Momentary Lily

Episode 7

Note: This one gets a little bloody. Reader discretion is advised!

Sarah Downing had been watching Momentary Lily on repeat all week. Ever since Cleo had been taken to Mass General for treatment after the incident in the dormitory, it was all she could do to keep from breaking down completely. She didn't want to watch the godforsaken cartoon; it was fucking horrible in every conceivable way, just like her friend had told her before everything went to shit. Still, watching Momentary Lily was just about the only thing Sarah could even pretend was under her ability to control, at the moment. Cleo was still completely shut down, and Sarah never even entertained the thought of trying to tell the police what happened the night her father's “gift” arrived in the mail. The cops were all too happy to shrug Cleo off as yet another queer girl with tendencies towards self-harm and substance abuse and leave her for the overworked and understaffed doctors at Mass General to deal with.

The doctors couldn't find any substances stronger than THC in Cleo's system, of course, and they still couldn't explain why the girl could only mutter the word “Kappou!” under her breath after seven straight days of treatment. They wouldn't ever figure out why, too, because they were looking for answers in the realm of brain chemistry and modern medical science. They were relying on reason to save Cleo's mind when Sarah knew full well that it was Cleo's soul that was at stake. Their enemy had no patience for something so feeble as “reason”, and neither could Sarah. So, she watched every episode of Momentary Lily over and over again, studying each garish frame and eye-searing background like a coroner might pluck apart the flesh and the bones of some mangled corpse.

The visions came in short, violent bursts. Sometimes, while scanning the frames of some scene from the show in the back of a lecture hall, Sarah would look up to see them sitting there and staring back at her from a few rows ahead. Those giant, horrifying eyes would gleam from their doll-like skulls while their kinetic strands of DayGlo hair would flail like Gorgon's snakes. They would smile and wave at Sarah, never blinking, and never saying anything other than their goddamned little catchphrase. Other times, they would visit her one by one, giving what she could only describe as macabre performances that only Sarah could see. Once, while trying to find some peace in the corner of the dining center, the green one with the headphones stood up and began slamming that little handheld gaming device into its own mouth with such force that it eventually caved into its skull. Then, there was the time that the pink one in pigtails kicked open the doors of Sarah's History of Photography class and stood right in front of the professor's projector screen so that Sarah could get the perfect view of the thing tearing off the skin of its face gnawing on the scraps of its own flesh-jerky while it used the leftovers as makeshift brushes to paint emoticons and other doodles all over the professor's slideshow.

It had been a very long week. Sarah knew that continuing to watch the damned show was probably only making things worse, but what else was she supposed to do? Should she sit and wait for more calls from her father? Even thinking about what those ghouls had done to him was enough to make Sarah want to throw up from anxiety. At least she might learn something if she figured out just what the hell this Momentary Lily thing was all about. She would watch the first six episodes again and again, even if it meant sleepless night after sleepless night, countless wasted class periods, or sneaking an increasingly suspicious number of bathroom breaks during her shifts at the Blue Rose. If that's what it took to save Cleo and her father, so be it.

During one of those shifts at the Blue Rose, Sarah saw that Episode 7 was uploaded to that Crunchyroll website. Normally, this would have been Sarah's cue to take advantage of the endless font of patience and goodwill that was her manager, Tess, and excuse herself for yet another extended trip to the storeroom. Tess, however, had been forced to leave early on account of some drama at her son's daycare, and the winter storm pummeling Boston all week left the Rose empty enough for Tess to trust the place to Sarah and her suspiciously weak bladder. A week ago, Sarah would have never dreamed of being the kind of cringey Gen Z cliche that ignored customers to stay glued to her phone all day. Then again, a week ago, her life had not been shattered by the psychotic haunting presence of a bunch of demons from the worst Japanese cartoon she'd ever seen. Desperate times, and all of that.

Sarah was just about to click that orange “Play” button on the video app when the chime of the doorbell signaled that she was no longer alone in The Blue Rose. Sarah slammed her phone to the counter and jumped to attention, half expecting this to be another visit from one of them, but no. Somehow, there was one person in this city who cared enough about getting their afternoon cup of coffee that he was willing to brave the bitter lashing of the sub-zero winds to get it. At the very least, the guy had normal, human eyes. His thick, black hair was long enough to give Sarah a second jolt of suspicion, but it moved like hair was supposed to move (though she was going to keep an eye on it, just in case).

Clearly, Sarah's attempt at passing as a woman who had gotten more than seven hours of sleep in as many days was starting to falter because the customer was giving her a look that was usually worn by people who had just stumbled across a sickly stray animal in some moldy back-alley box.

“Um,” he said. “I'm sorry, the place looked open from the outside. Should I go, or…?”

