The Man Who Drew Cats

Alysha MacDonald

 

 

THEY TRIED TO MAKE A farmer out of Shiro. They raised him in the hot sun with mud caked up to his knees, grinning to themselves as he stooped and planted row after row of rice in the flooded paddies with his cousins. They told them stories at night of how, though it was true that emperors were the direct descendants of the sun goddess, Amaterasu, that it was the peasants who were her actual favorites. After all, the emperors stayed away from the sun by hiding in their large homes and traveling solely by covered wagon. They were tucked away safe like pretty gems, while Shiro’s family was raised beneath Amaterasu’s glory. They grew tan from her presence. They broke out in sweats and sometimes collapsed in the water, then waved up at Amaterasu to go rest behind the clouds, so that they could have a moment of peace in the shade.

Shiro was to his family what nobility was to Amaterasu. He hid in the long grass and jumped out as his cousins passed. They cursed and hit him with their hats, hissing that he’d scared them half to death by thinking he was a kappa. When his sisters got angry after finding him stitching small birds into their clothes, they pinned him down and shaved the top of his head so that he better resembled the monster. After that, everyone started calling him the little Kappa. He leaned into it. He wrestled his cousins and ate cucumbers with sharp, quick snaps. He hardly worked. He saved up red clay in a jar and painted swirling patterns on their ox, himself, their floor, and once his mother’s lips when she was laid out for funeral.

He was an amusement to them. While his family took turns hitting him over the back of the head to get him to focus, they never hit too hard and they never hit a second time. They saved his drawings and etchings, but years passed and Shiro grew into an idle teenager, which was not as endearing as an idle child.

His father came to him one day, watching as Shiro played with a spider by keeping it imprisoned in the circle of his hands. He sat down next to him and Shiro scrambled to his knees, the spider running free as Shiro realized that his scythe had been discarded outside. There was no feigning work.

“Sometimes,” his father said. “People grow straight and upright like the bamboo. They bask in the sun, keep true and tall, and then are felled when it is their time.”

His father placed a hand on his head.

“And sometimes,” his father said, “a person grows like a vine. A vine needs to grow in shaded places or up sturdy walls. It can grow nearly anywhere and it can grow well, but it cannot grow up among the bamboo. It’ll die in the ground if it tries.”

Shiro watched him.

“There’s a place for you, somewhere, and you’ll be happier there,” his father said. “You’ve an idle body, but an overworking mind.”

Shiro gave his father a small smile, but he caught the spider again after and sat with it for a long time, watching as it fled from palm to palm, but was given no escape. His uncles brought him to town a month later and Shiro followed a band of monks to a monastery far up some old mountain.

If farming had made him strong, then the monastery padded him out. He ate as much rice as he could after prayers and, sometimes, by sneaking in bites during them. Each taste brought him back home and, if he chewed long enough, he could imagine the ox’s plowing, his family laughing and gossiping as they worked, and the slush of bare feet through knee-high water. He traded the rest of his allotted food for others’ rice cups and sometimes took out a small clump at night, placed it on his tongue, and let it turn to starch in his spit. With every pound he gained, it felt as though he was adding a new layer of his home to him. He loved the soft give of his body. He would press his hand to his stomach, feel the hair, and pretend it was the paddy grass. He would press harder and wish that his softness could extend outward and into his life. Where he could have an existence different from the restrained lives that monks were supposed to lead.

He was resentful at his father for sending him away, then resigned and, after a handful of long-winding years, grateful. He learned to read, how to use critical thinking, and about his nation’s history. There were endless young men and visiting scholars. Sometimes, a brush with one of them left him with his robes askew and Shiro grinning to himself later during prayers.

Then, one afternoon, he was given a brush and told to write with it. He dipped it in the ink, watched the black blend with the horsehair, breathed in, and pressed it to the washi paper. It bled out thickly and smelled of forest. The brush raised, droplets of ink dripped onto the paper.

He’d drawn and stitched throughout his childhood. He made endless little crafts, but he had never made something as beautiful as a single brush stroke.

He sat crying over the paper, watching as his tears dripped down and blurred in with the ink. An older monk went up to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, saying that not everyone could write their name on the first try, so he needn’t weep over it. Shiro smiled up at him and, for the first time in his life, focused. He drew Kanji, swirling flowers, and sold calligraphy prints for the monastery in town. Perhaps, in a different world, he would have done that until his body bent into death. Where he would be a master by then, unbound by want or desire, and would use his last moments to scrawl out a jisei on golden paper.

Perhaps, had it not been for the cat.

Shiro had learned of the many seducers of monks. The forests were rife with yokai, ghosts, oni, and spirits. One straying step and one didn’t just lose their way, but their life.

Shiro’s unraveling was far subtler than any demon’s influence. The cat arrived with the pond, which had been his duty to build. He spent a spring digging, then lining it with rocks, and finally ordering the silver carp to fill it with. When they were safely settled, he practiced calligraphy with his feet dipped in the water.

It was then that he saw his first cat.

He knew that cats existed, of course, and had seen them as running blurs or white glowing eyes from hidden spots in town, but never in the open. He sat watching the feline weave out from the woods, tail high and proud, and then pad a lap around the other side of the pond. It sat sunning itself and stretched out limbs that seemed unconstrained by physics. He’d heard of ghosts who could turn their heads around. He’d seen a monk fall from the temple roof and lay crumpled at wrong angles on the ground. But when the tabby stretched out so impossibly, it did not seem to be in any pain.

It captivated him.

He wasted all of his paper drawing it before he realized what he had done. When it tried for a carp, but found it too big, he left out a wad of rice for the cat to eat and retreated. He watched from around a tree, while the cat went up to the rice, sniffed, and turned away in disgust.

