A small, broken laugh escapes her. It’s the first laugh since October.
“I’ll forge it. She would have told me to.”
“I don’t have a mother anymore. So I’ll have to be my own.”
“You’ll miss my cooking one day,” her mother would say, half-joking.
Optional Coda (if this were a musical or animated short):
She hasn’t cried in three weeks. That, she thinks, is the strangest part. The crying stopped, but the absence didn’t fill in. It hollowed out.
A late autumn evening. The sky above Tokyo is a bruised purple, fading to black. Seta Ichika sits alone in her room at the rooftop flat she once shared with her mother. The window is open a crack, letting in the cold air and the distant sound of a train.