Momentary Lily

Episode 6

The storm left the streets of Boston barren of life and practically bereft of light. Stumbling down Boylston Street, Sarah took one step at a time, shielding her eyes from the frigid wind with one arm while desperately clinging to her bulky leather satchel with the other. It had been just past eleven o'clock when she closed up shop at The Blue Rose Café, and that was all the way up on north Tremont. Sloughing through three blocks of shin-deep slush, trying to blindly feel her way down the narrow sidewalks of the city's old walkways, Sarah had never felt more like a pathetic west-coast interloper. It took what felt like hours, even though she knew that the walk from The Blue Rose to the dorms at The Colonial was only fifteen minutes on an especially crowded day, but eventually, she finally found herself standing below the strangely comforting gaze of the Colonial's dozens of dormitory windows. There were a scant few lights still managing to break through the veil of blowing snow, giving the old building the impression of a haggard, dozing giant. She affectionately patted The Colonial's cracked stone façade and made her way inside.

It was when she finally kicked the last of the filthy ice off of her shoes and made her way into the cramped little elevator that Sarah's phone rang. She didn't actually have to check her caller ID to know who it was – there was only one person who would be trying to call her at this ungodly hour these days – but Sarah glanced down out of habit to confirm that, yes, the word “DADDY” was right there above the clock on her lock screen. The second “D” in the name had been replaced by the emoji of the winking ghost with its tongue sticking out. It was the third or fourth time that Saturday that her father had reached out to her, and for the third or fourth time, Sarah rolled her eyes and crammed the phone back into the satchel to let it go to voicemail. It has been a long enough day already. She had no need to put up with another one of her father's bouts of sad, clinging loneliness. Maybe, if the stars aligned just right, she would feel up to calling him back on her own terms tomorrow.

The moment the phone finished buzzing in her bag, the elevator lurched to a sudden, almost violent stop. Sarah had to slam her palms against the door to keep from getting knocked over. The lights flickered in random spasms for a few seconds before fully crackling out, leaving Sarah in complete darkness. She could feel her heart fluttering in her chest as her lungs began to tighten up. It had been years since she'd last had any kind of major claustrophobic attack, but the old fears always died the hardest, and it wasn't long before Sarah began to sense that old familiar knot beginning to twist around in her stomach. She took sharp, concentrated breaths in a rapid but measured pace to try and calm herself down. In, and then out. In, and then out. Her left fist was already beginning to clench tight, so she tried one of the old tricks her dad taught her back when the night terrors were at their worst, forcing each of her fingers to slowly open and close one at a time, counting the seconds with each curl and unfurl. One, and then two. Then three, and then four, and finally—

There was the press of a hand against the small of Sarah's back, causing Sarah to twist violently to greet nothing but the elevator's darkness. Then, a voice rose up from behind her, a sharp whisper so close to her ear that Sarah could practically feel the speaker's breath against her still frigid flesh.

”Kappou!”

Sarah cried out and whipped back around, reaching for her phone again in a panic to activate the camera light and illuminate the darkness. She saw nothing as she cast the glow against the shadows, of course. This elevator was only big enough to fit maybe four or five people comfortably, and Sarah was the only soul aboard. There was a croaking sound of whirring metal from underneath her; the elevator lights sprang back to life, and suddenly, she was moving again. The digital counter on the control panel moved from 3 to 4 and then to 5 before the elevator came to a stop, and the doors slid open.

Stepping out into the hallway, Sarah allowed herself a moment to collect her breath and steady herself. Barely three minutes had passed since she had come into the building from the storm and pressed the button to climb up to the fifth floor. Why did it feel like another hour had passed instead? Sarah glanced down at her phone one last time. That ID was still there – “DADDY,” with the little cartoon ghost stuck right in the middle — with the words “FOUR MISSED CALLS” glaring at her in bold underneath. She was only tempted to hit the green phone icon at the bottom of the screen for a moment before she scoffed and once more banished her phone to the darkest corner of that beaten-up old satchel. She was mad enough at him already. That she might give him an occasion to use his “I told you so” voice on her so soon after their blowout was beyond unacceptable. She was just exhausted from a long day being underpaid to sling coffee to the handful of ungrateful film students whose caffeine addictions superseded their survival instincts. Satisfied enough to shake off the fading memory of whatever she thought she had heard in the elevator, Sarah dug her keys out of her bag and retreated to the safety of Room 512 at last.

