“We just have to wait.”

“Look at its eyes …”

“They’re green!”

“That is fucking scary. What the hell do we do?!”

“Look at the size of him. That thing could rip a man in half.”

“Shut the hell up! All of you, get a hold of yourselves. It’s just the reflection from the headlights. You wanna scare everyone? Just be cool; it’ll have to move sometime.”

“Mama, I want to go home!”

“Me, too, sweetie. Me, too.”

“Thank you for your patience,” says the attendant, who disappears the way he came in.

The giant boar stands its ground as the passengers whip out their cellphones and cameras. A hundred flashes snap at him, but it remains unmoved. It continues to survey the crowd, trotting over to the car doors, sniffing and snuffling. People looking at their phones exclaim, screaming that its tusks are covered in blood, they’re sure of it.

Somewhere in the bushes, a voice rings out: “This is stupid. We should go.” But the boar does not respond. He is hell-bent on his task. This is the car he is searching for. He can smell it. He parades around a little more, letting the humans push and jostle, and really get their elbows into one another, to point, to take more pictures, to cry for their mothers.

The boar gallops up to the window and smacks its hooves against it. Everyone cries out in terror, fleeing the window, except for a few foolhardy people who just take even more snaps on their cameras of the cloudy fog the boar breathes onto the glass.

The boar looks right at me, narrows its almost-human eyes, green as radioactive material, and slams into the glass, twice. The third time the glass cracks and breaks. The boar leaps through the window and launches right at me with a high-pitched squeal.

I scream.

“Hey.” Zaniel has one hand around my shoulder. The other is rubbing my back. “It’s okay. You were dreaming.”

I’m sitting stock straight. The scream I thought was mine is the gentle screech of the train brakes in front of Takaragaike Station, according to the intercom. A few people look at me oddly — but then, what else is new? “We stopped.”

“Yeah.”

“There was a boar on the tracks.”

The hand on my back stops mid-circle. “You must have dreamed that part,” he says. He doesn’t look happy when he says it. He reads the look on my face and guides me back to a reclined position. He rests his head against mine again, his arm presses up against my shoulder. “Don’t go back to sleep,” he murmurs. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

“Hmmm …” I try to keep my eyes open. “Have you heard this saying? About how if Tokyo were a person, he’d be a cold, stern salaryman, and Osaka would be his glam rock, visual kei, gum-chewing, rebellious Lolita daughter?”

He laughs. “Where’d you hear that?”