The monks who saw him with the creature said it must have been some demon cat, a bakeneko perhaps, because it so thoroughly led Shiro astray. He abandoned his art. He ducked out during prayers or the middle of the night, stealing a carp and breaking its spine on a rock, before slicing off small cuts for the cat. Soon, the cat grew to cats, and they bred. The monastery was slowly overrun by the furred creatures, until monks couldn’t sit in peace without a cat coming up, rubbing against their back, and then pawing at the adornments on their robes.

Shiro cared for nothing but his cats. They said he drew them into existence. He slept by the fish pond in the summer, wrapped up in a great furred blanket of whites, greys, blacks, and calicos. When he moved, the cats all moved with him. His ink was spent for nothing but drawing each one, his calligraphy only used to scrawl their names in the corners. When they took away his inks, he got an old stick and drew out the cats in the dirt, laughing as they swapped at the end of the stick in fake lunges. He walked with kittens in his pockets, wearing a cat as a scarf around his neck, and even started growing back his hair.

It wasn’t out of hand until it was. Locals wouldn’t come to the shrine because the cats’ territorial squabbles destroyed any sense of peace. The place started to smell and, when a group of new initiates drowned sacks of cats in the pond, Shiro exercised no detached patience after finding out. It surprised them too, because Shiro was not a violent man. The numerous frustrations that they vented to him over the year was met with Shiro’s friendly response that, as Buddhists, weren’t they supposed to treat all animals as equals? As such, weren’t the cats not pests, but actually their guests?

Thus, when Shiro saw the bodies of the cats drowned in the water, he felt an anger he had never known. He’d been annoyed plenty of times before, but had never experienced a flashing, fiery sort of hatred. He tackled the initiates into the pond and cursed at them for not respecting the lives of creatures, big or small. When they yelled back that he was the one not respecting the lives of his own fellow man, he shook his head and got off them. His cheeks flushed with shame. His clothes dripped and clung to him. He went to one of the head monks and the man, who had been the one to whisper to the initiates to carry out the killings, met Shiro with a bag packed for travel. Shiro paused at the door, letting in cat after cat in between his legs. He went there to report the monks’ misconduct, but paused upon seeing the bag.

“It’s become clear to me that this might not be the life for you,” the monk said.

“You would turn me out? For this? Because I was kind to small creatures and sheltered them?”

The monk walked up to him and gave a small, encouraging smile. “Once you leave, the cats will disperse. We’re doing them no good by locking them away here and letting them breed. They’ve killed all the fish and they’ll starve without you here to feed them. You shouldn’t stay here either or you’ll starve, too. Mentally starve; spiritually starve. There’s no shame in leaving. You don’t have a monk’s soul. You’re too attached to life and so … this is not your path, but we’ll care for your cats until they leave.”

“No,” Shiro said. “After the cruelty I’ve seen today, they will leave with me.”

“Then you’ll learn loss, finally,” the man said. “And I wish you the better for it.”

Shiro tried to keep the cats with him. Before he left, he bought a bucket of eggs and cracked one open every hour of walking. The cats scrambled and fought over the yolk, but he could not keep them all. They dropped off, one by one, and he couldn’t follow them into town, up trees, or into the mouths of foxes. He held to what he could, but every day brought fewer cats and pieces of his heart slipped away each time one ran off to a new territory. There was no holding such fluid creatures. They squirmed, hid, and climbed. Some went to farmers or the arms of smiling, happy children. Others were trampled by a horse or taken by a bird. He buried every one that he found dead. The leaves fell. He awoke to snow on his face. He sat up shivering and saw that the last of his flock had left him.

He was alone in the forest.

He bowed and contemplated their tracks in the snow. Already, the snow was blanketing them. Three cat trails in different directions—what was the point in choosing one to follow?

Shiro breathed out. Was this what his father had meant, years ago, when he called him vine-like? As an adult, Shiro knew that vines were weeds that destroyed whatever they clung to. Perhaps that was his father’s message and never one of love. That he clung to pointless things and crushed them with his desperate, clawing grasp until everything around him suffocated.

How could he return home as a failure? He’d been away for years. By staying in exile, he could keep his childhood locked neatly away in memory. He didn’t have to face any news of deaths or suffering. He couldn’t bare the thought of traveling back, only to see the house gone entirely and his family moved on or murdered.

But where was he supposed to go? He’d spent his life listening to what other people wanted him to be, but what did he want?

He took out his art tools, sat with his back to a tree, and drew out his home in long, loving brush strokes. He drew cats in place of his family. They slept atop the roof and jumped up in fright from the water. He placed the paper down, drew a fire and some food with a stick in the snow. Then he slept, feeling strangely warm and nourished, with the echoing of meowing in his ears and the crackling of imagined flames.

 

 

WHEN HE AWOKE, SHIRO FIGURED he had made such a poor drawing that he was cursed into a landscape painting. He was atop a snowy mountain peak, pressed into the top branch of a pine tree, and clung to it with a start after seeing how high up he was. The beard he was growing was not yet long enough to shield him from the biting cold.

A coo of laughter came from the next tree over. A tengu peered down at him from the topmost cedar. His black wings flicked about in the wind while he gripped to the bark with sharp, black-nailed talons. The rest of the body was squat, but undoubtedly human. The tengu watched him from behind a long-nosed gigaku mask with its hair a mismatch of black and feathers.

“Welcome, monk,” the tengu said.

Shiro knew of tengu, but their origins changed depending on who he asked. Some called them the protectors of Buddhism, others the reanimated forms of people killed in jealous blood. They were creatures who loved nothing more than to mock, torture, and sometimes murder, depending on the tale. A monk at the shrine had fallen prey to one such being. He disappeared and returned, vacant-eyed, foaming at the mouth, weeping of nonsense and clawing at his own face. Whatever the tengu did to him drove the monk mad.

