Chapter 10: Natsuko Calls the Care Facility in Osaka

The fourteenth photograph sat face-down on Reiko's floor until morning.

Neither of them agreed to leave it that way. It simply remained where they had set it, at the same moment, both hands withdrawing at the same speed, and neither of them reached to turn it back over. Natsuko photographed the back of it — the plain white reverse, the development date stamped in chemical orange, August 14 — and logged this without explaining why. Reiko made tea and did not drink it. The lamp burned until it began to feel less like warmth and more like something they were huddled beneath for cover.

At some point Natsuko fell asleep on the tatami with her complaint log open against her collarbone, and when she woke the lamp was still on and Reiko had spread a thin blanket over her without waking her, and the photographs were exactly as she'd left them, and the fourteenth was still face-down, and the August light coming through Reiko's curtains was thin and waterlogged and smelled faintly of the tide.