Rural Texas is just rotten with ghost towns. I’m tempted to say that the past dies hard, but the truth is that it’s more forgotten than anything else. Folks just have more to think about than the ramshackle farmhouses in their pastures. Now, seeing as it was a two-hour drive to town, entertainment had to be found and it had to be made. That’s why I started thrusting open the doors to dilapidated shacks, armed only with a pocketknife and a few vague stories from octogenarians. If I was lucky, I’d come back home with some kind of treasure—a chipped knick-knack, a bent branding iron from some long-dead ranch, severe brown medicine bottles stuffed with earth. We’d clean them up and stack them on top of the fridge. Humor me; there was no such thing as the Internet back then, and only two television channels to boot. I used to get some real quality leads out of an old River Rat, a friend of my father’s, who had zero qualms about closet skeletons. “Wanna see something crazy? Then go down
A Summer for Saya, Chapter 3: Killing Mom by VVatchword, literature
Literature
A Summer for Saya, Chapter 3: Killing Mom
I didn’t take my eyes off of Dad as he drove. I didn’t dare. In the dark, I couldn’t tell how much he was bleeding or how badly he had been struck. Minutes crawled by. When Dad cranked up the AC again, the cold air burned on my cheek, and I remembered that I had hurt myself. I dug in the bag for the First Aid kits. “Were you hurt?” Dad asked. He turned on the radio. “Not bad.” I pulled out a pack of disinfectant wipes, each one a luminous white square in the darkness. “I fell, that’s all.” He touched my shoulder. “Thank you.” I briefly touched his arm. “About the things he said.” Dad’s hand fell to the wheel again. “Don’t take anything personally. He was just angry at me.” I grimaced as the alcohol burned into my cheek. “You should’ve killed him. You know he’s just going to find you again.” “I deeply hurt him,” Dad said. “He loves Casey more than any of us, and it’s Casey and his family who have suffered the most for my foolishness. If I killed him, I might as well kill
My birthday fell on March 15. At first I thought it would pass like Christmas, without ceremony, because nobody talked about it in the upcoming week at all. It made me wonder if Dad had given me the wrong date, whether by accident or as a lie. But when I stepped into the exercise room on the fifteenth to practice my katas, it was to see Mom standing against the far wall holding a bokken. I nearly jumped out of my skin.
"Mom!" I said. "What are you doing here?"
"I came back last night," she said simply, tapping the tip of the bokken against the wall. "Shall we spar?"
She was so, so good. One minute she'd be posed loosely asi
A Summer for Saya, Ch14b by VVatchword, literature
Literature
A Summer for Saya, Ch14b
Those ways turned out to be furtive whispers between sets, quick run-downs of common phrases and verbs. Thankfully, Flynn's speeches seemed to be over, to be replaced by teamwork exercises. Our first order of business: performing katas in perfect synchronization. Every time someone moved too fast or too slowly, we had to start over. We barely got into the second kata before we had to switch gears again.
In an adjoining room, there was an obstacle course built out of tall foam pads, rock-climbing walls, ropes, and tires. Flynn marked our goals with a laser pointer and explained that we were to hit each set point under a certain amount of
A Summer for Saya, Ch14a by VVatchword, literature
Literature
A Summer for Saya, Ch14a
Mom stayed at home for the end of January and the first week of February. She spent each of those days with me. The razor-sharp chill of her tone warmed in degrees. She corrected my Japanese without snippiness, taught me three new katas, and gave me books that were full of difficult kanji and concepts. When she touched me with calloused fingers, it was gently.
I was growing quickly, growing more proportional. Sometimes I woke up aching all over. I could no longer lean back and touch the lip of my shell with the back of my skull. In fact, it was like the weird turtlish part of me wasn't growing at all. There were narrow, translucent d
Winter came. With it, the snow: great heaping waves of it that swamped the streets. Snowplows roared down the roads; cars disappeared under drifts. The people on the sidewalks bundled up in winter coats and slipped on the icy pavement. I borrowed Fujita-san’s binoculars to watch them from the warmth of the glasshouse.
I grew taller, more proportional. I had more of a human shape—even a dip in my sides that suggested a waist. My hair began to grow in more thickly as well, something that excited me to no end. I could actually comb and shape it. Soon my head was completely dark with it, and there was hair on my arms and real
Mom had me sit down at the table for breakfast. It was with wide eyes and a grumbling stomach that I watched Ms. Fujita fix the single meal in the kitchen. When she came into the dining room to drop off the food, Ms. Fujita gasped over my cheek and touched it with her papery hands. She told me many things that I didn’t understand in a concerned voice. I told her “thank you” a lot, but she shook her head. When Mom entered the room, clothed in a black pinstripe suit, Ms. Fujita turned on her and said a great many more things, rapidly and with feeling. Mom bent her head, touched my cheek. Her reply to Ms. Fujita was reserved
I was in the dining room by seven forty-five, dressed complete with wig, my back flat against the chair. And what a chair! It looked more like the set piece for an emperor's dining room. The cushion was crimson with flora embroidered in gold thread. The back had been elegantly carved into the likenesses of two twisting phoenixes with gilded detailing, each of their feathers a different kind of polished wood.
It was also hard as hell. I shifted constantly. Finally, I started sitting on my hands.
Ms. Fujita clanked around in the kitchen. The minute she noticed that I was there, she started talking: simply, slowly, like I was an idi
Rural Texas is just rotten with ghost towns. I’m tempted to say that the past dies hard, but the truth is that it’s more forgotten than anything else. Folks just have more to think about than the ramshackle farmhouses in their pastures. Now, seeing as it was a two-hour drive to town, entertainment had to be found and it had to be made. That’s why I started thrusting open the doors to dilapidated shacks, armed only with a pocketknife and a few vague stories from octogenarians. If I was lucky, I’d come back home with some kind of treasure—a chipped knick-knack, a bent branding iron from some long-dead ranch, severe brown medicine bottles stuffed with earth. We’d clean them up and stack them on top of the fridge. Humor me; there was no such thing as the Internet back then, and only two television channels to boot. I used to get some real quality leads out of an old River Rat, a friend of my father’s, who had zero qualms about closet skeletons. “Wanna see something crazy? Then go down