Shiro didn’t mind the thought of a tengu scrambling his brain into incoherency. To some, that would be a fate worse than death, but thinking had only led to sorrow in his opinion. Perhaps he would find some peace in the insanity.

“You’ve brought me to a nice view, friend,” Shiro said.

“A nice view of the heights?”

“Of course. And a nice view of you.”

The tengu snorted.

“Did your fellow monks not teach you how to address us beings? You repent first and then you flatter me. If you do it well, then I’ll bring you back down the mountain. If you don’t, well … There are no riddles from me; no trickery. Humble yourself in exchange for your life.”

Shiro thought for a moment. He took a slow, careful seat on the branch and tried not to think of the drop. “Can you tell me your name?”

“My kind doesn’t give out their names freely. What’s yours?”

“Humans don’t either, at least, not to demons. Monk is fine.”

“Hm. Then you can call me Crow.”

Shiro nodded. He still had his belongings and wasn’t injured, which was good. The tengu didn’t seem particularly bloodthirsty, so Shiro scooted close to the trunk and proceeded to climb down the tree. The tengu paused, flew over to a branch above him, just out of reach.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Crow asked.

“I didn’t think you would help me down. It’s no issue. I’ll manage the climb on my own.”

The tengu jumped branch after branch, until he squatted and rested his arms on his legs, mask pointing at Shiro with an accusatory glare. “I kidnapped you to repent. You’re failing your task and cedars don’t have branches at the base. What is your plan?”

“What do you know about me that needs repenting?”

“I know you’re a monk, but your hair is long. That you are fat and slow and that the items in your bag are expensive. I saw you with your cats. Did you think you were some little god who ruled over the felines? How quick they abandoned you. And now you’re all alone.”

“You’ve been watching me for a while, then?” Shiro stood on a branch and smiled upward. The tengu leaned forward, bowing his branch so that a dusting of white snow covered Shiro’s shoulders. “I think you’re the one trying to flatter me.”

“Human,” Crow cautioned.

“You’re no different from a cat. You inconvenienced me for attention, I imagine. Or because you were bored.” Shiro laughed. “If you were really going to kill me—“

The tengu jumped down to his branch, bent it enough to send Shiro off balance, and slapped him once with the back of his wing. If it weren’t for the snow, the fall would have hurt him more. As it was, it still hurt him some.

Shiro stared up at the tree, dazed.

The tengu leaned forward.

“Run away, monk! Return to your people and tell them to never set foot in my woods again.”

The tengu made to leave, but paused after extending his wings, staring down as Shiro made an awkward limp away. “That’s not much of a run.”

“The fall hurt my ankle,” Shiro said.

The tengu hesitated. “Consider yourself lucky that I didn’t eat the eyes from your head instead.”

Crow left him to his hike.

Shiro was used to cats. Once he was aware one was around, he heightened his senses to their little tells. The shuffle of feet, the creak of wood as they jumped atop it, or the sound of nails in tree bark. Now that Shiro knew he was being followed, he hobbled slowly down the mountain and could sense the tengu nearby. Shiro found himself laughing. He was used to being left alone, not stalked. When he got halfway down the mountain and a break in the woods showed him some of the valley, he studied the miles of wilderness, the small town miles off, and the trade route cutting straight through it all.

If he was to go out and make something of himself, then these demon-haunted woods seemed a good a place as any to settle down.

 

 

CROW TERRORIZED HIM.

Shiro would wake in a cave, a cliff, and once, was adrift in a river. He often spent the better part of the day returning to his home, though once it took him almost a week. The villagers got used to their new, self-proclaimed artist stumbling through town for water with dirty, torn clothes and a bemused expression. No danger ever befell him on these mandatory sojourns, however. Whenever he heard the growl of a wolf or some other nightmare, there was a yelp and then silence. Sometimes, he talked aloud to Crow the entire way back, but there was rarely a reply. Only the occasional sigh. And, even rarer, a quick laugh from high above.

Seasons slipped by and Shiro drew them, but never failed to add in a cat. He became well acquainted with his immediate country and soon found it easy to navigate, until his longest wanderings only took three nights to traverse back to his home. Shiro came to love nature in a way he never had as a farmer. He didn’t have a knack for trying to bend it to his will or organize it, but he enjoyed building a home amidst the chaos. He cut trees, went fishing, trail-blazed a path to the main trade road, and took to lazing about, shirtless, in his wildly unkempt garden. When Crow kidnapped him and brought him somewhere new, Shiro had the feeling that Crow was trying to show off the prettiest parts of their valley.

Each time that Shiro made it back home, Crow flew ahead to wait for him on the perch of Shiro’s roof. As though Crow hadn’t been following him the entire time. The tengu laughed while mocking him—his state, his late timing, his skin burned from tan to red by the sun.

He yelled down, “Have you gone mad yet, monk? You’re more hair and beast than human! How can you call yourself anything but a failure? Look at this little lean-to in the woods you call home and despair. I’ve seen nests sturdier.”

Shiro stood by his door each time, arms crossed, craning his neck to see the tengu.

“I see you’ve stopped by,” Shiro said. “Are you coming in?” But the tengu never did.

Shiro had never been cunning enough to insult others, but he fought back in small ways. He spent a summer’s day threading a large nest atop his roof and, when the tengu arrived to land, Crow became all fluster and feathers. He cursed him and kicked the nest from the roof, claiming that he was no ordinary songbird, no pet. Shiro collected the fallen feathers. He hung them from his door and when villagers came to look at his art. They seized the huge feathers in their arms, whistle, and asked what beast they came from.

“Just a pest,” Shiro said with a smile.

