Firebirds Soaring Page 5

  Now she was gone and I wasn’t sure what would become of the plans Kazuko and I had made together. Over the years my father had grown to dislike me more and more, especially when it became apparent he’d have no son to inherit his blighted farm, in which he took a spiteful pride. And with my mother dead, he’d taken to drinking sake every night until he was drowned in his and its misery. When he drank, his dislike for me grew into a hatred that brought forth curses that shook the walls. That spring, I often found myself running from the house, my hands clapped over my ears to shut his voice out behind me. Without my mother to protect me, I didn’t know how to proceed with my plans to leave. I’d become so human that I’d forgotten I could challenge his belligerence with the strength of my own will. I’d become such a proper Japanese girl that I’d forgotten I was stronger than him.

  One day, soon after our graduation ceremony, I told him my plans. “I’m moving to Tokyo with Kazuko,” I said. “We’re going to room together and go to college.”

  “College? ” he said, as if it were another planet. “College? How can you think about college? Your mother has died!”

  “She died three months ago, Father.”

  “I need you here,” he said. I could see his muscles tense with frustration. “Besides,” he said, “you’ve graduated. You don’t need to go to school any longer.”

  I could hear the rest of his meaning unspoken: that I did not need to go to school because one day I’d marry a man who would take care of me. That, until then, I’d help him take care of this home.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” I said, “but I’ve already decided. I’m going to Tokyo. You must learn to take care of this house on your own. I want a different life than the one you see fit for me.”

  I felt the back of his hand strike my cheek before I actually saw him moving. For a long stretch of time, I could feel the knobs of his knuckles pushing my face to the side after his fist struck. I saw a bright flash of light behind my eyes and my jaw rattled. I thought I was seeing a dream, the way I sometimes dreamed my teeth were all crumbling and falling out of my mouth. Soon they would all be broken and fall out covered in blood, I thought, when I felt them scrape against each other. There was no pain immediately, but as soon as the white flash of light faded and my vision returned, I felt the sting and the piercing flow of blood flooding through my cheek. What’s more, I saw his hand rise again, come down at me again, moving toward me like the scythe moves toward a stalk of rice.

  My cheeks, my mouth, my nose, my shoulders, my chest. His rage was like the rage of a demon as he pushed, grabbed, shook me. I cried, pleading, but he could not hear me. When his rage was spent, he stood above me, crying like a child, his hands over his face. “Why this?” he said. “Why this?”

  I stood up slowly, gingerly, my head bowed, one arm held in front of it to protect me from further blows. “Why can’t you be a good girl, Midori?” he said as I walked past him to my room. I passed a mirror on the way and caught a glimpse of the bloody meat of my face. I stopped for a moment to get a better look. My bottom lip was split and my cheek was swelling so that it seemed it might tear open. I was fascinated. The blood seeped out, and in my blood I saw a glimmering. When I looked closer, it seemed like tiny beads of mercury, and then I remembered the silver ball my mother had given me years ago. I’d put it in a toy box and hidden it at the back of my closet after I became friends with Kazuko and no longer needed the comforts of my secret origin.

  Now I crawled on my hands and knees to the back of my closet to find it. When I opened the lid, the ball seemed to glow, faintly illuminating the dark. I picked it up and heard the same heartbeat inside it I’d heard nearly ten years before. That was me in there, I remembered. Kazuko had made me feel so human that the silver ball had become something I dreamed about over the years, and forgot each morning when I woke. I had become someone else. I had forgotten myself.

  I fell asleep in the closet, listening to the silver ball’s heartbeat, feeling its warmth in my hands. When I woke several hours later, my father had fallen asleep on the floor in the living room. I crept back to my room and picked up the phone to call Kazuko. When she answered, I was already crying. “Ne, ne, Midori chan,” she said. “Doushita no?” What’s the matter?

  Through clenched teeth, I told her what had happened after I told my father our plans. When I finished, she said she was calling the police. I told her not to, that I would take care of this myself, but within a half hour the police were at my house and my father, crying, was explaining how his wife had just died and now his daughter was going to leave him to go to college in Tokyo. “I didn’t intend to hurt the child, you see, it just happened, she is abandoning me.”

  I stayed in my bedroom and when the police officers were done speaking with my father, they came back through the hallway to my room and knocked. I slid the door open, lifted my face to them. They were both men. They squinted at the sight of me. Then, as if shaking off a bad dream, they regained their stiff composures. They said in kind tones that my father was having a difficult time right now, and that I should be a good girl, take care of him now that my mother was gone, that I should help him. “There’s a university right here in town,” one of them said.

  “That is the agricultural college,” I reminded them. “I already know as much about farming as I want to.”

  “You can go to secretarial school,” the other suggested.

  I nodded. “You are right,” I told them. “Thank you for your help.”

  They excused themselves from my room and I watched their backs as they went down the hall, back to the living room, and talked more with my father, telling him to control himself, or else they would return and that they’d not be so kind the next time. Minutes later they were gone and he was in my room, angry again. “What person of importance do you think you are?” he said. “Calling the police on your father!” He shook his head as if I were the one who should be ashamed. “Such willfulness, even as a child,” he complained. “I blame your mother.”

