Free Fudoki by Kij Johnson Page B

teeth into her calf. “Stop that!” she said.
    The thing squirmed. “Let me go!”
    She felt it trying to bite her fingers, so she shook it and then cracked a little opening to look inside. It was like the others, small and white; when she looked around, she saw several more, just out of the firelight. “Stay back, or I’ll squash this one.” She flattened her hands a little, and the others squirmed back into the darkness.
    She returned her attention to her catch, which lay rigidly still in her hands. “What are you? Killing animal, prey, something else?”
    “I am a rice ball,” it said with a certain pride.
    It did look a bit like one, though.—“Rice balls don’t talk, or move. Or bite me,” she added as it tried to do so, and she closed her hands and shook it again.
    “I’m not just a rice ball,” it said when it could talk again. “I am one of your rice balls. You dropped us. Remember?”
    “You weren’t alive then.”
    “You abandoned us,” it said, full of a sense of ill-usage. “Bad enough that you eat my brethren; bad enough that my destiny is to be eaten, but then you don’t even do that! You drop me on the ground, where mice or foxes will find me. Wasted!”
    “Hey,” she said, and shook the rice ball again. “I said something: you weren’t alive when I dropped you. What happened?”
    “How do I know?” the rice ball snapped. “How do you know, for that matter? Maybe we were alive, and you were just too much of a clod to notice.”
    She considered the rice ball. This was the first time that something she might eat had ever spoken to her. Prey animals didn’t have souls and could not speak—her mother had taught her this, and it must be true.
    “You have a soul?” she asked dubiously.
    The rice ball said, “Why do you care?”
    “If you do, then perhaps mice and rats and all the other prey animals have souls as well. I’m curious.”
    “Would that stop you eating them?”
    “No,” she said honestly. “Not if I can catch them.” (Cats are like that.) “But it might make things a little more difficult.”
    “Why?” said the rice ball. “Life is all about eating and being eaten.”
    “I suppose,” she said. “What do rice balls eat, then?”
    It was an unanswerable question, and so it tried to bite her again. She popped it in her mouth and bit down. There was a single squeak, and her mouth was filled with cold sticky rice. The other creatures rolled to her feet, their life gone: no more than rice balls now. After eating two more (for she was hungry), she pushed the rest into the fire. I cannot say whether this was a touching attempt to offer them a Buddhist cremation, or whether she was making sure they would not come back to life and harass her in her sleep. Perhaps she meant both these things. It is seldom that our motives are uncomplicated.
     
     
    “Perhaps now you are willing to listen,” the road said.
    She stood on a road as clear as crystal, fading into fog at either end. Ten thousand voices chittered, growled, chanted in the back of her mind: turn; cedar; emulate; I hear it now; rain-wet sleeves. “Go away,” she said as she had before, but added: “Did you make the rice-ball creatures?”
    “The farmer made them,” the kami said. “His wife and the little pregnant servant-girl, actually. You take cooked rice and a bit of vinegar and—”
    “No, I mean did you make them live?”
    The road shrugged, causing the tortoiseshell to stagger. “I am the road.”
    She gave up. “Did they all die?”
    “Why do you care?” the kami said, echoing the rice ball.
    “Because—” She sat down. “If they didn’t all die, they might breed. Perhaps someday they might tell tales to one another. I wondered what a rice ball’s story might be like.” (As do I, though I cannot tell their stories myself. I must pick carefully what tales I tell in the time I have left.)
    The road was warm, with a pulse like a heartbeat against her legs, she curled down until her