Ichiro lowered his head in despair, making no effort to fight the urge to cry as the tears flowed from his eyes, and an undignified sob escaped his lips.

There was no point in trying to be a worthy man anymore, now that he had been deprived of the very thing that marked him as an accepted member of society and made him who he was.

Searching for his mother and father had become a useless endeavor. He simply couldn't face them again like this, regardless of the knowledge that their love was unconditional.

The same could be said for his beloved wife, Kumiko. She was a beautiful and powerful kitsune, who clearly deserved much better than to waste her time serving an unremarkable young man such as himself. If he went back to her now, she would undoubtedly find him less desirable than before, and as a result, he would become even more of a nuisance.

His sense of hopelessness grew until the pain became too much for him to hold in. He sobbed louder and felt himself begin to tremble.

The door to the bathroom opened again, and the mysterious woman came in to crouch beside him on the floor. He turned his head away to show that he did not find her presence welcome, but she handed him a piece of wiping paper regardless.

"Here, take this tissue. Wipe up your tears," she instructed in an accent that sounded rather strange and foreign to his ears.

Through the corner of his eye, he noticed that her expression was, in fact, a kind one. After some hesitation, he took the tissue and rubbed it against his damp cheek, finding that the material felt even softer than the paper Kumiko kept beside the toilet.

He balled it up in his fist when he was done, then turned his head to look at the woman. "How could you do this to me?"

Her eyes widened in confusion. "Do what? Be more specific, please."

"Cut my hair."

The woman's expression became resolute. "That wasn't me. I swear."

"Then who was it?"

"It was me," an unfamiliar male voice suddenly said, filling Ichiro with shock. He glanced in the opposite direction, hoping to find some sign that another person was present before it became apparent that it was just the two of them in the room.

"Did you hear that?" Ichiro asked anxiously upon facing the woman again.

"Hear what?"

"A man."

She frowned as if losing patience with him. "Seems like you're still hungover. Call me when you're feeling sober."

At that, she stood up and left the bathroom, leaving him to continue coping with his sorry situation alone. The pain of loneliness swept through him, and he buried his face once more as the tears returned.

"Don't you start crying again. Things aren't as bad as you think."

"They are," Ichiro immediately countered with a whimper. "Who are you? A ghost?"

"You might have met me before. My name is Tsutomu Higuchi, and I live inside your head."

Ichiro froze for a few moments, then resumed movement by slowly lowering his hands in disbelief. As a child, he had known of an odd woman who claimed to have another person occupying her mind, but he'd always been confident that such a phenomenon could never affect him.

However, it now seemed that he'd been very wrong to believe so. "I'm... I'm going mad..."

"No, you're not. Let me explain..."

"Go away! Leave me alone!"

"Calm down. I only intend to enlighten you on a few things..."

"Will you go away if I let you do that?"

"I certainly will. Is there anything you want to ask me first?"

"No. Just get it over and done with."

"All right, I'll start from the beginning. Do you remember your wife?"

"Kumiko?"

"Is that her name?"  the voice asked in apparent surprise.

"Yes, it is..."

"That pleases me to finally know. But, back to the subject at hand. I have reason to believe that your wife never truly overcame the grief of losing you..."

"O-Of course not. She had only a few months at most..."

"I'm sorry, but you might be wrong there."

"How so? She told me that-"

"I've done the calculations. You've been dead for about a century, at the very least..."

Ichiro couldn't help but chuckle at something so absurd. "That's impossible. My wife's sense of time is much better than that."

"Well, she must have lied to you then. Either that or you made an incorrect assumption."

"And why should I trust you? If there is anyone who is a liar, it would be you..."

"Ichiro, I would know that better than anyone. I was your future incarnation, after all..."

"Future incarnation? Please stop with this tall tale," Ichiro snapped, his previous despair now mostly forgotten. "One cannot reincarnate if there are no more bodies left for his soul to inhabit..."

"What... what are you talking about?"

"The world ended a few months after my death when the sun grew a thousand times bigger. Kumiko told me so."

A long silence ensued, and Ichiro believed that he'd won the argument before the voice eventually returned to prove otherwise.

"You. You are very stupid, indeed."

"No, I'm not. I'll have you know that I'm-"

"The sun is still very young for a star. It won't grow like that for another billion years."

Ichiro paused, unsure of what to make of such a pair of statements. "The... the sun is a star?"

"Yes, it is. But you wouldn't know that since you never learned any science."

"Science? What's that?"

"It's not important right now. What is, is the truth about what your wife has done."

"Go on..."

"As I said before, she may have never overcome her grief. My theory is that she reconstructed your physical body, and knowing that I was your reincarnation, took my soul to bring you back to life."

Ichiro swallowed as a sliver of self-doubt began to creep through his mind. "But this is the afterlife. I'm dead, and so is she."

The voice shifted from hurried to solemn in tone. "I don't want to tell you this, but I had the opportunity to possess your body for a day. You are very much alive, and you are capable of breathing and experiencing pain..."

These words prompted Ichiro to gaze down at his expanding and contracting chest. He had noticed such a thing before, but at the time, he'd assumed it to be an illusion designed to give one the impression that they were still alive.

He stared a while longer, before placing his index and middle finger upon his wrist to feel for a pulse. It took some shifting around, but he eventually detected a faint thump and felt a subsequent tightness in his abdomen.