* * *

The dorm was nearly as dark as it was outside. The only illumination came from the dim glow of the small TV that her roommate, Cleo, kept on top of the game console that was the centerpiece of the cluttered stand at the foot of her bed. As her eyes adjusted, Sarah could see that Cleo was indeed bundled up there in the bed, her eyes fixed on her television screen. Whatever Cleo was watching must have been exceptionally good because she didn't even blink when Sarah finally found the wall switch and flicked it on, bathing the room in much-needed light. Even when she kicked off her dirty shoes, tossed down her satchel, and collapsed dramatically onto her own bed, Cleo didn't so much as glance in her direction. She just watched the screen. Sarah peeked at whatever this new show was and saw that it was one of those Japanese anime that Cleo loved so much. Sarah had been a fan of Pokémon back when she was a kid, but she started losing track of the popular cartoons once she discovered her passion for horror movies and old TV shows like The X-Files. Cleo, though, was a certified nerd for all things Japan, so Sarah wasn't exactly surprised to see her friend burning the midnight oil on some cheesy cartoon about big-boobed girls splashing around a pool.

“I take it you didn't end up making it to the protests, then?” Sarah asked though she got no response. Cleo just kept staring at that cartoon. Her eyes were glassy, almost vacant, as if she'd somehow turned on her console and started watching stuff in her sleep. Sarah had to snap her fingers five times right in front of Cleo's nose just to snap her out of her stupor.

“Jesus!” Cleo yelped. “Holy hell, Sarah, you scared the piss out of me. What are you doing back so early? Did the Rose shut down because of the weather?”

“Um,” Sarah said, “It's almost midnight, Cleo. I only just got back from trudging through all of that snow.”

Cleo's eyes widened, and she regarded her TV screen again. Sarah was not shocked to see that the show was still frantically cutting back and forth between extreme close-ups of insanely bouncing breasts. Cleo was, if nothing else, a proud and shameless nerd.

“Christ,” Cleo muttered, “There's no way I could have been watching for…fucking hell…”

“So much for sticking it to Musk in DC, then, huh?” Sarah said this with a laugh, but she was genuinely concerned. All yesterday and even early this morning, Cleo had been fired up about taking the train down to DC and joining up in the rallies at the Capitol. Sarah had wanted to go herself, but the Blue Rose had been understaffed for weeks, and Sarah couldn't afford to pass up a chance at paid overtime. The plan had been to stay protesting all weekend until classes picked back up on Sunday, though, which clearly is not how things panned out.

“Shit, Sarah, I was totally going to go, but then…” Cleo looked like she was still trying to stir herself awake. “The package!” She cried out suddenly, jumping up from the bed and sending an entire afternoon of half-eaten snacks tumbling to the floor. After digging through the trash bin for a minute, Cleo marched back over to Sarah, waving a torn-up brown envelope in her face. “This thing,” Cleo said, “Got taped to our freaking door this morning after you left.” Sarah took the envelope and studied it, though there wasn't much to actually glean from the thing. It simply read “SARAH DOWNING” in all-capital letters. Curiously, Sarah thought she almost recognized the handwriting, though she couldn't quite place where from. Cleo went on: “There's no address, no stamp, no sender. Nothing but your name scribbled on a sketchy-ass envelope. It's Unabomber shit, I'm telling you.”

“So, naturally, you opened it?” Sarah asked.

“Yes!” Cleo said, “Obviously! What if one of your fans at the Rose sent you creepy pictures of his weird genitals? It's my job to protect you from that!”

