At the Edge of the Woods by Masatsugu Ono

Author:Masatsugu Ono
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press

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I was concerned. Since living alone with me, my son was using fewer and fewer words, conveying his thoughts more and more through gestures and facial expressions. He seemed to be regressing into infancy. Was it because he wished to return to a time and a place when happiness was not segmented, when there was no need to understand it as such? I thought that at his grandparents’ he had laughed a lot more. In the airport, he had sobbed that he wanted to go “home.” But where was home? The house at the edge of the woods? Wasn’t the other place much homier to him? But no, I thought. His memories of the mother he was tied to—that he had once literally been tied to, in the womb—all began in the house at the edge of the woods.

My son knew perfectly well that the house at the edge of the woods was his real home. Just like his absent-minded mother (since his rival was still inside her, he had exclusive rights to the title of “just like”), he had merely forgotten. As proof, when we left his grandparents’ house the second time, it was as if the uproar the first time had never occurred. Not only did he not cry, he made no show of resistance. My brother-in-law drove us to the airport. Our son sat in his car seat with an unchildlike, solemn look on his face, strapped in so he couldn’t move, resolved that this was the end, looking—with a serenity born of the knowledge that he would be reunited with his loved one in the world to come—heroic. The small hero looked earnestly into the face of his mother, bending over him with difficulty due to her unwieldy belly.

“Mommy will be coming home soon, too. Be a good boy and listen to Daddy.”

She kissed him on the forehead and cheeks. Maybe that was the magic. No sooner did we start the car than he was fast asleep. It seemed a shame to wake him up, so my brother-in-law carried him all the way into the airport. As he showed no sign of waking, I borrowed a stroller at the ticket counter. Even on the airplane, he slept soundly. “Do you have to go pee?” Along the way I woke him several times to ask, but each time, with eyes so unfocused I couldn’t be sure if he was looking at me or not, he shook his head, then curled into a ball, snuggling back under the blanket like a puppy burrowing under its mother, and went back to sleep. That’s how he tried to recapture it—the travel experience he had known inside the dark waters within his mother, not once awakening or being disturbed by a nuisance like me. Which must be why, later, when I asked him about it, he looked at me blankly.

“You must have been really tired. You never woke up, so I got worried. You were like a sleeping prince. But my kisses never woke you up.

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