“No!” Sarah said, in a voice that was meant to sound cheerful, but almost certainly came across as manic, instead. “I mean, no, no sir, we're not closed, believe it or not. How can I help you?” The man smiled, unfastening the belt of his long black peacoat to shake off the snow he'd accumulated in his travels.

“You have no idea how happy I am to hear that,” he said. “I've been trudging through the snow and looking for a halfway decent cup of coffee for the past thirty minutes. I figured this part of town would have no shortage of choices, but Jack Frost had different plans for me...” The man began to scan the offerings on the Blue Rose's chalkboard menu.”

“I take it you're from out of town, then?” Sarah asked. The man laughed.

“Oh yes. I'm from way out West, in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. This is my first time in Boston.” Sarah did her best to smile more naturally and act like casual conversation was something that still came easily to her. It took a lot of effort to keep her eyes from wandering back to the door of the cafe, just in case some other visitor came creeping in behind this man.

“I'm not a native either,” Sarah said. “I grew up in California. So, about as far off from New England as you can get.”

“No kidding!” the man said, his eyes gleaming. “I spent my childhood in the Pacific Northwest before I headed down to cowboy country. Now, don't get me wrong, Massachusetts is lovely, but the West Coast will forever remain the Best Coast.”

Sarah found herself smiling a little at hearing that silly old slogan. Having a normal chat with a regular person would have been second nature to her just a week ago, and the gentle thrill of it was almost enough to distract her from that insidious brick of metal and glass lying just a couple of inches away from her.

“Finally, someone gets it!” Sarah chuckled. “So, what can I get for you, sir?”

“Well, damn, everything you've got looks so good,” the man said. “I feel like I should be trying something new in the spirit of adventure, you know? Then again, on a cold day like this…I might have to go with a caramel macchiato, with an extra shot of espresso, if you could. And maybe one of those lemon squares that you have right there.”

“Coming right up!” Sarah went about assembling the drink with practiced precision, and not even a week of continuous waking nightmares could prevent her from getting this customer's order out in just a couple of minutes. The man thanked her and took a seat to quietly enjoy his drink and his dessert. After a moment, Sarah could have almost forgotten he was even there. Tess still had yet to return from whatever crisis she was trying to manage with her kid, and nobody else came through the door, corporeal or otherwise. Soon, almost without realizing she was doing it, Sarah grabbed her phone and resumed studying whatever fresh new hell this cartoon had in store for her this week. She kept the volume off, of course, and the phone remained hidden enough from the customer's view that it hopefully just looked like she was busy filling out paperwork and cleaning the counter. Not only did this minimize the risk of exposing other people to this madness, but Sarah was fairly certain that muting the inane ramblings of the Momentary Lily girls were better for her long term health, too.

Besides, the episodes were always such an assault to the senses that even the briefest aural reprieve was something to cherish. To this episode's credit, however, the show wasn't as unwatchable as it had been in the past. The whole thing began with an extended battle with the Wild Hunt creatures that were supposed to be the big bad enemies of the whole show (even though Sarah still barely understood what they were supposed to be or how they worked, even seven episodes into the season). It wasn't a particularly good battle, based on what little sense Sarah had for how these things were supposed to look under more reasonable circumstances, but she could still follow most of what happened. The Wild Hunt creatures looked as ridiculous and unthreatening as ever, and all of the random colors and effects legitimately made her eyes hurt, an effect that was only more irritating given the exhaustion she was suffering after all of the obscene crap she'd had to put up with seeing when she wasn't watching the show. Still, compared to the first episode she watched the night after Cleo's…episode, this was at least vaguely tolerable by comparison.

Though, if Sarah had learned anything after binging the first half of Momentary Lily's season on repeat all week, it was that the most sinister elements of the show were not related to its grotesque visuals. Her passion for photography and visual storytelling had exposed her to enough bizarre and experimental artwork over the years that she felt like she might somehow be inoculated to the series' most harmful aesthetic, though the sheer senselessness of those choices was still enough to wound her psyche whenever she forced herself to get through another shlocky looking scene. What had really begun to make the experience of watching Momentary Lily almost unbearable was its story. As Sarah tried to follow the script's attempts to sell the seriousness of this Wild Hunt fight and establish just what in the hell was going on, the words in the subtitle track at the bottom of the screen kept blurring out and jumbling together. She kept hitting the button to jump back ten seconds over and over, trying to make sense of the basic direction of the plot, even though she knew it would hardly matter, in the end. The green girl in the headphones was trying to explain the mechanics of how she was going to use her elite computer powers to help create this big plan of attack, and the show was clearly trying to paint this entire battle as a big, dramatic win, but it all just amounted to vague gobbledygook. Despite their inherent meaninglessness, these were the parts of Momentary Lily that Sarah tried to study the most. The way that the show tried to insist that it was telling a coherent, character-driven story despite only barely being able to suggest the usual signposts of plot development and world-building was so inextricably tied to the core of the show's terribleness. In this madness, Sarah thought, she would find the secret of its power. She might discover some clue, some code, that could point her in the direction of snuffing out its evil for good. Though she would never want to admit it, her father's insistence on pursuing the strangest secrets of the world had rubbed off on her enough to instill the stubborn streak that kept her scrolling through each crappy episode. Hell, if given enough time, Sarah might even be able to—