Once a season, a traveler would stop by for the night, offering their life story or a trinket for board. Some were flings; most were strangers. Some asked to be painted, but Shiro said he was cursed to draw cats—only cats. Some travelers he drew as cats, and they laughed together at the portraits. Some knew of the tengu that haunted him, and asked if he needed help getting rid of it. Shiro shook his head. He had already spoken to the local monastery a year ago about Crow and they knew of him. They said that Crow was the least of their concerns. Monsters far deadlier lived only steps from the road, the monks told him. Besides, this wasn’t Crow’s territory at all—couldn’t he tell?

Shiro could. He saw it in the bent branches around his home, where Crow undoubtedly slept. He saw it in Crow’s ever watchful eyes when he peered out at their surroundings as they talked. Or when Crow was scuffed from some fight. He wasn’t too different from a cat in that manner, both being creatures of predator and prey.

When Shiro turned Crow’s discarded feathers into a cloak, the tengu refused his gift, hissing, “Would you consider wearing a shirt of your own hair or shoes from welded toenail slivers?” But the present was gone the next day, either way. And, a week later, Shiro received his first and only gift from Crow.

He woke up on the nearest mountain and spent most of the day scaling down it. He stopped in town for food, then met Crow sitting atop Shiro’s home. Clenched in the tengu’s foot was a cat. He threw it down at Shiro and Shiro dove to catch it. When Shiro put the cat down, he saw that something was wrong with the feline. It moved on front paws, bore a broken, bent back and was a missing tail. It was still young. Not yet one year old. On the street, it wouldn’t survive much longer. The wounds were old, though, so Shiro discounted Crow as possibly being the predator to paralyze it.

“Do you like my gift? Long may you look at this whelp and know that it suffers endlessly. Long may you be too weak to kill it and give it peace. And long may you know that, in your weakness, you will let it limp on like this, hurt and broken for all its days.”

Shiro bent down and held out his finger.

The cat gave a nervous, though curious sniff.

“Crow, this is the kindest thing anyone has given me. Thank you.”

The tengu said nothing, but watched him bring the cat inside. After Shiro made a bed for the cat to sleep in, he turned and saw Crow’s long-nosed mask peering around the doorway.

“It will have no companions,” Crow whispered. “If you bring another cat home, I will kill it.”

Shiro offered him a cup of tea.

“Monk, why would I drink your dirt water?”

“It’s Shiro, actually.”

And the tengu didn’t cackle or curse him. Or fly off. Crow paused, lowered his face, and whispered something to himself.

It was the closest Shiro had gotten to Crow. And he knew enough about beasts to know when approaching would scare one off. Shiro kept his hands at his sides instead of reaching out like he wanted to. He sat at the table and Crow took a tentative step inside. The cat ran its awkward, sliding run under paper scrolls and hid from the tengu. It peered out with bright green eyes.

“Shiro,” Crow repeated.

“Shiro of the family of rice planters. And you?”

“I don’t remember my name. But …”

“But?”

Crow hesitated. “My family was from the coast. Fishing folk, I imagine.”

“They say tengu are born out of the souls of people who have been killed.”

“Some do.”

“The souls of vain people.”

“Yes, so it seems.”

“Won’t you sit?”

“I would never stoop so low. I’d rather sit on the floor.”

“The floor is open.”

Crow remained standing.

“I’ve been wondering, Crow. Do you have some unfinished business? What is it you want? After all these years, I can’t imagine.”

“I’m not a common ghost. What makes you think I want a thing from you?”

“Do you remember your previous life?”

“Our lives are seeds, aren’t they? You fell the crop that grows and in its place a new one sprouts. That’s what you monks seem to think, anyways.”

“Who knows? I don’t remember a single past life.”

“Not the most enlightened, are you?”

“No.” Shiro laughed. “I was far from it as a monk. I still am.”

Crow sighed. “I shouldn’t be wasting my time on somebody that isn’t a real monk. Or somebody who is selfish, though, somehow, not vain. That’s not what tengu do.”

“I’m glad you do, though.”

“I figured.”

The tengu looked over his room without moving from his spot. He stretched a wing and knocked stacks of drawings over, which further sent the cat hiding. “You’re not even good at being an artist. You haven’t made a profit from it, after all these years. You never moved away to richer places.”

“You do keep a man humble,” Shiro said.

“It is my purpose.”

“Well, perhaps I’m content here in these backwoods. With crates for chairs and you watching over me.”

Crow looked to him. There was something in that stare that made Shiro continue, emboldened.

“Tell me, friend, who is it you’ve been protecting me from? This isn’t your territory. The monastery says these are dangerous woods, but I’ve never had any trouble.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I torment and protect a great deal of other forest homes.”

“From whom?”

Crow folded his wings back up, and gave a low huff. “The Goblin Rat. But don’t worry your little empty head about her. She won’t bother you.”

“Why?”

“You’re a poor artist. What makes you worth a thing to a rat?”

“It makes sense. In the end, I suppose I’m only worth a thing to a crow.”

As Crow turned to take his leave, he paused by the door. “There’s nothing vainer than infatuation.”

Whether Crow said that to Shiro or to himself, Shiro did not know. Either way, Crow didn’t come back.

Shiro regretted his words and spent long nights thinking them over. The truth was, he wanted a demon in his home. He wanted a tap on his door, Crow’s black eyes, and the sneak of a monster crossing the room to his bed. He wanted hands on his throat—murderous at first glance, but softening to loving. Until the two of them were nothing but bed and feathers.

Still, Crow did not come back.

Shiro was left alone for the first time in years. He kept to his cat and his art, trying uselessly to draw something not feline. But when his brush pulled away from the paper, he was left with a cat-bird hybrid. He didn’t let it dry, but tore it apart in long slivers.

