We were hunting for a van, lost in the snow; searching the frozen shadow of mount Fuji. The group of us, wrapped in white cotton and wearing orange goggles over our eyes, progressed along a disused motorway. The carriages merged, and then disappeared altogether, and we followed a broken trail of flat tyres and lost hubcaps into the dense wood.
We found the van, a little later, with its front bumper wrapped around a pine tree. Snow caked its sides, and its two front doors hung open like the wings of a gigantic butterfly - and then we noticed them, they were everywhere, but we weren't afraid. We saw them in clear view and in the corners of our orange eyes.
Sleeping snow drifts. Crumpled forms below the ancient trees. Open mouthed, black tongued, many hanging from the branches. Personal effects; driving licenses and photo albums, shadowed the quiet shapes of the suicides, like plants that had surrendered their seeds.
In white cotton, and orange goggles we weren't frightened, watching the half frozen ants gathering the suicides, piece by piece, like berries from the trees, and carrying them off into the bitter cold of the afterlife.
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