“Has Eri been reunited with her family, yet?” the man in the black coat asked. Sarah's blood ran cold in her veins the moment he said one of their names. She looked up at him slowly and carefully, though he hadn't made any move to come closer from the table in the corner he was sitting at.

“I'm sorry?” Sarah responded.

“You know? Eri. The girl with the physics-defying chest? Right after that overlong fight with the Wild Hunt, she's going to suddenly be reunited with the mom and sister that she was getting all depressed about a couple of episodes back.” He wasn't even returning her gaze; the man simply sat there, smiling, sipping at his coffee and taking small, relishing bites of his lemon square.

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Sarah insisted. The man in the coat, still refusing to look up from his desert, merely raised a finger in mocking protest.

“Ah, ah! You're going to miss it! It's one of the silliest moments of the entire episode, so I suggest you pay attention.” Sarah knew that listening to the man was a foolish idea, just like engaging with Momentary Lily at all was just asking to be sucked deeper into this world of dark visions and broken minds. What else could she do, though? She turned her eyes back down to the screen to watch the episode continue to unfold. The characters were meeting up with some new blue-haired girl who was acting like she was some cutesy comedy character and not one of the last remaining survivors of a terrible apocalypse. Par for the course, so far. Then, as she introduced the convenient band of surviving civilians that had just been hanging out underground for God knows how long, it happened: Eri, whose sole defining character trait outside of her insane breast physics was her sadness over losing her family, discovered that her mom and sister just so happened to be one of the handful of people waiting to meet them at this exact spot.

“How…” Sarah began. “How did you know—”

“It's quite ludicrous isn't it?” The man said, ignoring Sarah. “All of that fuss over the painful world of loss and death that these girls have found themselves in, and yet it turns out that, nope! It barely matters at all. Lost families can just poof back into existence without any narrative justification at all.” There was the sudden crack of shattered ceramic. Sarah looked up to the man in the black coat to find that they were suddenly no longer alone in the cafe. Eri was there, next to him. Her hair was pulsing and vibrating wildly like it always did in the show, and her uncanny, cartoonish features looked positively grotesque when stretched into three dimensions. Her skin and clothes all glowed with an otherworldly, vibrant sheen, and they all looked as unnaturally smooth and flat as ink drawings on paper. It was as if someone had taken a blown-up picture of the character and stretched it across the bones and meat of a normal human.

It was a sight that no longer surprised Sarah, really, but it was never any less disgusting to see than the first time one of those creatures crawled out of whatever void had birthed them and into her world. Eri was giggling madly and slamming her oversized cartoon fork into the plate that she had given the man just a couple of minutes ago. The lemon square was gone, but that did not quell the Eri-Thing's appetite, because it simply kept stabbing and stabbing at the plate, breaking it off into little porcelain pieces, and then it shoveled those pieces into its mouth. The Eri-Thing never stopped giggling as it chewed, even as the shards of porcelain tore its mouth and throat into bloody ribbons.

The man in the coat smiled at the Eri-Thing, though his eyes were twisted into a cruel scowl as he did so. It was a look that Sarah could only describe as an insane mixture of affection, pity, and utter loathing. He sighed. “They sure do love to eat, don't they?”

“Who the hell are you?” Sarah screamed, though the man only gave her a passing glance of recognition and brushed her interrogation aside.

“Oh please, don't let us spoil your fun. Don't worry, I won't tell you to watch cartoons on the clock. You've still got more to see! Next, the show is going to pretend that we give a damn about Renge's amnesia plotline, and hints to us about her true nature that I'm sure you'll be so invested in! To tell you the truth, it's probably the “best” episode of Momentary Lily so far, though I use that word very loos—”

Sarah sent a large ceramic mug flying across the cafe, straight towards the man and that Eri-Thing. To Sarah's shock, the mug made contact with the Eri-Thing's face, shattering against its skull and slicing up its face and neck. Streams of shimmering, too-red blood fell into its eyes, but it never blinked and it never stopped laughing and chewing. That meant the things weren't just visions. Either that or Sarah's grip on reality was becoming worse with every passing second. She couldn't decide which option was worse.