 

 

PERHAPS CROW WOULD STAY AWAY forever. Perhaps the best way to banish a demon was to make them uncomfortable with the prospect of love, then never see them again. There were endless tales of monsters seducing humans, but what of humans being the one to reach out? By extending one arm, did monsters run away screeching? He didn’t want to think that Crow had fled out of physical repulsion. Shiro knew he was not handsome, but he was proud of the man he’d grown into. His hair was graying and starting to thin, but he was a human and humans were shaped by the world around them. He could trace the farmer, the scholar, and then the secluded artist in his features. He had callused hands but a taste for laying around, savoring others cooking, and going to town on festival nights.

Just as Shiro didn’t try and tame nature, he didn’t attempt to tame his appearance. He was how the world had shaped him. He was himself—hairy, burly, and with a moustache that refused to grow without a bald patch in it. There was no use trying to alter his body into what others wanted in order to appease them. And those others included Crow.

Sadly, tengu were creatures built on vanity and Crow spent more time preening every feather into its perfect place than he did flying. Shiro hoped that his friend wasn’t so shallow as to think lowly of him because of his looks, but Shiro was unsure. Crow was guarded, and now he was gone.

Shiro sat watching the changing, cycling world and petted his sickly cat. He had come to enjoy those silly kidnappings. He didn’t travel without them. Instead, he holed up in his house and kept the door open, inviting anyone to come and take him to some new mountain or forest path. He slept, rolled up amongst sheet after sheet of paper, with ink stained to his skin.

His number of visiting travelers dwindled. When people rested in his home for the night, they now only spoke of the Goblin Rat and her cohort. They asked if he knew anything at all about how to beat her or if he could sell them talismans, but he wasn’t magically inclined. He gave them sheepish smiles and said he didn’t do much but draw cats, really.

The Goblin Rat terrified the valley, but not because she was a warmonger who left scores of people slaughtered. In truth, her cohort didn’t kill many people at all. But rats were rats, and they were nearly impossible to keep out. She could fit through the smallest crack in the floor. She worked silently. While never maiming entire homes, her rats burrowed their way into the mouths of sleeping people. They attacked too quickly for the victim to scream. Then, once the rats choked the person to death with their own bodies, they took over and walked in the person’s corpse. They pulled at the human’s vocal cords and neck muscles, making them talk. The rats worked as a team for the Goblin Rat’s plans. What those plans were, nobody knew. But her corpse-walkers traded in town, bought weapons, jewelry, and the finest of foods, before hauling it all back to the woods. Nobody knew how many had been killed by the rats, but a young boy was struck by a cart and, to everyone’s horror, when he fell down with a shattered bone poking through his thigh, there was no blood. A rat’s sniffing snout emerged from the body, startled. It alerted a pack of rodents that expulsed from the boy and into the streets until all that remained was a husk of skin and bone, everything else eaten clean away.

Perhaps the rats inhabited only one person; perhaps the rats had taken over half the town. People started cutting their hands to show that there was clean blood beneath. A few died from infections this way.

Shiro started to wonder if Crow hadn’t simply run off. Or maybe Crow was killed by the Goblin Rat the very night Crow told him about her, as though speaking her name aloud had summoned her.

It was reckless to live in the woods alone, but the Goblin Rat had never bothered him. Sometimes Shiro found the torn corpses of rats around his woods. Still, he knew his cat’s disability prevented her from taking down something half her size.

But he didn’t understand the tengu. If Crow was going to keep watch over him, Crow might as well pester him. It seemed unfair to have a friend who risked his life for Shiro without bothering to drop by for tea.

It made him feel pathetic.

Shiro took his brush out from the case, laid out his floor with paper, and stood over it. His cat went from scroll to scroll, trying to find the best place to stretch out and nap.

He breathed out. Talismans. He had seen monks and demon hunters use them before. There couldn’t be too much to them—could there? The worst-case scenario was that they did nothing but make the townspeople feel safer. He tried to make them ornate, but his characters slowly started looping and he made up the kanji he needed as he went, thinking of lofty and vague words (Justice, Begone, Protection, God’s Blessing).

When he stepped back from his first drawing, he saw he had drawn out the face of a cat in characters. He bit his cheek, thinking it looked childish instead of legitimate. Surely the townspeople wouldn’t think something so silly would save them.

He made hundreds of such cat faces. He ran out of words and started writing sentences, including “The Monk Shiro commands that you leave this house alone”. He replaced his name with more powerful monks instead. Finally, he broke down into tired scratchings of, “Go away. I eat mice. Die.”

The townspeople were mostly illiterate anyways. What did the words of a talisman matter if the intent was the same? He let the various cat faces, poses, and paws dry before giving them away.

He was ready for people laugh at him, but instead, villagers scrambled for a painted talisman. They offered payment, anything at all, but he asked only for more paper and ink. He spent the next weeks writing out words made of cats. Shiro had no idea if they were working or not. The number of corpse-walkers remained unknown. When a new one was discovered, it was impossible to tell if the person was changed pre-or-post talisman. Eventually, it would be clear if the talisman were working, though. Those possessing one of his talisman would either all be alive, or dead.

But maybe they did do something. For when the fall leaves were at their reddest, the monk Mitsue stopped by. Mitsue was a wiry fellow who had visited years ago to welcome him to the valley. Welcoming him meant that Mitsue had really come to chastise Shiro, saying that he shouldn’t wear monk robes if he wasn’t a monk anymore. Shiro did stop wearing the adornments, but always made sure to wear his robes when visiting the monastery—mostly to annoy the man who scolded him.

Mitsue caught him mid-painting. He stood in Shiro’s doorway with clenched hands, all smiles and shyness.