“Okay, sure…” Sarah said, “But what if it was, like, something really personal and private?” Cleo shrugged, plucked the envelope from Sarah's hands, and tossed it unceremoniously to the ground.

“Then I probably would have sealed it back up and pretended I never learned any of the juicy gossip about that life back home that you absolutely refuse to talk about. Besides, it wasn't anything private. It was, well…"

Cleo trailed off as her eyes once again were drawn back to the seemingly infinite montage of impossibly proportioned anime girls and their physics-defying bosoms.

“Somebody tried to give me…an anime?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah,” Cleo said. “Weird, right? One of your Blue Rose regulars must be a very awkward little weeb, if this is their idea of an alluring gift. Not that I'm one to talk…”

Cleo trailed off again, her voice sounding more airy and unfastened to the world with every syllable. Sarah suddenly felt that pang of anxiety in her gut again, though she couldn't fathom why. Even if she did have some weirdo from the school who had strange ideas of what a romantic gesture was, it was just some cringey anime. And yet, here Cleo was, unable to look away from it…

“What even is this show, anyways?”

Sarah asked, leaning forward from her spot on the bed to get a closer look. “It must be pretty, um, exciting if it kept you from telling off Elon Musk with Sam and Brady?”

“Yeah, but that's the thing,” Cleo said, her eyes still glued to whatever the hell was happening on screen. “This show sucks ass, Sarah. To an unbelievable degree. It's one of the worst goddamned things I've ever seen!” Sarah cocked an eyebrow at the parade of jiggling flesh on display.

“Wow, no kidding, huh? And here I thought you were all about those steamy hentai shows…”

Without looking back, Cleo grabbed a stray kernel of popcorn from the folds of her bedspread and shot it back at Sarah's head. “Sarah, I am not even going to waste my time distinguishing between hentai and ecchi right now, though if you are making a dig at Bakemonogatari, I am honor-bound to remind you for the hundredth time that it is not pornography. It's just very trashy and problematic art.”

“Right, of course,” Sarah said. On the screen, one of the anime girls was bent down on all fours, with the camera gliding down her body from her boobs to her but in reverse and at such an uncomfortably intimate angle that Sarah was genuinely shocked that the shot didn't end with the audience staring straight into the poor girl's large intestine. “So, if that other anime is art, then this one is…what, exactly?”

“Like I said,” Cleo continued, “It's hot trash. I don't even want you to speak the name of Monogatari in the same breath as this…thing.”

“Okay, but what is it, then, Cleo? Don't act all weird and cryptic about the show that someone apparently sent me.” At this, Cleo paused the show for once and actually looked back to look Sarah in the eyes, but Sarah didn't like what she saw. Cleo was trying her best to wear the usual snarky smile, but there was something there, in her eyes that just made that knot in Sarah's stomach twist tighter. Cleo hesitated to speak.

“It's called…Momentary Lily,” Cleo said. “I've never heard of it before. The DVDs that came in that envelope were the blank ones that you have to burn stuff onto. There weren't any labels on them, either.” Cleo went on to try and explain the gist of what she had seen in the five episodes she had watched before Sarah came home, though none of it made much sense to Sarah. It apparently took place in some ruined, post-apocalyptic world, where these girls with magic powers had to fight monsters known as the Wild Hunt…except apparently, the girls barely did any fighting, and none of them ever acted like traumatized survivors of a world-ending catastrophe. “They mostly just waste time yammering on about food and bullshit small talk,” Cleo said, “And sometimes they cook stuff, I guess. The show keeps trying to pretend that the girls actually have personalities and are even, like, gay for each other, I guess? It's the most pandering, stupid form of ‘representation’ that I've seen in a long time, though. Like, you just know that these vaguely ‘queer’ teen girls are being written by almost-certainly straight dudes who have no idea what the hell they're talking about, and it's only because they know they can get more money from fanboys if they make it seem like the hot anime dolls might kiss, or whatever.”

