He sits down between two tall pine trees across from a line of bushes. He plays with the snow on the ground and throws it at the opposite tree. He suddenly has a feeling that he is being watched. He looks in every direction, but sees nothing more than the bushes across from him beginning to rustle. He grabs a nearby rock with intention to do bodily harm. When he begins to cock back his arm to throw the rock at whatever is there, two arctic foxes jump out fighting over the dead carcass of a polar hare. He drops the rock, relieved and ready to go back home. When he turns around and takes a step, he runs into Liraz, pushing him into the snow.

"You are real," Takashi says with joy.

"Takashi, you told me you were dying, did you not?"

"Uh, ya I am. Of cancer, why?"

"Well, I have the ability to give you something you might want. Immortality."

Takashi is without words, wondering if what she is telling him is true. He picks himself up and dusts of the snow that is on him.

He replies to her, "If that's true, why would you give me this opportunity?"

"When I stared into your eyes last night, I read your soul. I saw a lonely, empty boy. I can see you have a fascination with me; you don't fear me, at least not as much as others have. I want to give you what was forced on to me, and because I feel alone myself, I want someone who will be by me now and forever."

Takashi looks to the sky and a crow passes over onto a tree a short distance away. He looks back at Liraz and begins to speak.

"Can I have some time to think about it? This is a lot to process."

"You have until midnight, because I must leave this town before someone else discovers me," She replies.

She adds, "But, if you do choose to come with me, know that even though you will be immortal, you will still be sick from your cancer, and it will always be with you."

Takashi walks away in deep thought. He arrives home, and sits at home for hours wondering what he should do. Then, when his clock reads 11:30 p.m. he finally decides what he will do. He sits and writes a letter addressed to his father then grabs his weather proofed clothing and heads for the forest.

Takashi arrives just five minutes away from where the lonely tree is, before he starts to feel a pain in his chest. He grabs it with intense pain and keeps pushing forward. Then when he stops in front of the tree, the crow from earlier flies in and sits on the tree. Liraz comes out from the hollowed trunk. She notices something is wrong, and before she can say something Takashi begins to ooze his red body fluid from his nose, mouth, and his eyes. He falls to the ground, and Liraz stiffens up because she does not know what is happening. Takashi reaches out with his hand with the recovering wound towards Liraz.

"Hi Mom", he whispers to a light only he can see.

His head drops into the snow along with his hand. Liraz jumps to his body, grabbing him and placing him in her lap. She turns his neck, and then two of her teeth grow longer and sharper instantly, and pierces his neck. She picks her head up to see her plan did not work. She sits in the snow with the lifeless body of a 12 year old boy, the crow perched on the tree crows and flies away.

Back at Takashi's home, John Gray gets home early expecting to see his son. He calls out to him but the house is empty. He walks into the kitchen and scavenges through the fridge and pulls out a glass bottle filled with milk. He turns around and notices a note on the table. He puts the glass down on the table, and then picks up the letter.

Dear Dad,

I am sorry, but I can't live with you any longer. I am just sick of this horrible world and having to live for a short time suffering. I am going away forever. I'm going to visit Mom.

Love, Takashi.

John drops the note and rushes outside in the blistering cold without any thought of his own self being. He screams at the top of his lungs, but not a word is heard by anyone. The moon shines lightly on the roof of his house. Liraz sits on the roof watching John in his despair, than runs into the shadows behind the house towards the forest.