“Good afternoon. I’ve come on behalf of the monastery. Do you think, great artist Shiro, that you could paint some talismans for us too?”

Shiro looked up from his page.

“You don’t need to treat me with reverence, my friend, just because these are trying times.”

“Of course. Endless apologies.”

“There’s no need to apologize. You can take some of these back with you, though I’m sure that your own talismans would work better. I remember something about not being considered a real monk?”

“We have a big monastery,” Mitsue replied, ignoring him. “We thought you could paint our Shoji screens. You must understand—holy ground is always a target for demons. They would love nothing more than to slaughter us all.” Mitsue smiled at him.

Shiro didn’t know what was so amusing about it. “I can paint your walls,” he replied.

“That’s great news. We’ll pay you with whatever you’d like.”

“I don’t need payment.”

“Then we can offer you as much ink as you need, so long as you protect our monastery.”

This was surprising, but not unpleasing. “But some more kindness from the monastery would please me,” Shiro replied.

The monk laughed, but when Shiro invited him in for tea, Mitsue backed up and bowed. “I really have to get back, although if you wouldn’t mind stopping by tomorrow, that would be most appreciated.”

Shiro didn’t think it was a strange meeting at first, even if Mitsue was overly formal with him. Perhaps he had to be, being on official orders from the monastery and all. But when Shiro walked up the monastery path in the morning, he was taken by how queer the woods had gotten.

The forest, by day, should have been anything but peaceful. He listened for rustling creatures or birdsong, but even the wind seemed muted. There was the occasional gust of leaves caught up in wind, but nothing else. His footsteps were muffled by the unkempt steps. Perhaps the monks were too afraid to leave their domain to sweep away the leaves. Perhaps the valley was in worse shape than he thought.

When he arrived, breathing heavy, at the top of the hill, nobody was there to greet him. The monastery should have been full of hundreds of monks, but he only saw a handful scattered about the grounds. They were in prayer or walking, their hands behind their backs. He breathed out, waved to a few, and they waved back. He found Mitsue by the entrance and the man ran to greet him.

“This place is nearly abandoned,” Shiro said.

“The Goblin Rat scared most of them off. But that was months ago, now.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You don’t pay attention to most things. That is … if you don’t mind such an impetuous statement, honorable artist Shiro.”

“The Goblin Rat is that powerful?”

“Of course!” The monk shook, more emoted than Shiro had ever seen him. “She could rule this entire valley, if she wanted to.”

“Do you think that’s her goal?”

“It’s impossible for somebody like me to know the goals of a being so awe-striking. It’s beyond comprehension.”

“Well, you could still guess,” Shiro suggested. “Sometimes it’s fun to guess at things.”

Mitsue didn’t seem to understand.

Shiro dropped the subject and the monk left him alone to paint the cloister screens. He worked straight through the day and made cats large and small. Three hours into his task, Shiro realized he had made a fatal mistake.

For these monks were most likely all corpse-walkers.

Shiro painted anyways. But his grip tightened to keep his hand from shaking. As a former monk, Shiro knew that routine was ingrained deeply into every monk’s day, but these monks seemed to have no plans. Even if dwindled down to a few scared monks, he couldn’t imagine them abandoning the faith. If anything, people stuck to routine more strictly when faced with so many unknowns. Instead, these monks lingered. They peered into the woods and didn’t speak to one another. There was no bell for prayer; no chanting. They didn’t seem to notice time at all. It had taken Shiro years to stop planning his day around the ingrained call to prayer and sometimes, even on the road, he would find himself humming at sunrise and sunset.

Maybe this was his fate. That a disgraced monk should be torn apart by imitations of his own order.

Mitsue came to check on him, flanked by the other monks.

Shiro lowered his paintbrush.

“You plan to kill me, I take it,” Shiro said by way of greeting. “If you don’t mind, I’d sooner kill myself than be murdered by rats. Can you at least give me that option?”

Mitsue’s laughter was the sound of hundreds of squeaking rodents held deep in the monk’s frame. “You’re not our high prize. You’re bait, so we keep you alive.”

Shiro paused. “Haven’t I killed scores of you? This isn’t revenge?”

“Killed us with your words and pictures? Of course not! Your little follower is the scourge. And he’ll come out of hiding if your life’s forfeit. The Goblin Rat comes tonight. We’ll slay you both.”

“Crow won’t come for me,” Shiro said. “He gave up on me months ago.”

The monks laughed as they assaulted him.

Despite the blood rising from their bites, he held no anger against them. No rage. He did nothing but clutch his brushes closely. They ripped open a screen and dragged him by the hair through to the prayer room and threw him on the cushions as though he might plead to some higher power to step in and help.

He didn’t pray. He pressed the blood on his face and pulled his hand away, staring at the redness.

They didn’t guard him. They didn’t think he was worth the bother. Shiro sat alone in the prayer room. There were no life-threatening wounds, but dozens of bites and scratches. They had fought animal-like. That had probably saved him some agony; humans fought far more cruelly than rats. Humans flayed and tortured and knew what pain was. These rats had only nipped.

He didn’t think Crow would come. Crow hadn’t come when people went missing or were turned to corpse-walkers, but the rats seemed to hate the tengu. He sat wondering, feeling useless. But wasn’t that the fate of humans? In a world of myth and demons, what were people but pathetic creatures? Not even worth posting guards for.

The false monks waited outside for the Goblin Rat or for Crow to arrive. He hoped neither did. He hoped each would sit outside from day to night then day again, feeling foolish.

His talismans had done nothing. How could he think some scribbling on a paper could fend off demons? The monks taught that the world was illusion and, thus, the world was meaningless. He didn’t know how they could teach that because he found so much meaning, in everything. Even if comprised of pictures and the two-dimensional, didn’t that still have meaning?

