Frost and Flame

Ghost in the Corridor

Sayaka could not sleep.

The silence in the resort room was not empty, but something alive and weighted—a vacuum filled with the sounds of the past echoing inside her skull.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Souta’s gaze in the dining room earlier: flat, filtered through layers of analysis and defense, like iced glass that blocked any possibility of entry.

She thought, with a sudden and stabbing bitterness, that she was more prepared to face open anger than this cold filtration.

Anger was something warm, something real, something that proved feelings were still there. This was merely absence—an absence more painful than rejection.

She turned over for the third time in the past hour, the stiff sheets hissing roughly in her ears like a different kind of wind. The real wind outside echoed in a strange and irregular rhythm, sometimes roaring low like a freight train passing in the distance, sometimes howling high and thin like the cry of a lost child.

Through the narrow gap between the thick burgundy curtains, the pale white light from the corridor’s emergency lamps seeped in, drawing faint, shifting lines across the dark wooden floor, like signals from another world.

Finally, at 2:47 a.m. (she checked the dim clock on her phone), she gave up.

Carefully, like a thief in her own home, she lifted herself from the bed, draping her body in the thick wool blanket she took from the closet. The air in the room felt sharp in her lungs, startling after the warmth of the bed.

She opened the door with minimal sound—a soft click, a smooth slide—and the resort corridor stretched out before her.

It was a long tunnel lit by small LED lights embedded in the floor, casting a pale blue glow that guided like runway lights on a dark airstrip.

The dark wooden walls absorbed most of the light, creating pockets of shadow between each lamp.

At the far end, about twenty meters away, a large panoramic window reflected her distorted image—a faint ghost with disheveled hair and a blanket wrapped like a cloak.

She only intended to get a glass of water from the dispenser at the end of the corridor. But as soon as her foot stepped onto the thick, dark red carpet that swallowed sound, the space seemed to change dimensions.

“This corridor was no longer a functional passage between the neighboring rooms and the shared bathroom.” It became a theater for everything unspoken, an empty stage where every shadow could become a memory, every sound an echo of the past.

And there, only ten meters ahead of her, standing before the panoramic window reflecting the storm, was a silhouette.

Sayaka’s heart pounded—not from fear, but from immediate recognition.

She recognized the posture even from behind: shoulders slightly hunched forward like someone constantly bracing against wind, head tilted down as if observing something invisible on the ground, feet set hip-width apart for balance.

Souta.

He wore a thick gray sweater and dark sweatpants, and looked like part of the night landscape itself, a statue erected to commemorate solitude or waiting.

She froze, unsure whether to move forward or back, whether to acknowledge his presence or pretend not to see. But her body was already moving before a decision formed, drawn by a familiar and painful gravity—the pull of shared history, of a body she had once known better than her own.

She walked slowly, the sound of her footsteps fully absorbed by the carpet. She hoped—with a small, selfish hope—that he would not hear her coming.

But when she was about three meters from him, close enough to see how his usually neat hair was now disheveled behind his ears, Souta spoke without turning around. His voice was hoarse, held back by the night’s silence and something else.

“Can’t sleep?”

Sayaka stopped at the exact distance for conversation, but too far for touch. “Water,” she said, and her own voice sounded foreign in her ears, like rust amid this polluted silence.

“I’m thirsty.”

Souta nodded, still looking out the window, into the swirling white. “The storm is strengthening. Air pressure dropped sharply over the past two hours. It’ll last all night, maybe until tomorrow afternoon.”

That was Souta’s other voice—the voice of the weather observer, the voice of the man who hid behind data and predictions, the voice he used when the emotional world became too complex.

Sayaka stepped a little closer, standing beside him, but keeping enough distance for a small island, an invisible buffer zone of air.

Outside, the world had vanished completely. No trees, no buildings, no horizon. Only white swirling in darkness, a curtain endlessly drawn across the glass, erasing everything familiar.

“You could always tell,” Sayaka said, unable to stop herself, the words slipping out like trapped breath. “Changes in the weather. Even small ones.”

Souta was silent for a moment, as if processing the statement not as an observation but as a question. “It’s my job.”

“Not only that.” The words came out before she could stop them, louder than she intended, breaking the corridor’s quiet. “Before… you always knew when my head would ache before I realized it myself. Before a storm came. You’d say, ‘The air feels heavy today,’ and a few hours later, I’d feel pressure in my temples.”

