Miran Reborn |EN|

Clio stared at the grain of the wood on the principal’s desk, while the hum of the air conditioner and the stale smell of burnt coffee hammered at her temples. Her throat was still burning. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the impact of her knuckles against that creep’s cheekbone.

She could still see his smile, the way he tilted his head while blocking her path in the hallway. She hadn’t screamed. He had leaned in too close, until Clio caught the sickly-sweet scent of his hairspray mixed with mint chewing gum. “You know, Miran,” he had whispered, looking down at her chest and then back at her chalk-stained hands, “if you tried to be less... rough, maybe someone would forget you look like a street kid. It’s a shame to waste those exotic features with the posture of a dockworker. You need someone to teach you how to behave when you want to be looked at.”

He had brushed a lock of her hair with an air of fake pity—a gesture that felt to Clio like an oil stain on a white dress. It was that silent evaluation, that way of “dissecting” her like a defective spare part, that had made her lose control. Instead of just screaming, now she was here, counting the floor tiles as if they could offer her an escape route.

A sharp knock at the door broke the silence. The principal leaned in, glancing at Clio. She would have gladly kicked him. Behind him, Rui appeared.

There she was. The perfect sister, pulled away from a vital lesson because of the black sheep of the Miran family. Her uniform was impeccable, but her gaze betrayed a tension Clio knew well. It was that mix of resignation and annoyance felt by someone who already knows they’ll have to fix someone else’s mess.

“I was set up, Rui,” Clio blurted out, her knuckles still hot from the fight. “That piece of shit was all over me, I just—”

“Sit down, Rui,” the principal cut her off without even looking at Clio. “Your sister has gotten into another one of her scrapes, but you’re not here for her conduct.” He held out the phone receiver toward her. “It’s your father. He’s very shaken.”

Clio’s heart skipped a beat. Dad never called the school. Never.

Rui grabbed the receiver, her back as rigid as a steel wire. “Hello, Dad?”

Clio watched her sister’s face crumble. The mask of control slipped away, leaving behind a deathly pallor. Rui didn’t speak; she listened, as the color drained from her lips and her pupils contracted.

“What happened?” Rui whispered. Her voice broke—a thin sound that made Clio’s blood run cold.

Then, silence. Rui froze completely. The phone slipped from her fingers and hit the floor with a sharp thud, like a gunshot.

“Rui?” Clio asked. Her own voice sounded tiny, like a child’s. Rui stared at her without seeing her.

“The lift in the workshop,” Rui murmured, looking at an empty spot over Clio’s shoulder. “Mom was under it...”

The world crumpled in on itself. The family business—mechanics—was settling the score with her mother.

Clio’s legs turned to paper-mâché. “Is it... is it serious?” she asked, but the question already felt hollow, devoid of any possible answer.

Rui shook her head slowly. “They don’t know... shit.”

Clio stood still, swaying on her heels to keep from losing her balance. “What do we do?”

“They’re coming to pick us up,” Rui replied, her voice now flat, metallic. “We’re going to get the little ones from preschool. Then to the hospital.”

The principal cleared his throat, passing a trembling hand over his face. “It’s... it’s a tragedy, girls. I am deeply sorry,” he murmured, and for the first time his voice wasn’t institutional, but that of a man who didn’t know the right words to use. “Rui. I’ll call the office immediately for your dismissal, but... please, try to understand. I cannot let you go until we sign the release form with the person coming to get you. If I let you out now, alone and in this state, and something happened... I would never forgive myself.”

“The form?” Clio snapped to her feet, her chair screeching violently against the floor. “You’re talking about forms? My mother is under a car and you’re thinking about paperwork?”

“Clio, please. These are the rules. The school is responsible for you. I must have an adult take charge of you and a signed form so we know who you’re with, do you understand?” the principal replied, almost as if pleading.

“The school is responsible?” Clio took a step forward. It wasn’t just anger anymore; it was terror looking for a way out. “My mother could be dead, or paralyzed!”

“Clio, stop...” Rui whispered. She seemed to have no oxygen left, her hands clutching the skirt of her uniform until her knuckles turned white.

“No, I won’t stop!” Clio yelled, turning to her sister and then back to the man. “She’s there, crushed! She isn’t waiting for your forms, she isn’t waiting for the office to answer the phone!”

“If you leave now, without me knowing where you’re going and with whom—” the principal tried to grab her arm, a protective gesture that felt like a brand to Clio.

“Don’t you dare touch me!” she snarled, wrenching her arm away with a violence that made her stagger. Her laugh was a broken, bitter sound that died instantly in a hitched breath. She didn’t say another word. There were no more words for that office that smelled of coffee and old paper. She turned, hitting the panic bar on the door with the weight of her body, and walked out.

The hallway seemed endless, the neon lights overhead buzzing like crazed insects. Every step was a struggle against the image of that lift collapsing, of metal winning over flesh.

Clio walked fast, her lungs wheezing.

Mom. Workshop. The iron giving way.The words bounced around her skull like debris.

Then, the impact.

She didn’t even see it. She slammed into something solid. A muffled cry, the sharp sound of sliding paper, and then chaos. Clio stumbled, the breath dying in her throat.

Yuko was there, kneeling among his scattered papers. He was the kind of boy Clio never noticed: too neat, too quiet, always confined to his world of perfect handouts. At that moment, however, his black eyes were fixed on her, wide behind his glasses.