He pressed the paintbrush to a gash on his arm and drew a hand-sized cat on the floor beside him. He wouldn’t mind being a haunt to this place. If they killed him, then he wanted to tie himself to the monastery. He was addicted to the world. To material things. To life. If they murdered him, perhaps in a hundred years’ time the Goblin Rat would move on and Crow would perch on a tree nearby. Shiro would peer out, specter-like, from the abandoned monastery, and talk to him again.

He might as well be a ghost. Might as well be an illusion clinging to a material object.

He painted with his blood. On every surface he could reach, he drew a cat. When his blood dried up, he mixed his blood with his ink. The ink turned the lines from red to black. His iron and cells were embedded in that color. It was his ink; his drawings. He marked the world again and again, claiming his stake in it. That he was worth something, if only a scribbling. If only an etching on the wall.

When night came and he heard yelling, then fighting, outside, only then did he pause. It sounded like a bloodbath.

The Goblin Rat had come. She would discover Crow was nowhere to be seen and walk into the monastery to shred him. He sat on a cushion and closed his eyes, waiting.

He wouldn’t scream in death. He wouldn’t fight. He would drift from his body and they could do what they wanted with the corpse he left behind, though he didn’t have much pull in town, so how could he be worth imitating?

When the screaming quieted and the door slid open, Shiro opened his eyes. The Goblin Rat was a murderess. She must have attacked her followers because Crow had not appeared.

He faced his death head-on, expression placid.

But standing there was no goblin twisted with savagery; standing there was Crow. Or Crow in pieces, for his wings were gone, and his arms hung limp with chunks of feathers torn out. His mask was cracked down the middle, barely holding in place. Everywhere, his feathers were tufts, the ends shredded.

Crow also bore older wounds. His wings were months’ scabbed over. The tengu walked with a limp. Shiro saw that Crow bore two severed claws on his right foot. These were fresh. The third claw, front and hind, was slick with red.

Shiro gasped. “I didn’t think—”

“You should think more, it’s a good talent,” Crow said. He staggered and fell forward.

Shiro wasn’t quick enough to stand and catch him. But he ran to Crow and crouched down until they were close. So close that he smelled iron and salt.

“You came for me,” Shiro said.

Black, beaded eyes stared up at him. “I did, didn’t I? It makes me a bad tengu.”

“But it makes you a good man.”

Crow laughed, but with pain. “It seems that I’m the one that’s been driven mad by a human.”

“You were watching over me all this time? All this time you’ve been keeping away and just watching? Even when I kept the door open? Even when I walked around at night looking up at the trees? Why? Do you really find me so repulsive, just because I reached out one time? I didn’t need your undying love if you were so disgraced at the thought of being with me.”

Crow stared at him, surprised.

Shiro wasn’t used to raising his voice or edging over to anger. He breathed out and sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You think I’d find you repulsive? The disgrace is mine, Shiro. You should be the one turning away.”

Shiro watched him. He saw how self-conscious Crow was about Shiro looking at him, how much more tense about that than being in pain. It was true that tengus were most vain creatures. Crow had spent so much time trying to appear beautiful that he was fearful of not living up to the tales that told of what a tengu should be. That he had a role into he was placed, the same as Shiro was, But whereas Shiro made his own way, gaining the kind of confidence that only comes in knowing oneself, Crow had hidden all of his insecurity behind pride. With his wings gone, Crow seemed more disgusted with himself than with anybody else.

“I was trying to keep away,” Crow said.

“Why?”

“Because they would have killed you sooner,” he said. “But it looks like they’ll kill us all the same. They found what would lure me. Even when I tried to hide it.”

“If I may?” Shiro asked.

He used one of Crow’s uninjured talons to rip off a strip of his shirt and wrapped the material around Crow’s foot. The makeshift bandage did little to staunch the blood.

“You could have stayed,” Shiro said, “if it didn’t matter. You could have stuck around and we could have been killed then. Instead of months of silence.”

“And me, thinking I was fool for following a bird.”

“You are a fool for following a bird,” Crow whispered. “And I’m a fool for coming.”

“Do we run? Do we fight?”

“They own the woods. And now I am worthless. The Goblin Rat is on her way. When she arrives, she’ll sniff us out. She’ll have everyone in the woods looking. We should seek a more merciful death.”

“Let me understand. You stayed away because she took your wings? And you only came because I was going to die either with you at my side or alone, so you chose to stay with me?”

Crow said nothing.

“Did you really think I’d care to see you without your wings? Did you really think I’d drive you off?”

Crow stiffened. “Isn’t that all I am to you? Some pretty bird?”

“Of course not.”

“I didn’t want to be like your cat, either. I was afraid to be a pity case.”

“You aren’t a pity case to me.”

“Then what am I to you? How can I be worth a thing as a tengu, with no wings?”

“‘Tengu’ is but a title. And I know your name. You are Crow.”

Shiro looked around the darkened room. The moonlight illuminated what it could. He could barely make out outlines. His drawings were no more than shadows. Shiro lifted up Crow in his arms.

The defeated tengu did not resist, which Shiro found heartbreaking. He walked with him around the room, looking for anywhere to hide, and eventually came across a linen wardrobe. He opened it and tried to fit around the sheets. He kicked at them until they loosened and he could just squeeze the door shut, but they were both-full sized men. They took up most the space and the clean sheets absorbed their blood.

“She’ll find us here,” Crow whispered. “Nothing keeps a rat away.”

“I don’t care.” He fumbled in the dark, trying to find Crow’s face amongst all the feathers. When it was close, he pressed his forehead against the mask and breathed out. “If she comes, if she kills us ... then it will be like when you kidnapped me. We’ll be reborn and show up somewhere else, won’t we? And then we can wander and find each other again.”