  “I did not get my willfulness from her,” I told him, staring straight into his eyes. “I did not get anything good from either of you.”

  “Bah!” He threw his hand in the air, as if he were throwing away trash. “No good has ever come of you either, and nothing ever will.”

  When he had passed out for the second time that evening, I called Kazuko again. I thanked her for being concerned, for being my friend, but said that I wouldn’t need her help any longer. “Midori chan,” she said, “you’re acting as if we’re never going to see each other again.”

  “I won’t be going to Tokyo with you,” I explained. “But please don’t worry. Really. I’ll be fine. I’ll be more than fine. I hope you’ll be happy, Kazuko.”

  “Midori—”

  But quietly I disconnected.

  For a few days I kept to my room, barely coming out to eat, barely sleeping more than three hours in the night. My father knocked on my door from time to time, and called my name weakly from the other side, but I didn’t answer, and eventually he’d drift away. The phone rang sometimes, but neither he nor I moved to answer it. It was probably Kazuko calling. But I’ve already said good-bye, I thought. I held the silver ball in my hands, cradling it against my body while I considered my fate. There was a reason for everything, I’d been told, but I was not at peace with this. I was finished, I decided on the fourth day. I was through with this world. It was time to reclaim my proper identity.

  I took the silver ball and placed it inside my mouth, holding it there, a pearl in an oyster, and finally swallowed it with much effort, choking, my throat swollen with it until my body filled with its terrible rhythm and I fell—that body fell to the floor, I should say, but I remained standing above her, looking down at the girl I’d been for nearly eighteen years. Midori Nakajima. Such a pretty child, I thought, kneeling down to look at her more closely. Even with bruises, she looked like an angel. “Good-bye,” I said, and kissed the flesh that had been home to me for so long. “Goo
d-bye,” I said, and walked out of that room and out of that house, into the woods to the shrine, where I broke the lock he had placed on the doors so many years ago, and reached inside to retrieve my true skin.

  It’s been a long time since that moment of discovery. I can still remember in detail, and still wince at the memory, how I reached into that old, rotten shrine in the forest and found nothing but dust, the dried husks of insects, and empty air. And then what? Then I looked around the forest with my eyes wide open without a story to go along with it. It was a forest of bamboo and pine trees with an old shrine at the heart of it, and me standing in the middle of it, my hands empty, and no way to undo my choices.

  I ride the trains at night now, staring out the windows at the lights of passing cities and towns and villages, thinking back to that moment, the point that I’d thought without any doubt would be my exit to salvation. I’d thought so far ahead in the story, had imagined all of it happening in a particular way. Midori, I think as I stare at my face in the glass of the train window, you silly girl. I truly had been a kitsune in spirit, clever as an old nine-tailed fox, cleverer maybe, clever enough to have grown a thousand tails over my brief history of living. But the only person I’d managed to trick with the stories I’d been telling for so long had been me. A kitsune. Indeed.

  I walk the streets of Tokyo sometimes, and wander through its parks and subway stations, watching all the people that fill the city with their fragile bodies, their feathery breath, their fleeting dreams. The buildings are so tall that when I look up I get the sense of falling backwards, as if I’m flying. When I look down again, though, the streets still surround me, the neon glares in the puddles, and the people continue doing whatever they’re always doing. Laughing, arguing, reminiscing, cursing the day they met each other, holding hands, walking together, remembering their childhoods, their school days, and then, when they come to an unfamiliar intersection, they realize they’ve forgotten their intended destinations, and look around wondering how they got here.

  I like looking at their faces, at their smiles and frowns, at their brows furrowed in confusion. And when they return home for the evening and the streets begin to grow empty, I go down into a train station and select a destination. There are so many paths to choose from, and no one ever tries to stop me. But I always travel alone. That’s the price of my ticket.

  In fifteen years, I’ve seen everywhere the trains of Japan can take me. I’ve climbed Mount Fuji in the dark of a stormy night, lightning cracking the sky open around me, and when I reached the top I saw the sun rise clear and bright. I’ve visited Nara, where the deer roam through the cemeteries and parks like lost children, and I’ve been to Kyoto, the old capital, where the trees are already beginning to change colors as the summer closes and autumn draws near. At the Golden Palace, even weak sunlight is more than enough to set the walls of that place aglow. I lingered in the shadows of its great walls on days when my spirit’s body, instead of growing bent and wizened, grew thin and light as the flame of a candle. I looked up at the golden phoenix perched on the rooftop and wished that one day it would show me a different sort of trick than the one I played.

  I’ve stood upon the wooden bridge of Kiyomizu Temple, where the water is purer than anywhere else on this planet, and held my arms out like the wings of a crane, looking up into the sky and waiting for Buddha to make me light enough to fly up into the blue air, to see Japan grow smaller and smaller below me until I am so far above everything that I can see people walking the busy streets like ants tumbling through their tunnels, living obliviously or else noticing far too much, living contentedly or in frustration, unhappily or ridiculously happy, as they always seem to be doing. People. Higher and higher still I’ll go, until the island I call home is a stone surrounded by water. I’ll wave with both hands as Tokyo and Nikko and Sapporo and Osaka and Nagoya and the rice fields of my youth fall away from me. “Sayonara, Japan!” I’ll shout, and even then I’d fly higher.