Sarah could not believe that this latest episode still somehow featured nothing on screen but the disturbingly detailed butt-cheeks of supposedly underage girls. One of them kept jumping up and down to force her breasts to aggressively undulate in opposing circular motions, which was genuinely disturbing to see happen over and over with such casual abandon. “So you're telling me that for five straight episodes, it's just been…this?

Cleo laughed. “Would you believe me if I told you that this is actually even worse than before? At first, the show at least had a couple of shitty monster fights and some character death stuff that made it seem like there was a story going on. This sixth episode though…I mean, shit, you can see it for yourself. I've seen actual hentai that had more respect for its characters than this. These girls don't even exist, and I still feel like they're being exploited…

Sarah didn't even have any words to describe what she was looking at. It wasn't the frankly ridiculous obsession with supple, bikini-clad flesh that disturbed her so much at this point. As sad as it was, Sarah was used to this kind of bullshit. She was a fan of old horror cinema, after all, and you had to be willing to put up with a certain standard level of male-gazey grossness to stay sane in that fandom. No, what was starting to hurt Sarah's head the more she looked at this thing went beyond the content of it. “Does every episode look this…God, how do I even put it…”

“Psychotic?” Cleo finished. “With the lens flares, and the freaky-looking backgrounds, and all that?”

“Yes! And all of the random camera movements and angles that make you want to vomit?” Cleo gave Sarah a grim nod of affirmation.

“Every episode I've seen, yes. This funny thing is that this swimsuit episode is the first time that all of the whacked-out camera shit seems like it might have a point, but the point seems to be making whoever is watching the show feel like a peeping tom that snuck into a high-school locker room. Pick your poison, I guess…” Cleo turned back in a kind of daze, and Sarah joined her friend in watching the insane nonsense continue to play out.

“There's supposed to be some mystery about whether or not the girls can trust if their online ‘friends’ are human or not,” Cleo continued, “but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see that Momentary Lily clearly does not give a fuck about any of that. Which, fine, whatever, but what are we supposed to do when the fanservice is also unhinged and terrifying to look at?” Sarah had never been a fan of “hate-watching” stuff. Still, there was something that she had to admit was a bit mesmerizing about this Momentary Lily show. They sat together, enraptured, until the episode arrived at a scene where all of the girls stood together in their hideously frumpy aprons and shouted a single word in unison:

”Kappou!”

A jolt of recognition crawled up Sarah's spine. She stood, smashed the button on the game console until the DVD popped out of the tray, and flung it into the trash bin with enough force to crack it cleanly in two. She did the same with the other blank discs on Cleo's bed, and she covered the shards of plastic with torn up shreds of the envelope they'd arrived in.

“Dude, be careful with my Xbox!” Cleo said, though Sarah felt vindicated to see that her friend was the most lucid-seeming that she'd been since Sarah first stepped through the door.

“Your box is fine,” Sarah said, falling back onto her own bed. “And it was my creepy stalker-gift, right? I get to do whatever I want with it, and I'm unfortunately not interested in watching a bunch of half-naked anime schoolgirls cook me a poolside barbecue while they scream nonsense at each other.”

“Well, when you're right…” Cleo muttered.

“It's past midnight, Cleo,” Sarah said, curling up into her blanket without even bothering to change out of her clothes. “You can watch all of your good pervy Japan shows all you want tomorrow while we're snowed in. Can we just go to bed, please?” Cleo didn't respond, which bothered Sarah, but the lights turned off soon enough, and it wasn't long after that Cleo tumbled onto her mattress and began to snore. This was enough for Sarah to at least close her eyes and sleep.

Her last thought before drifting off was, 'What a stupid show. Whoever sent me that crap is going to get a piece of my mind if I ever find them out…'

* * *

It was the buzzing cellphone that woke Sarah up. She groggily fell out of bed to dig through her bag, and she was furious to see that damned “DADDY” ID flashing on her lock screen in blaring white letters. The phone's clock read 03: 03 AM. She spat out a bitter, “You've got to be fucking joking, Dad,” before smashing the “Accept Call” button hard enough to hurt her thumb. “What, Dad? What do you want? Do you have any idea what time it is here?” There was nothing but crackling static on the other end.