“That’s a nice dream, it is. But it’s a dream all the same.”

“I think I love you, Crow. I think I’ve loved you more than I’ve loved anything else. Even cats. And I love cats so much.”

“Even though she tore off my beautiful wings—”

“Love is the deepest cut and the darkest stroke. My heart cares for yours. It beats faster than your wings ever did. Can you not say the same for me?”

“Fully.” Crow’s word echoed with emotion.

In the doomed and shadowed prayer hall, Shiro kissed the crack on the mask. In the dark, they were both blind.

Crow pressed the side of his face to Shiro’s. “When I died, I woke upon a shore. I was in a body bloated by the sea and, slowly, I pecked my way free until I was panting in the sun with sea water dried to salt on me. My old flesh was nothing more than rotten skin, a husk.”

“How did you die?”

“I—I don’t remember. Drowned, probably. There was rope around my legs and it was frayed at the end. I was killed for a reason, probably deserved.”

“But you don’t remember?”

“No. I have never wondered why. But now I want you to know my past.”

Crow’s mask split down the middle with the sound of a nut cracking in one’s palm. He pressed his head closer to Shiro’s, who felt the sharp turn of a beak against his neck.

“I don’t think I mind getting killed,” Shiro said. “Even if it’s by a rat.”

“No, I believe I don’t mind much, either.”

When the Goblin Rat came, she spoke in a tongue that Shiro did not know. He kept his breath quiet, though Crow was unconscious from his injuries. They smelled too much like blood, the two of them.

He waited for a long snout to push through the crack in the dresser and grin at them. Instead, the Goblin Rat yelled at whoever was with her. The sound of dozens of sniffing, snorting human-rats filled the monastery. He heard her nails clicking on the floor.

She laughed taunted him in her demon tongue.

He felt Crow stir, but pressed a hand to his beak to keep him quiet. Shiro didn’t want to be butchered. He figured that nobody ever did, but life was cruel and took and sometimes turned a person into lunch. It would be a brutal but quick death.

The Goblin Rat was close now, close enough for him to hear her claws against the door.

She hissed.

The hiss carried from the mouth of one to another. Well, there was a hiss, but perhaps it wasn’t her.

Shiro wondered if she had an army of hissing monsters at her side, but the Goblin Rat suddenly went quiet.

The hissing continued, loudly, then gave way to growling, yowling, then fighting.

Shiro held his breath and listened to terrible screaming, but from whom he could not tell. The violent fight shook the cabinet and woke Crow, who tensed against Shiro. They waited in the dark, together.

For whatever was fighting would come for them next. It felt giant. Monstrous. As tall as trees and strong as fire. It fought and growled until all Shiro could smell was blood.

Then, silence. Then, the two of them close together, hearts racing.

They didn’t dare come out. Not for hours. Not until the sun pressed against the crack in the wardrobe and Shiro could finally see Crow with the sliver of light. His face was that of a bird’s, the beak pointed straight, trying to look outside. For hours, they sat there.

His entire body hurt to move, but Shiro opened the door, carefully.

The prayer room was a ruin.

Claw marks covered nearly every surface. Half the walls were torn down. Blood painted the floor.

Shiro would never know what the Goblin Rat looked like, truly, because she was a mess of shredded red skin and white bones. There was nothing left but remnants and the corpses of the torn monks, their bellies emptied of slaughtered rats.

Shiro stood with the tengu leaning against him, surveying the wreckage.

“But what creature could—?”

“Your cats,” Crow said, gesturing at the walls.

And there, Shiro’s cats of ink and blood looked down upon them lazily. They were still paintings, but not in their original poses. They grinned, rat fur matted in their mouths, blood staining their incisors.

He felt a faint purring vibrating out from the walls, but the cats did not move. They remained perpetually happy from their feast.

Shiro’s cats had saved them.

He and Crow waited for somebody to come, but of course nobody would. The monks had fled months ago. Nobody stopped by a haunted monastery. When the birds and animals returned to the woods, they were alone. Not a single rat was left scurrying alive.

“It seems you’ve finally won your territory,” Shiro said.

Crow sat on the engawa with his back to him. There was no re-growing the stumps where his wings once were. No more silent movement or flight. He couldn’t walk without stumbling, but that would heal. They both knew that, with so many scars, he was no longer a tengu. That he would never roam the skies again.

Crow did not weep. He seemed both destroyed and relieved.

Shiro sat beside him.

They looked out at the forest.

“I can’t hold a territory, not anymore,” Crow said. “I could barely protect myself once the Goblin Rat took my wings. I didn’t want you to see me like that. I still don’t. Those wings were my pride.”

“Maybe you could protect a smaller range. Here with me.”

Crow blinked a moment. “This monastery?”

Shiro lifted his arms. “This monastery abandoned to the woods. I’ll be its keeper, but you are its protector. We’ll root out any remaining rats together, if there are any. Help out the town.”

“The monks won’t come back?”

“Not if we lie and say it’s cursed.”

“And when something bigger and stronger comes to claim this area as their own? What will we do then?”

“Then we’ll kill them or we’ll die. But we will die on land that we’ve made sacred. Do you think that’s so bad?”

Crow laughed, his neck feathers ruffling outward. He shook his head. “No, it’s not the worst thing.”

“There’s one stipulation though.”

“And what is that, Shiro?”

“Once you heal, I plan to kidnap you.”

Crow cocked his head. “Do you, now?”

“Yes. I’ll tie you up and throw you over the back of a horse, then leave you by the seaside. Then you’ll have to spend days wandering around to try and find me.”

“And what will happen when I do find you?”

Shiro leaned close and took Crow’s hands in his own. “Of course, I’ll attack.”