The kids get to stay.
I wish I could say I had a hand in all this, but… I’m just a spectator in all this. Or maybe you could take out the “AT” and change the letters a bit.
You know how cute he [Tolly] is in an oversized hoodie? I’m proud to say that I gave him his hoodie “fetish”. Mmhmm. I am a █████…
I don’t know where I’m going with all this. I know Didi wants to post something I’ve written onto the site. Since Aki-chan is too busy—too anxious to write anything meaningful. It’s hard to believe that those two are brothers. Reminds me of my own niece and nephew. Siblings, yet… almost completely different. And I know they came from the same set of parents! The twins, too, though they’re a bit different… But same parents, same food, same musical upbringing, and yet they’re completely different. I’m glad the little kids don’t get to see this. I don’t want them to see the fire, the smoke. Everything burning. That’s too much for a baby to handle. (Ai would say, “I’m not a baby…” …And she’s right. She’s not. She can make, with adult supervision, a stock all by herself. Oh, Didi. You really are meant to be a dad.
If I keep going like this, I’ll definitely embarrass him.
So I’m going to keep going like this.
A fire’s different if you’ve seen a man burn to death.
I don’t know where that came from. But being paid to burn a man to death……?
I wonder if the kids these days know what they’re getting into. “GI Bill!” Right, right… I saw Didi play this PC game once. It’s called Spec Ops: The Line. In it you order this white phosphorus bombing of a compound and it turns out to be a refugee camp, you see your reflection on the screen and you go through, walking past shambling, burning corpses. I don’t know if his mother’s family ever lived through something like that. The fire bombings, or maybe even the atomic bombs. I don’t know if they would ever talk about something like that. My understanding is that you don’t, in Japan, because that’s a shameful history to live through, you don’t want to be known as a bombing survivor. Maybe that’s why she was so eager to leave the country. Hmm…
Now that we know that they have a stable home, we’re going to have to set up the cabinet-altar again. The place doesn’t have enough space for a full butsudan, so we’ll have to get a more compact altar instead. Something travel-sized, maybe… Hahh. My carpentry skills are just handy at a time when I don’t have the means to work on anything.
We’ll set up a little shrine. Maybe we can move the furniture around and give it a respectful place to sit. Yumeka seems really excited by that. Surprised. I thought he was more of a witch and less of a devout ancestor worshipper. Not that Didi is one, but…
No.
—Ansel