A quiet wind brushed the leaves overhead, carrying the scent of gingko biloba and dried earth as Akiko and Hiroshi sat across from each other on the splintered bench. The small village of Sakamoto lay languid in the early afternoon sun, with only the creaking bamboo groves disturbing its tranquility.
“Have you heard about the Cleanstick?” Hiroshi asked, his eyes more curious than concerned.
Akiko, with her usual air of indifference, shrugged. “Isn’t it just another village myth? You know how they like their ghost stories.” Her hands idly played with a pebble, gray and smooth like a polished secret.
“It’s more than a myth,” Hiroshi insisted. He leaned closer, lowering his voice as though the trees themselves might listen in. “It’s said to have been spotted again near the shrine.”
“The thing that looks like a walking stick?” Akiko’s tone was skeptic, not dismissive. “Why is everyone calling it clean?”
Hiroshi paused, a flicker of uncertainty clouding his face. “They say it appears as a perfectly smooth stick, immaculate and untouched by dirt. No matter where it’s found—forest paths, muddy riverbanks—it’s always clean. Like something out of this world.”
Akiko met his gaze, the ghost of a smile on her lips. “You think it’s something supernatural?”
“I think,” Hiroshi began, faltering on the brink of sharing a belief he half-mocked himself for holding, “it might have something to do with the disappearances.”
The air grew still, a sinister calm that swallowed Akiko’s retort. She bit her lip, choosing instead to ask, “You remember Kenji?”
Hiroshi nodded, his eyes darkening. “He was the last one, wasn’t he? Before he vanished, he spoke about seeing a stick by his window. Said it was strange, how tidy it looked in the rain.”
They sat in the stifling quiet of unspoken fears. The stories spun by elders around hearth fires were one thing; real missing people were quite another.
“Should we…?” Akiko ventured, trailing off into uncertainty.
Hiroshi’s hesitation matched hers. “Investigate? Maybe. If you’re not afraid.”
“I haven’t been truly afraid since I was ten,” Akiko replied, attempting bravado with a teasing grin.
Under a pale moon, they found themselves courageously standing at the shrine where the Cleanstick was said to have appeared. The cold night air was sharp and expectant, like a hoarse whisper in a muted crowd.
“Here,” Hiroshi said, pointing to an unblemished stick stabbed upright in the earth. Its surface was smooth and unnaturally bright under the moonlight—a clean stick indeed.
Akiko picked it up without thinking, the sudden chill of it biting into her palm. “It’s just a twig,” she scoffed, though something in the back of her mind screamed otherwise.
As they turned to leave, the air cracked with a sound like bones snapping, and Hiroshi fell silent mid-step. Akiko spun to find him petrified, eyes wide with horror that mirrored the terror coursing through her veins. Where Hiroshi once stood, there was only the Cleanstick, now crudely smeared with a streak of earth.
Her heart pounded as understanding slammed into her—a revelation both shocking and hopeless. The Cleanstick wasn’t an object to be pursued; it was an agent in a dance of disappearance, a tool of impending dread wrapped in neat simplicity. Trembling, she let it fall, knowing with a sudden, grim clarity that Hiroshi, like Kenji, had been claimed.
Yet in the void of answers, only questions thrived. What darkness lurked beneath the clean facade? As the night closed in, returning to its stillness, Akiko walked back to the village alone, the mystery of the Cleanstick clinging to her like a second shadow.