The silence that followed was heavier than before, denser than the snow outside. Sayaka could feel her own heartbeat in her throat, a rapid rhythm at odds with the slowness of the night. She looked at their reflections in the window—two blurred shadow-figures, separated by a thin black chasm that was the reflection of the corridor behind them. Like a photographic negative of a memory, an image of what could have happened but did not.

And then, this quiet corridor, with its ghostly blue light and sound-swallowing red carpet, sent its real ghost—not a supernatural one, but a ghost of time, a ghost from the life they once lived.

—

Twelve Years Ago

They moved into their first apartment in Sendai in July, in the middle of humid summer air that clung like a wet cloth to the skin. Cardboard boxes—mostly filled with Souta’s books and Sayaka’s cooking equipment—were still scattered across the thin, cheap laminated wooden floor, creating narrow labyrinths in the six-tatami room that felt smaller with every stacked box. Sayaka, her hair tied haphazardly with a pencil and wearing a T-shirt smeared with sweat and dust, sat amid the chaos, staring at the piles of meteorology books and cheap kitchenware with a dizzying sense of overwhelm.

“This is crazy,” she muttered to the humid air, but there was a wide smile at the edge of her cracked lips. “We really did it. We’re living together.”

Souta, from behind a stack of boxes in the corner meant to be the “work area,” snorted. He was struggling to assemble a cheap bookshelf whose instructions were only in Mandarin, with diagrams that looked like abstract art. “It looked easier in the brochure,” he complained, but his eyes—usually serious and focused—sparkled with a light that rarely appeared. “This screw doesn’t fit this hole.”

That night, after futile attempts to arrange everything into something resembling a home, they gave up at eleven. They rolled a thin futon mattress into the center of the room, directly beneath a ceiling fan that spun lazily and creaked with each rotation. They lay on their backs, shoulders and hips touching, staring at the spinning fan and mapping invisible wind patterns in the stifling air.

“You know,” Souta said, his voice trembling with exhaustion and something like happiness, “the corridor in this building is strange. Long and dark. There’s only one light in the middle that flickers. I almost got lost earlier looking for the recycling area.”

Sayaka chuckled softly, her voice hoarse from dust and fatigue, tilting her head toward him so her cheek brushed Souta’s T-shirt-clad shoulder. “We’ll get used to it. In a week, we’ll be able to walk through it with our eyes closed.” She paused. “Tomorrow, we’ll paint the walls. What color?”

“White,” Souta answered immediately, without hesitation. “To make it look more spacious. Brighter. Maximum light efficiency.”

“Boring,” Sayaka objected, gently pinching his upper arm. “And cold.”

“Practical,” he replied, catching her hand and threading their fingers together between their bodies. “And we can add color with furniture.”

They argued softly, without real energy behind the words, their debate blending with the creak of the fan and the sound of nighttime traffic from the street below. As the night grew deeper and the air became slightly cooler (or perhaps they simply grew accustomed to it), Souta rolled onto his side, propping himself on his elbow, and looked at her. His face was only a few centimeters from hers, his brown eyes serious in the dim light from the streetlamp outside the curtainless window.

“I’m happy we’re here,” he said, simply and honestly, like a statement of fact, but its meaning ran deeper than that.

Sayaka reached for his other hand, weaving all their fingers together now, a tangle that felt like a bond. His skin was warm and slightly rough from handling boxes and tools all day. “Me too.” She paused, swallowing something that felt like fear mixed with joy. “Sometimes I’m scared.”

Souta frowned, his thick eyebrows meeting in the middle. “Scared of what?”

“That someday, years from now, we’ll wake up in a place like this—in a room we call home—but… We’ll be strangers. That we’ll stand in the same corridor, the same rooms, and not know how to reach each other’s rooms. That we’ll forget the language we’re using tonight.”

Souta looked at her for a long time, his eyes scanning her face as if searching for data in her expression. Then, without releasing their joined hands, he brought them to his lips, kissing her knuckles gently, one by one, with a seriousness that made Sayaka’s heart stop for a moment.

“That won’t happen,” he whispered against her skin, his breath warm on her fingers. “Because I’ll always recognize you. I’ll recognize you even in total darkness. I’ll recognize the sound of your breathing, the rhythm of your steps, the way you go still when you’re thinking. You are the pressure system I understand best.”

They fell asleep like that, hands still tightly clasped, amid unopened boxes and promises still fresh. The corridor outside their apartment was dark and quiet, its light still flickering, but inside that room, among the piles of belongings and two bodies fitted to each other, there was a warm, new, and temporary light—the light of something beginning.