Kaori Saejima -2021- May 2026

She pulled on her coat. It was too large—her mother's, from a decade ago, the wool frayed at the cuffs. She did not own an umbrella. She did not own a phone that worked.

The game was about to begin.

Kaori's breath caught. Her left hand twitched inside the glove, a moth against a windowpane. Kaori Saejima -2021-

Kaori was thirty-four. Once, she had been a child prodigy of the shogi circuit—the "Lioness of Kyushu," they called her after she defeated a reigning grandmaster at sixteen. But that was before the accident. Before the tremor in her left hand made it impossible to place a piece without knocking over three others. Before her mother’s funeral, which she watched through a hospital window, her jaw wired shut after a seizure sent her down a flight of concrete stairs.

The figure sat down. Gestured to the empty chair. She pulled on her coat

As she stepped into the hallway, the light bulb above her door flickered and died.

It was 2021. The world had learned to live with the quiet hum of absence. She did not own a phone that worked

—The Caretaker