Then, faintly, almost imperceptibly: “…ppo…Ka…!...pp…ou…” Sarah tossed the phone to the ground, disgusted that her dad's drunken attempts at apologies could get so out of hand. There was a time, not too long ago, where the very thought of admitting that her mother might actually have been right about him would have been utterly inconceivable, but now…

The phone rang again. Again, Sarah grabbed it, yelling into the receiver, “Leave me alone, Dad! I asked you to give me some space, not whatever the hell you're trying to do right now!” This time, the voice on the other end was more clear, and it was definitely her father's.

“Did you….?” he said.

“What?”

“Did you…get…did you…?”

Sarah took a deep breath. It was everything she could do to keep from bursting into tears. “Do. Not. Call. Me. Again.” This time, Sarah flung the phone across the small dormitory hard enough that she heard the screen crack. Muttering curses under her breath, she flicked on her bedside lamp and crawled over to it to inspect the damage. Yeah, she'd busted it. The screen was cracked to pieces, and it didn't respond at all when she tried turning it back on. Now, there wasn't any holding back. She started sobbing right there, in the middle of the floor, cradling her crappy old iPhone like it was the injured baby bird she'd found in her backyard once back when she was just a girl.

“God, Cleo,” she said in between sobs, “I'm sorry. I can't believe he has me acting like such a brat…” Cleo didn't respond. Looking up for the first time since she woke, Sarah saw that Cleo wasn't even in the dorm anymore. Glancing around, there was no sign of Cleo anywhere, though Sarah couldn't help but notice that the garbage bin had been tipped over and spilled out. When she stood to inspect further, she saw that the envelope and the broken DVD pieces were gone. Cleo must have dug them out of the trash, but why?

The dorm door was open, just a crack. Stepping outside, the hall was completely dark, and Sarah could hear none of the telltale signs of life that you could usually make out in a college dormitory, even in the dead of night. Holding up her broken phone to turn on her flashlight only reminded Sarah of her stupid tantrum, which left her stuck peeking down the dark corners of the hallway to hunt for signs of her friend. To the left, the communal bathroom a few doors down was dark, and unoccupied. There were no friends on this floor that Sarah could imagine Cleo sneaking off to visit, and there weren't any signs of life in the strangers' dorms besides.

It wasn't until Sarah looked across to the other end of the fifth-floor hall that she caught sight of it. The elevator doors were stuck half-open, with a strange red light spilling out from inside. Just in front of the doors, Sarah caught sight of the person collapsed on the floor, and she knew it was Cleo the moment she began running towards her. Her friend was splayed out in a catatonic daze, staring listlessly at the ceiling while her palms stretched out to reach each hallway wall. Sarah cradled Cleo's head in her arms, gently patting her cheeks to shake her awake, but it was no use. A foam of spittle was spilling out from Cleo's lips as she murmured incoherently. Cleo's hoodie was smeared with blood, which must have come from the dozens of oozing gashes that had been cut across Cleo's palms.

It wasn't hard to figure out what had made those cuts, either, when she turned her head to peer inside the elevator. The jagged shards of the DVDs had been split into dozens of smaller pieces, each of them shimmering red with her friend's bright blood. The elevator lights reflected off the shards and filled the hall's entrance with macabre light. The pieces had been neatly placed in patterns to form letters. A word. Sarah only had to make out the bright, glistening “K” to know what they spelled out.

That damned buzzing sound sprang up again. It was Sarah's phone, rattling violently on the floor where she'd dropped it next to Cleo. It said “DADDY” on the front screen. This was impossible, of course, but the impossibility didn't stop the phone from ringing. Still holding Cleo in her arms, Sarah reached out to pick up the phone one last time.

“…Daddy?” Sarah said. “Is that you?”

“Sweetheart!” Thomas Downing said. “Did you get the gift we sent you?”

Rating:

---

Momentary Lily is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.