"Catch"

This trip into the 森  forest will be your last."

You swear it. You’ve sworn it before, more than once. Now the words hang loose around your mind, like an undersized coat. No more excuses, no turning back.

Now march. Let the business, broken relationship, the overdraft fall away. Buried. Among the bones and beetles compacted in the seething forest floor, they decay. This hunt is a reckoning.

The buzzing breath of the northern Okinawan woods exhale moist on your neck. Mosquitos suck at your skin: legs, arms, face, chest. Then float away bulked with blood. More life leaves.

Ground sounds beneath your boots with each step – a mixed mulch of rotting leaves, and the soft collapse of forgotten things.

Every movement grinds a thousand tiny deaths. You listen: crunch, crunch, splat, crack. Beneath it all, the forest murmurs at the edge of hearing.

A branch snaps—close, deliberate.

Stop. Listen.

What was that sound?

Almost too afraid to look, you swivel around. Behind, branches sway into the steamy day. A contorted tunnel of trees posing in suspicious forms. There was a scurrying - you swore it - a scratch scratch of underbrush dashing past your back. A boar? Maybe.

You’d read there were no wild animals here. Even they knew to stay away, but you kenneled that side of yourself years ago.

The gear you carry makes you itch along with the swells rounding on your flesh with every brush of air. Resist scratching.

Fishing rod digs into your shoulder, tackle box swings at your side, knife presses against your hip. The water calls ahead, time to work.

Hidden beyond the trees, the river widens before you – a muddy artery of the planet flowing from a failing heart.

It’s larger than you thought— again, behind you.

More pitter-pattering scrapes in hazing day. Jolt around. Scan. Ignore the bites. Nothing there but footprints in the mud. Yours? Most matched, some seemed small, misshapen. Had someone come before? Were they still here?

Doesn’t matter. The ultimate prize is at hand. That legendary catch (only to be claimed by the most intrepid) is in the deep, you can feel it.

This is it, this journey – a lifetime – carried you to this moment.

Will you step in the water?

(Choose an option. Follow instructions.)

“Yes.” – Read the next paragraph

“No.” – Read the last paragraph

“Ending – 人喰いのミーバイ”

The water is colder than it looked. Sloshing becomes wading, ankles, knees, waist in as the flow of the current sneaks faster around.

Time to cast. With a skilled flick, the reel cranks, line disappearing on the surface. Not long later, you feel a light tug, then a harder one. Soon your back strains to pull against it.

One slip is too many. You don’t know how, but you’re face down in the water, sealed in your clothes, thrashing, unable to let go of the rod with locked hands. Your stinging eyes wash open as a shadow slices the murk, darting up. It’s the last thing you see.

Life becomes legend.

“Ending – Footprints”

You’ve lost your nerve. Suddenly this sojourn feels stupid. Turn back, leave the forest to exhale, return to the life you left so quickly. The trees watch as you turn away. Silent judgment. Something swishes behind you – a soft scuttle, too light to be a person, too deliberate to be nothing. You don’t look back.

Years pass. The shade of what might have been clings like sweat in summer.

'If only,' 'In Okinawa,' 'I was there'—each phrase too bitter to pronounce. The forest kept something that day. You’ll never get it back.

You live in pieces. Your body lives on, but your spirit remains in that river.

Regret becomes ruin.