Kohaku River Magic
He is restless running over the stones of the Kohaku riverbed, flashes of light like white plumes in the water the only hint of his presence. He has always been restless, dragon spirit flowing against its own current to the mountains, pushing itself to the sea. He is quiet tonight, too, a fact Chihiro notes with the part of her unconscious mind that never stopped looking for his face in the water.
It's that time of the night again, when the crickets are silent and the traffic is absent on the dusty old road that strikes a fading slash across the Japanese foothills and over the river in ninety thousand secret places. It's the time of the night when the wisps of smoke rising from jasmine incense turns into the unruly, agonized hair of Yubaba, when Noname's voiceless whispers drift to her from the far-off coughing of starving automobiles or the wind striking the trees. It's the time of the night when tunnels to rail stations become portals between worlds.
Haku's eyes watch her from behind the moon, from the pattern of fur on her cat, from the voiceless calls of the far-off sea which she has never fully accepted is inaudible up here. There are times when she sees the bathhouse out of the corner of her eye, Kohaku River becoming the impossibly placid ocean, and she hears dim voices calling her Sen and asking her how she is, how Haku is, where the magic in the human world is hidden.
Her neighbors know she's crazy with the same blind certainty that she herself knows she is not. Her mother calls and leaves messages on her answering machine which she never fails to return, her voice fading into the static of bad reception and aging machinery. Her father sends money once in a long while under the assumption that no one can be unemployed for that long and survive on their own.
He doesn't know about the Kohaku River magic. It's a secret Haku shares only with her, how the water flashes like teeth in the sunlight and the foam in the estuary many miles away sometimes runs red with the memory of blood sapped by Zeniba's paper birds. Sometimes she wonders if her entire life has only been a pale echo of the timeless time she spent in Yubaba's bathhouse. Times like these Noname comes to her in her dreams, offering long useless armloads filled with gold that turns into Lin, scrubbing competantly at the layers of green muck that stuck to the bathing pool, tonic held carefully between her teeth. Or sometimes it's Kamaji and his fuzzball workers carrying their tiny loads to the fire. Or the ghostly passengers on her trainride to Zeniba's hut, staring stoically down at the floor.
But Kohaku River magic is more than dream illusions that fade even before sleep does. Chihiro has built a home out of memory and crawled inside. Her mother has long since forgotten the time when Chihiro's telephone voice was audible over the distant roar of tiny waterfalls. Her father's money drifts down Haku in baskets or bottles or once in a plastic bag like her hands she has longed for decades to let drift across him, though she has lost the truth of it and no longer knows why she lingers by the Kohaku River.
And tonight, while the insects and the neighbors are silent and the saplings stretch upwards with eldritch intensity, not fully realizing what she is doing she pulls open the rusting windows in the back of her house and drifts like a paper bird to the still water, letting it carry her down Haku to the sea, where life ends and the world of the gods begins.
And the river follows her.
No one ever remarked on the dry riverbed that stretched for miles underneath countless shackling bridges. People have a way of ignoring these things.