Neon Taiyaki Portal

The taiyaki was staring at me.

Not in the way food usually stares, which is to say, not at all. This one had a single black sesame seed for an eye, and that eye tracked me as I reached across the counter for the tongs. I pulled my hand back. The fish sat on its wire rack, crisp and golden, steam curling off its tail like it had just been swimming somewhere hot.

"You gonna buy it or marry it?" Old Man Watanabe asked from behind the register. He didn't look up from his newspaper.

"I'm deciding."

"Decide faster. That batch is the last one tonight."

The stall was wedged between a laundromat and a shuttered pachinko parlor, six feet of counter space and a griddle that had been seasoned longer than I'd been alive. Watanabe had run it since before the neighborhood had a name anyone bothered to use. I came here most nights after my shift at the convenience store, not because the taiyaki was good (it was) but because the walk home from here took me past the river, and the river at midnight was the only thing in this city that didn't ask anything of me.

I picked up the fish. It was warm. Normal warm. Food warm. I was being ridiculous.

Then it twitched.

Not a muscle spasm, not the settling of hot batter. It twitched the way a sleeping cat twitches, a full-body shudder that ran from the tail to the nose, and the sesame-seed eye blinked.

I dropped it.

The taiyaki hit the counter, flipped once, and landed on its belly. For a second nothing happened. Watanabe turned a page. A scooter whined past on the main road. Then the fish righted itself on its stubby fins, waddled to the edge of the counter, and jumped.

It hit the pavement and kept going.

"Hey," I said. "Hey!"

Watanabe looked up. "What?"

I was already moving. The taiyaki was fast for something made of flour and red bean paste. It hopped down the sidewalk in little arcs, tail flicking, dodging a bicycle and a stack of crates outside the noodle shop. I ran after it with my bag bouncing off my hip and one shoe half off because I hadn't tied the laces right when I left work.

Behind me Watanabe shouted something about paying, but I was already around the corner.

The street narrowed. This was the old part of town, the part the city kept forgetting to renovate. Power lines sagged overhead in thick black tangles. Vending machines glowed against shuttered storefronts, the only light for a hundred meters. The taiyaki hopped past a machine selling hot corn soup, past a poster for a band that had broken up years ago, past a cat that watched it go without moving anything but its eyes.

I almost caught it at the crosswalk. My fingers brushed its tail, and it was still warm, still impossibly warm, as if the griddle heat had nowhere to go. Then the wind came.

It came from nowhere, the way wind does in cities, funneled between buildings until it turns into something with intent. It caught the taiyaki mid-hop and lifted it off the ground. The fish spun once, twice, and sailed into the mouth of an alley I'd never noticed before.

I stood at the entrance, breathing hard.

The alley was dark. Not the ordinary dark of a street at night, but a thick, pressed dark, the kind that seems to have weight. I could see maybe three meters in. Beyond that, nothing. No dumpsters, no back doors, no graffiti. Just black.

Every sensible part of me said to go home. I had work in the morning. I had a landlord who wanted the rent by Thursday. I had a life made of small, manageable pieces, and none of those pieces involved chasing a pastry into a void.

I went in anyway.

The dark lasted about ten steps. Then it opened.

I don't have better words for it. The alley simply stopped being an alley. The walls fell away, and the ground kept going, and ahead of me, hanging in the air like a heat shimmer, was a doorway of light. Not a door. A doorway. An opening shaped like a door but made of nothing solid, edges rippling, colors moving through it the way oil moves on water. Blue. Pink. A green I'd only ever seen in the sky once, on a trip to the mountains when I was small.

The taiyaki sat on the ground in front of it, perfectly still.

I crouched down. Up close I could see the griddle marks on its skin, the little imperfections where the batter had bubbled. It looked like food again. It looked like something I could eat and forget.

Then it turned around.

I know how that sounds. A fish made of batter turned around. But it did. It pivoted on its fins, slow and deliberate, and looked at me with that one sesame-seed eye, and there was nothing in the world that could have convinced me it wasn't waiting. Not scared. Not running anymore. Waiting.

The light from the doorway moved across its golden skin, and for a moment the taiyaki looked like it was glowing from the inside.

"Okay," I said out loud. My voice sounded thin in that place. "Okay."

It hopped through the doorway and was gone.

I stayed crouched there for a long time. Long enough that my knees started to ache. Long enough that I noticed the alley behind me had gone quiet, no traffic, no scooters, no distant trains. The city had stopped making noise. Or I had stopped hearing it.

I thought about my apartment. The futon I hadn't folded. The dishes in the sink. The half-finished crossword on the table, the one I did every night because it was the only thing that made the hours between midnight and sleep feel like they belonged to me.

I thought about how I hadn't told anyone where I was going. How no one would notice for a while. How that fact had stopped bothering me a long time ago, and how that, more than anything, was the reason my feet were already moving.

I stood up.

The doorway breathed. Colors rolled through it, slow and patient. Somewhere on the other side, I could hear something. Not music exactly. A hum, low and steady, like a city heard through water.

I thought of my mother, who used to tell me that curiosity was a door you could only walk through once. She'd meant it as a warning. I'd always heard it as an invitation.

I smiled. I couldn't help it. It was the first real smile I'd felt in weeks, the kind that starts somewhere behind your ribs and pushes up through your face before you can stop it.

I took a breath. Held it. Let it go.

And I stepped through.

The light swallowed me whole. For a moment there was no up or down, no before or after. Just warmth, and movement, and the strange sensation of being carried, like a leaf on a current, like a fish in a river, like something small and golden flipping end over end through the dark.

Then the ground came back under my feet.

I opened my eyes.

Neon. Everywhere. Signs stacked on signs, kanji and katakana I half-recognized, colors bleeding into each other until the whole street looked like it had been painted by someone who'd never seen a sunset and was working from rumor. The air smelled like rain and fried oil and something sweet I couldn't place. People moved past me in both directions, none of them looking at me, all of them dressed like they'd stepped out of a magazine I hadn't been printed yet.

And there, ten meters ahead, sitting on the curb like it owned the place, was the taiyaki.

It looked back at me. The sesame-seed eye blinked once.

Then the screen went black.

A voice, soft and close, like it was standing right behind me, said:

Bienvenida al otro lado.