  But, no, this is just another story I tell myself, even now. I never did leave that bridge, or any other high place I’ve visited. I can stand on tiptoe and reach, stretching my arms out like a beggar, but the sky will not open for someone who does not truly want to leave.

  In fifteen years, I’ve seen so many things, enough things to last a lifetime. But I don’t want to stop watching people on their way to their destinations, loving and saying good-bye to each other as they go wherever they must go.

  I don’t travel far from home any longer. After a day spent walking along the Sumida River, watching a foreign family taking pictures of each other in front of Tokyo Tower, after an evening of wandering through the brightly lit game centers and their bubbling noises of winning and losing, I take the train home, back to Ami, of all places. It’s a long ride, but it’s never long enough if you ask me.

  I sit and watch my fellow travelers while they read novels and newspapers, drink coffee or beer, and send messages from their cell phones to someone they’re leaving behind in the city or to one of their friends sitting beside them. Sometimes I’ll stand and hold on to a strap in a crowded car, swaying back and forth with my eyes wide open while everyone else has closed theirs tight, pretending they’re not among so many others, trying to be alone.

  Back home in Ami, the streets are quiet and you can hear the wind blow down them and around the tiny houses, on its way to wherever it is going. I walk along the banks of the slow moonlight-rippled river, along the rice fields on the outskirts of town. I stand in front of my father’s house and watch his hunched shadow pass by the frosted windows. The farm often gives good crops now, though it’s nothing to do with me so much as the man who rents his fields from him. I stand in front of the gate of the schoolyard where the other children once asked if I didn’t like people, and sigh at the memory of the obstinate silence I gave in return. It’s strange to remember I used to think I’d do anything to leave here. Now I can’t get enough of people. Now I can’t get enough of this place. The moon is always right in front of me or just beyond the curve of my shoulder. I can hear the cicadas scream all day in the summer, their soft whisperings in the night, and they are a kind of consolation, the closest things I have to living. I could give it all up again and walk away knowing what that really means this time, but I won’t. Not yet at least. Just a little bit longer, I tell myself. Just a little.

  The fireflies glow off and on in the mist-covered fields, calling out, Here I am, waiting for another light to appear in the darkness. Here I am, one calls to another. Come find me.

  Here I am.

  After two years an English teacher in Japan, CHRISTOPHER BARZAK has returned to his home state of Ohio, where he teaches writing at Youngstown State University. His stories have appeared in the anthologies The Coyote Road, Salon Fantastique, Interfictions, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, among others. He is also the author of One for Sorrow, his Crawford Award-winning debut novel, and The Love We Share Without Knowing.

  Visit his Web site at christopherbarzak.wordpress.com.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When I was living in Japan, I was given a children’s book as a gift by one of my fourth-grade classes. Everyone in the school system where I taught—a small rural community outside the suburbs of Tokyo—knew I was trying my best to learn Japanese, so the book Gongitsune—a staple for fourth-graders in Japan (which happened to be my reading level in Japanese at that time)—was a perfect gift. I fell in love with the story of Gon the fox, as he’s called affectionately in Japan, and the lessons he learns and that he teaches others. The artwork was some of the most fabulous depictions of a fox—an animal thought to be a magical creature in Japanese mythology—I’d ever seen. It made me curious, and my curiosity led me to read further into fox lore, and the further in I went, the more I wanted to write about a young girl who is, in fact, a fox spirit but does not know her own origins and powers immediately, the way we’re all born into our lives here without knowing where we come from, why we’re here, or where we’re g
oing.

  I modeled the young woman in the story on two girls from my classes—one was the young girl in that fourth-grade classroom who’d been selected to present me with the book, and the other was her older sister, one of my ninth graders. They were both feisty and rule-challenging, which is sometimes a rare quality in Japanese girls, who are encouraged to be quiet and well-mannered. Writing about Midori in this story, I kept these two sisters in my mind and hoped they wouldn’t ever lose their challenging spirits as they grew older and began to make their own lives.

  Chris Roberson

  ALL UNDER HEAVEN

  Lu Yumin stood on the Ting township dock, waiting for his grandmother to arrive, as the sun rose over the still waters of the Southern Sea. A skink skittered over his foot, breaking his concentration on the red-and-gold object in his hands. Skin crawling, he shook all over and cursed the little gray-green aquatic lizards that swarmed the dock.

  A junk had just put out from the dock, motoring away from shore, the hands scrambling in the rigging to unfurl its square sails, each emblazoned with the image of a stylized red lantern. One of the crewmen was aft, and he cupped his hands around his mouth to shout over the motor’s noise. “Get moving, Grandmother Lu! Or would you prefer we bring you back some fish when we’re done?”

  The other crewmen of the junk laughed raucously. Yumin sighed deeply and turned to see the old woman coming up the dock toward him, a heavy mesh bag slung over her shoulder, a pipe clenched in her teeth.