July Twenty-Ninth, 20xx
Dear Little Miss Elise,
Today I will regale you with my tales of meeting a girl named Josephine Uí Mílítheach, whom I came into contact with around a year ago when she was traveling to Yokohama for the day. It was after I’d gotten into another fight with Mori about something ridiculous and stormed out of the house. I ended up taking the train to the pier to look at the birds, and that was when I ran into Josephine, who came up to me and asked for directions in terrible, terrible Japanese. I didn’t want to speak to anyone at the time—much less a creepy-looking tourist—but she was insanely persistent, refusing my replies to ask any of the other countless people on the pier with
in a whiny voice, which I suppose I couldn’t argue with.
She took out her phone and gestured to photos of the Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature, proudly proclaiming that she was there to visit an exhibit about her favourite author, whose grave she’d visited that morning. She said this with a big, toothy grin that nearly split her pallid face completely open, and I internally cringed at the fervor she spoke to me with. She seemed nice enough, don’t get me wrong, but there exists a certain kind of aura that some people possess where you feel uneasy looking at them, even if they aren’t doing anything particularly wrong, or worse—are trying their very hardest to convince you such an aura doesn’t exist at all. I’d know because I myself possess this aura as well, and when I come into contact with my kin, I am just as unsettled as a normal person would be. Josephine spoke to me with an overpowering sense of self-assuredness, as if she believed her human skin suit had no faults and its zipper couldn’t be discerned by a keen eye. It was this self-assuredness that pissed me off the most; she thought she acted so human that it got to a point where she almost believed it, believed she could stand on the same ground as actual humans and stomp about the world in her ugly, ugly Oxford shoes as if she were one.
I vaguely gestured in the direction of the museum and went back to my birds, but she didn’t move. Instead, she rustled through her over-charmed purse and pulled out a green pack of American Spirits.