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Satsuki realized she was disappearing on the twelfth of December. She held up her hands to see her fingers, tipless and abandoned. They weren’t dismembered on the floor. There were no traces of blood. Instead, there was a haze, a kind of shimmering otherness to her innocuous absence. She put her hands in her pockets and continued on with her day.
Winter in Sapporo could be deadly given the right circumstances. Satsuki walked around the mounded piles of thick, wet snow and stepped flat-footed against the iced ground. The zipper on her winter coat had, over the summer, rusted and was now rendered useless. Her turtleneck, though well-suited for a winter day inside the house, did no good against the blustering winds on her way to the bus stop, where she would wait fifteen minutes for the delayed public transportation.
Once at work, Satsuki removed her mittens, and her stubbed fingers revealed themselves to the world for the first time. At first, none of her colleagues commented on the anomaly. Who pays attention to fingertips? Satsuki thought to herself. Surely, if any of my colleagues were to notice, they would assume it had always been that way. Even if they were sure my fingertips were once there, they wouldn’t mention it out of sheer politeness.
And Satsuki, for the most part, was correct. Her colleagues didn’t treat her anywhere out of the ordinary, and though a glance or two was given to her hands, no one commented on her sudden lack. The only time someone did mention it was indirectly, for which Satsuki narrowed her eyes and grimaced, not at the man, but at the email he sent.
Satsuki, he wrote, I’ve noticed it’s taking you longer than usual to draft your daily communications email to the team. Is there any particular reason for that? Please let me know if you need any special accommodations in regard to your usual duties. All the best,
Satsuki deleted the email and carried on with her day.
The next morning, Satsuki looked in the mirror and cried out with joy. Her ears! Oh, the tips of her ears, which she once despised for sticking out further from her head than was normal—they had disappeared as well! Though there was an oddness to this new look, it was undoubtedly better than before.
The ears, perhaps due to their prominence, did not go unnoticed or uncommented on like her fingertips.
Satsuki! Nakamura cried when they ran into each other on the sidewalk. Your ears! Your ears! She reached out and tried to grab Satsuki’s now nonexistent ears, and when she did confirm that they were removed from her skull, Nakamura burst into tears.
Satsuki bit down on the insides of her cheeks. Nakamura, with her perfect ears and her perfect nose, lamented Satsuki’s loss but only because she was imagining the same fate for herself. Even Nakamura’s neck was slender and long, so white it gleamed against the background of the falling snow. Satsuki lifted her hand to her throat, where her olive turtleneck covered her thick, tanned skin.
At this movement, Nakamura took the opportunity to pull Satsuki’s hands into her own, only to drop them and scream at the realization that Satsuki’s fingertips had been severed as well. Instead of further questioning, Nakamura turned on her heel, sprinting through the streets until she slipped and fell backward, slamming hard onto the sidewalk head first.
Satsuki shook her head and continued on with her day.
Attending Nakamura’s funeral felt obligatory for Satsuki, since it was her disfigurement that caused Nakamura to run screaming through the ice-slick streets. The funeral was on the eighteenth of December, and by this time, Satsuki’s left knee had disappeared, along with her back teeth. Walking without a knee was far more difficult than Satsuki imagined, and she hobbled along behind the other mourners before dropping a flower in Nakamura’s casket just next to the deceased woman’s uselessly perfect ears.
By the New Year, Satsuki was a person only in name. She could not eat because she had no mouth. She could not see because her eyes had turned to blank holes in her skull, which was devoid of skin and painted in detailed musculature so obscene that should she have gone outside, which she no longer resolved to do, children would die on the spot from the sight.
Satsuki didn’t mind, though. How could she mind when her brain was only a stem, its petals plucked clean? Thoughts disappeared like that. Feelings went next. To be a shell is to exist only for the sake of existing. It doesn’t take long for Satsuki to become bones. Dust. To become
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Melissa Perri Smith is a recovering government worker surviving in the Washington, D.C. area. She has a few publications here and there and spent a ludicrous amount of money on an MFA. Follow her on Instagram and TikTok @melissaperrismith for some silly little posts.