“Clio? God, you’re... you’re white as a sheet,” he whispered, forgetting the papers. He moved to stand up, reaching a hand out to her. “Hey, breathe. What happened? I’ll take you to the nurse, I—”

“Move,” she hissed. It wasn’t a threat; it was a rattle.

Yuko didn’t move. He made the mistake of kindness. His hand closed around Clio’s arm, a light grip, trying to anchor her to the ground. “Wait, you can’t leave like this, you don’t look well...”

At the touch, the hallway vanished. Clio didn’t feel Yuko’s fingers. She felt the cold of the hydraulic metal. She felt the weight of tons of steel crushing flesh. Panic exploded in her chest like a dynamite charge.

With a choked scream, Clio gave a violent shove. She didn’t want to hit him; she just wanted that “metal” to let her go. In the movement, her shoulder slammed squarely into Yuko’s chest. The boy flew backward, hitting the lockers with a metallic crash.

The remaining handouts flew into the air, falling over them like dirty snow.

Yuko slid to the floor, a hand pressed to his sternum, his breath knocked out of him from the blow. There was no anger in his eyes, only a painful, almost childlike confusion.

Clio stood frozen for a heartbeat, staring at that disaster of paper and bones.

“Don’t touch me,” she whispered, her voice coming out small, a desperate plea.

She stepped over Yuko’s papers and threw herself against the panic bar. The door swung open with a bang, spitting her out.

The freezing air hit her like a slap. Clio collapsed against the brick wall of the gym, curling up, hugging her arms to her chest as if she could keep her own body from falling to pieces. She couldn’t cry. She felt only a dry, rhythmic tremor that emptied her lungs of all dignity.

She stayed there, forehead pressed against her knees, while the world around her kept turning with an atrocious indifference. She heard the distant shouts of boys playing soccer in the field nearby and the whistle of a Yamanote line train cutting through the air a few blocks away.

She looked down at her hands. Her knuckles were red, stained with a mix of blood and the chalk dust that covered the hallways. Under her nails, however, was that usual black line, thin and stubborn: engine grease that never came off, not even after hours of abrasive soap. It was her family’s mark, the sign that she didn’t belong to that building of concrete and rules, but to iron, oil, and the roar of compressors.

Mom.

The image appeared vividly: her mother laughing, her black hair pulled back in a colorful headband that smelled of Thai spices and gasoline. Her mother was the only gear holding together that junk-heap engine that was their life in Tokyo; if that gear snapped, everything else would become scrap metal.

Clio closed her eyes and tried to breathe, but the air felt dense. She felt like a defective part, one of those that never quite fits into the place it’s put. In Thailand she was too “Japanese,” here in Tokyo she was too much of a “foreigner,” too much of a tomboy, too much Clio.

She bumped her head lightly against the wall, once, twice. She wanted to feel the physical pain to drown out that buzzing in her brain. “Stay whole,” she commanded herself in a whisper that dispersed into the wind. “Hold it together...”

After a while, she heard someone calling her.

“Clio!”

Rui’s voice was a needle piercing the fog.

She reached her at a run, out of breath. She stopped a meter away, scanning Clio’s scraped knuckles and lost gaze. She didn’t shout. She didn’t have the strength. She simply took her by the arm, a sharp, nervous grip.

“Let’s go. Sato is here.”

Sato, one of her dad’s long-time mechanics, was waiting for them in the parking lot. His old ash-gray van was idling, the exhaust pipe spitting thick smoke into the gray afternoon. When he got out, he didn’t look them in the eye. He had fresh oil stains on his coveralls, and the smell of grease and tobacco followed him like a shadow.

“Rui, Clio...” Sato murmured. He got back in and, gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were white, said, “Get in the back. Hurry.”

The journey was a suffocation of sheet metal and silence.

The silence in the van was so thick that Clio could hear the buzz of Rui’s turned-off phone, clenched between her fingers. Rui stared at the black screen. Her back was rigid, her uniform still perfect, but her neck was strained to the point of spasm. She was the rock of the family, the “perfect Japanese girl.”

She wouldn’t give in here, not in front of Sato. Clio watched her, hating her calm, hating that control she herself would never have.

Rui stared at the dead screen of the phone. She gripped it with such force that the plastic of the case gave a small, dry creak—a moan of material under stress. Her knuckles had turned white, bloodless, like marble knobs.

Clio looked for a sign of cracking on her face: a quiver of the lip, a blink longer than usual. Nothing. Rui was a perfectly composed porcelain mask, but her skin had turned a sickly pale, almost translucent under the streetlights that began to flash past the window.

Not a single tear. Rui didn’t allow herself that luxury; someone had to stay whole while everything else went to pieces. But it was that absolute immobility that terrified Clio: she looked like a piece of poorly tempered metal, ready to shatter into a thousand shards at the slightest bump, instead of bending.

Clio looked down at her own hands. Her knuckles were red, dirty with chalk and that black grease that never went away. They looked like the hands of a stranger. The hands of someone who only knows how to hit, while her mother, back at the workshop, used those same hands to create, to repair, to keep their world standing.

Sato’s van turned sharply, the brakes emitting a high-pitched whistle that cut through the silence like a blade.

Stay whole, Mom,Clio thought, digging her nails into her palms to keep from screaming.Don’t seize up right now. Don’t leave me alone with this silence.