"Ichiro, are you there? Can you still hear me?"

Ichiro didn't want to listen to the voice anymore, nor did he want to consider for even a moment that he was still as mortal as ever. He stood up unsteadily, his legs numb from kneeling for so long, and studied his reflection in the mirror once again.

The cutting of his hair now seemed insignificant in comparison to the possibility that the world had moved on without him, and that almost everybody he knew had long since passed.

He clenched his fists tightly and slammed one of them against the wall. "No. I refuse to believe it!"

"Ichiro, are you all right? I'm sorry if-"

"Leave me be. You've brought me nothing but suffering..."

The voice sighed heavily. "Fine. But first, I'd advise you to speak with that young woman. She might be of more help than I've been..."

A sudden and intense headache prompted Ichiro to wrinkle up his face with a groan before the unwelcome sensation faded almost quickly as it had arrived. He relaxed, then turned his head to eye the bathroom door while contemplating the voice's parting advice.

After what he'd been through so far, consulting with the mysterious woman seemed like a favorable course of action, so he made his way back into the room that he'd woken up in.

It was vacant, but a second look around enlightened him to details he hadn't noticed earlier. The bedding that he'd slept on earlier was pale brown in color, and it resembled a large futon that had been bent out of shape. To it's left, stood a tall metal stalk with what appeared to be a white lamp mounted on top.

Such an object was curious indeed, and he approached it for further observation. He grasped the stalk gently, shifting his hands slowly upward until he came across a small lever.

He flicked it down, and the lamp immediately took on an intense yellow glow that brightened the room even more. What is this trickery? he thought to himself, feeling relieved to find that the voice inside his mind was his own.

He flicked the lever up and then down again repeatedly, producing a flashing display that must have caught the mysterious woman's attention, for she soon appeared and spoke up in disapproval.

"What's the matter with you? You're like some little kid..."

Ichiro stepped away from the magic lamp and spun around to lay eyes on her again. She looked no less outlandish and intimidating than when they'd first met, but he forced himself to say something regardless. "I apologize. It's just that I've never seen anything quite like it in my life..."

The woman raised her eyebrows. "You've got a funny accent. Where are you from? Osaka?"

Ichiro was stunned by her near-accurate guess. "No, but I did live nearby. You must have been very well-traveled-"

"It's no big deal. I hear you guys talk all the time on the TV or radio,"

"What?" Ichiro remarked, finding that her sentence had taken a turn for the incomprehensible, just like with the ghost he'd heard singing earlier.

"I said, I hear people like you all the time on TV or radio..." she rephrased while speaking a little more slowly.

"No, you don't understand. What kind of word is tee-vee-or-ray-dio?"

The woman glared at him intensely. "You're not just trying to get on my nerves, are you?"

"I assure you that I'm not. I really am confused..."

She gave a loud sigh and came forward to grasp his hand, much to his consternation.

"Why are you touching me? We've only just-"

"Sit down on the couch. We have a lot to work through." She flopped down on her rump upon the large misshapen futon, pulling him along as she did so. He landed right beside her before pulling his hand free and noticing that her hair was pinned in place by a silver butterfly-shaped ornament.

"Let's begin by introducing ourselves," she said, adopting a stern tone that incited him to sit up straight and listen intently. "My name is Yukari. What's yours?"

"Ichiro."

"I see. How old are you, Ichiro?"

"Twenty-two. Or perhaps twenty-three. I can't remember..." he replied, unsure of what she was getting at.

"Well, then. Let's just say that I'm twenty for now. Do you know when you were born?"

"Uh..." Ichiro uttered in hesitation as he tried to remember the year of his death and then backtrack from there. "Winter. The fifth year of Tenshō."

Yukari's hand met with his upper arm. "Stop fooling around. Tell me your real birthday."

It was now Ichiro's turn to be irritated. "I can't tell you the day. Only the season."

Yukari opened her mouth as if she wished to fire some retort, only to apparently decide otherwise and avert her eyes. Ichiro wondered if his words had somehow hurt her before she refocused on him and continued with the exchange as if nothing was wrong.

"I'm going to take a gamble and assume that you're telling the truth. Are you ready to hear a secret?"

"I'm... I'm all ears..." Ichiro replied, despite feeling a growing sense of dread.

"I'm not twenty. I'm actually seventy."

Ichiro thought of the ageless Kumiko and couldn't help but smile a little. "That's no surprise. You're young for a demon, are you not?"

Yukari frowned again. "I'm not a demon. At least, as far as I know."

"Then, what are you?"

"It's hard to say. The closest thing I can think of is a shibito-tsuki, but it doesn't add up..."

Ichiro nodded in agreement, for she did not resemble a rotting corpse at all. "Well, you still look very lifelike to-"

She grabbed his wrist and made firm eye contact, prompting him to swallow the rest of his words. "I know. That's why I came up with a new name to classify beings like you and me..."

Ichiro gaped, unsure if he had heard her correctly.

"I thought 'flesh specter' had a nice ring to it, but I'd like to know your opinion. Do you find it appropriate?"

******

Note:

- A shibito-tsuki is apparently a dead body possessed by either another soul, or a yōkai. They eat and drink a lot, and also become a little more decomposed with each passing day, so you can understand why Yukari had her doubts.