The man in the coat regarded Sarah with what must have been some genuine respect. “Well,” he said, “I suppose you're right. Even the “best” episode of Momentary Lily is going to provoke…reactions in those of us who sit down to watch it. We don't want to damn the thing with faint praise, now do we?”

Sarah had heard enough. This man, whoever he was, clearly had connections to the show that had ruined her life in the span of the longest and most nightmarish week of her life. There was nothing good to come from trying to understand what any of it meant. There was no fixing this. The only thing that made sense to do at this point was run. She turned to bolt out of the front door—damn the cold, and damn the mysteries left unsolved—but just as she did the Thing With Blue Hair came through from the other side. Sarah recognized her as the new one that had just been introduced in this most recent episode, and it terrified her how quickly it had been able to manifest this time. It had taken days, at least, for the others to begin their haunting work. The Thing With Blue Hair did not laugh, nor did it scream “Kappou!” like the others. It just stood there, staring at Sarah, its head cocked to the side like a dog that just discovered a small animal it might like to rip apart.

“I would give you a speech about how there's no use running,” the man said, “But I think you've figured that out by now. Your father always talked about how smart you were.” Finally, the man in the coat stood up and began walking towards the counter. Sarah was stuck in place. She couldn't move. She could hardly breathe. The only sensation that she was aware of was the stinging of the tears in her eyes, and how hot they felt as they fell down her cheeks. The cafe had suddenly become so cold.

“What did you do to my dad?” Sarah whispered. The man stood on the other side of the register now, just a few feet away. He studied her with mild, detached curiosity.

“Me?” the man said. “I didn't do anything to the old man. If anything, your father was the one who left me to rot in all of this Momentary Lily madness. He decided to watch the show for himself, in the end. He's the one that pulled the first of these things out of the dirt, even!” The man gestured back towards the Eri-Thing and The Thing With Blue Hair. The Eri-Thing had begun trying to shove the fork down what remained of its mouth. The Thing With Blue Hair just stared. “I merely offered him a little bit of…let's call it direction,” the man in the coat finished. What he was saying didn't make any sense. Her dad wasn't perfect, but he had spent his whole life studying this world of the strange and the occult. Even when others doubted him—when she doubted him—Thomas Downing had never wavered in his commitment to believing in, and thus truly respecting, the dangerous powers of the forces unseen. He would never just let something like this into the world.

“So, what?” Sarah asked, “Are you here to kill me? Over some stupid cartoon?” The man smiled again, though nothing about his face seemed warm or inviting anymore.

“Sarah, please,” he said. “I know that you know Momentary Lily is so much more than that. You've seen it. And not just the terrible animation and all that. No. You're seven episodes in! You're committed, now. You understand the ways that it tries to mimic and disguise itself as something with a real, coherent story and characters that matter. You've seen how it occasionally comes so close to just being a regular, mediocre anime that accomplishes little beyond killing twenty minutes with frivolous nonsense every week. You've seen how it fails to rise to even that pathetic bar of quality, time and time again. I've been dealing with GoHands' bullshit for years now, so nothing about this is new, per se. But it is different. There's a boldness to it. A flagrance to its heresy, so to speak. Or, maybe, it's just that seventh goddamned go-round the cycle is the charm. Either way, this time, they've let something out. And I don't think there's any closing up Pandora's Box this time if you catch my meaning.”

“Then just tell me, dammit!” Sarah hissed. “What do you want? What is any of this even for?” The man in the black coat casually pulled out his wallet and dropped a couple of bills onto the counter. The Eri-Thing shambled up from the table and spit out bloody strings of clots and porcelain fragments into the bin marked “Please return all dishes here before you leave!” The Thing With Blue Hair backed slowly towards the door to hold it open. The screaming wind blew in its frigid breath, along with so many other omens that Sarah didn't yet have names for.

“Sarah, I just stopped in for a cup of coffee and a chance to get out of the snow. The macchiato was lovely, by the way.” He gave a little wave and turned to leave. As he and his coterie exit, the man turns back to Sarah one last time. “I also might have made your father a promise to check in on you when we arrived here in town. We have an appointment to keep, you see, and a lot of work to do. He wanted you to know that he was thinking about you. I passed along a little message from him.” The man cocked his eyebrows down at the pile of money he'd just left, and Sarah saw that there was a slip of paper mixed in with the bills. Before she could ask any more questions, she looked back up to see that the man and his companions were gone. Now, she allowed the tears to flow freely; she had to choke back her sobs as she unfolded the note and wiped the mess from her eyes just to read it. It was a messy, scrawled thing written by someone who was clearly distressed, but Sarah could still recognize her father's handwriting. It was the same scrawl as the note she'd received on that package just one week ago. There were thirteen written on it:

SIX MORE WEEKS REMAIN. JUST KEEP WATCHING. THEN IT WILL ALL BE OVER.

Rating:

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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.