Raindrops

Ten. Deep breath. In, out. Okay, I can do this.

I stepped into the dark alley. The girl was shoved against the wall, her hand on her purple purse and her curly brown hair damp under her hood, with a face that couldn’t be older than 16. Her brown eyes widened with shock as they met mine. Fear coated every raindrop on her skin.

“Hey!” I shouted, hoping to be heard over the heavy, cold rain. “Leave the kid alone!”

The man turned back to me. A black beanie turned even blacker by the rain, brown hair pushed to the side, bright blue eyes. The gun in his right hand glinted with raindrops and shined like a beacon in the dim streetlight. He was holding it about a foot away from her chest with his right hand, oriented slightly to the right instead of straight on. His immediate fear turned to arrogance as he saw my mediocre figure illuminated against the entrance to the alley. He laughed a deep, hearty laugh and faced me, pointing the gun straight between my eyes.

“Whatcha gonna do?” The man exclaimed, taking his left hand off his gun and gesturing with it. “You definitely ain’t the type to have a gun on you.”

Nine. Attention grabbed. Now to figure out what to do with it.

I took another step in. My legs, previously trembling from the cold, were now shaking from fear, but I tried to hide it by throwing my shoulders back and looking confident. I put my hand to my pocket in an attempt to make him think I had a weapon on me, even though I accidentally left my pocket knife in my apartment. Not that it would have done much in a gunfight anyway.

“Alright there, superhero. I’ve got bullets to share if I need. Why don’t you walk on over here nice and slow and give me whatever’s in that fancy briefcase of yours?” He gestured at the wall next to the girl.

Eight. It would be great if I could make a plan right now.

I slowly raised my hands and took slow, casual steps toward the man. He was confident; I could see it in his eyes. It didn’t matter if I had a knife in my pocket or not, he had the gun. As long as he kept his distance, he would be alright.

I looked at the girl, who currently had no attention drawn on her. She was eyeing the gun in his hand and glancing back at me. Since I couldn’t physically shake my head without him seeing, I tried to tell her with my eyes to wait. We could do this, but not yet.

“Damn, you’re really going nice and slow with those steps. I ain’t got all day, hero.”

I slightly quickened my pace, but didn’t approach the wall. I instead came closer to his gun, drawing attention away from her. He raised his eyebrows and took a step back, seemingly impressed by my courage.

“That’s not the direction I said to go. Wall. Now.” He gestured at the wall with his gun, still glaring at me intensely.

Seven. Please, whatever your name is, take this opportunity.

With a sudden burst of energy, the girl leaned forward and pushed the man away. He stumbled one step as she tore down the alley, toward the exit at the other end. He made a wide grab for her shoulder but missed totally. I charged forward, motivated by her burst of courage to respond with some of my own. He turned back toward me as I grabbed his gun and pushed it to the side. His grip was strong and I couldn’t force a release. His other hand came back from the attempted grab and swung toward my face. I managed to back up so it didn’t catch me fully across the jaw, but only glanced across the side. It still hurt.

He brought his gun toward my chest. I was off-balance, and he knew it too. With hope still deep within my heart, I threw a punch square into his chin just as I heard a loud boom at my chest.

Six. A raindrop lands on my nose.

It’s a good punch. I don’t know how I landed it, but I feel his head shift and his brain rattle. His lights blink out like a light switch. I stand stunned as he crumbles backward to the ground. The gun clatters on the ground to his right.

I lift my head toward the end of the alley. Her black hood has slipped off her head. Her purple purse is still slung over her shoulder. Her bright blue tennis shoes turn the corner, splashing in a puddle. I hope she didn’t get them dirty.

Five. It’s cold and small and beautiful.

My chest is really damp. It must have started raining really hard. I grab it. It’s red. That’s not the color of rain.

Four. There’s a small rainbow inside it.

The ground rushes to my face like a long lost friend. It gives me a hug; I hug it back. It’s cold, but that’s okay. I’m cold too. We can be cold together.

Three. It’s shimmering in the light.

At least the girl won’t be cold anymore. She’ll run home, find her family, and they’ll wipe the raindrops from her face. Her mom will hug her. She will be warm.

Two. It’s so fragile.

My mom always told me to count when I got nervous. She said it would help me focus. If I count, then I can think of things in parts. It will be easier to understand.

One. It breaks.

shower

After critical acclaim (“…a beautiful cautionary tale” -Emma Smith — “…this shit is super well written” -Zack Werhan — “Deeply disturbing” -Angelo Capriola) and some revisions, I have decided to share this story with the world.

I now bring to you the story of a trialed man in his struggle against USAFA infrastructure. It is a tale of valor, courage, and sacrifice, but also of folly, despair, and regret. May you read it and take heed. 

It was a calm evening in CS23. I had calculated the optimal time to visit the showers, to secure my rightful place in the singular completely functional and comfortable shower. The royal water gushed out at any temperature and at great volume, indefinitely, like the fountain of youth of ancient legend, at the turn of a handle. However, there is an inherent danger in soliciting the water gods, which the informed shower-goer intuitively understands: one must first turn the handle past cold water to obtain the steamy water of unbounded cleansing power. The unwary user may inadvertently freeze himself to death before he has a chance to correct an error… many generations of showering men paid such a price before we developed the skills to safely harness the shower uninhibited by shower head. 

Fast-forward. There I stood beneath the great, benevolent water pipe, turning in the stream like a rotisserie chicken. A man skulked across from me, in the inferior shower, with countenance contorted in jealous regret that he had miscalculated the optimal time and had lost favor with the water gods. I smiled with closed eyes at the thought and felt the warm droplets dancing gleefully down my eyelids. Still I continued my periodic turning, in time immeasurable, passing by hours or perhaps only seconds. Occasionally, I wiped my eyes with my towel so as to again witness the desolate face of the unfortunate man, doomed to a mediocre showering experience. These were the final moments.

Facing the wall, I turned to my right for a final posterior rinse. Suddenly, my upper arm hooked the shower handle as I rotated. As I heard the metallic pang echoing through the stall, and felt the subtle change in the water’s flow rate, and saw the shiny, water-speckled handle downturned directly above the letter “C”, I realized the gravity of my situation and began a prayerful leap to safety. But it was too late.

I had brought forth the icy deluge upon my naked body. The levy had broken, and I stood, frozen in time, powerless to prevent the tidal onslaught, like being unable to run in a nightmare. As I fled, the icicled droplets viciously stabbed into my quaking legs, causing me to collapse directly onto the jealous man of afore. And there I lay atop the toppled man, with a double handful of hairy ass cheeks, assessing the damage to my frostbitten frame. Of course he was confused and angry—but promptly all emotions collapsed into a singular, primal fear of the pitter-patter of the arctic water splatter showering us from great range. We sat up, cornered, shivering, and unable to escape the unremitting torrent of tempestuous torment. In an instant, I pondered every life choice that had led me to this fatal moment. 

Snapshots of loving memories were frozen before me, as if to shatter into millions of indistinguishable pieces as my mind numbed. Suddenly, my focus turned to the shivering sobs of my cohort. In that moment, I realized how selfish I had been. To save his life and my own, I would have yielded the good shower ten thousand times over… but my pleas were drowned out by the sound of the frigid water pounding the grey tile. The walls began to frost over, and I knew time was running out before the entire bathroom turned into an icebox of deepest Siberian winter. There was only one option.

Numbed to paralysis below my waist, I stood slowly and faced the spewing god. With each lurch forward, I entered still colder waters. My shallow breaths frosted in the air. My hairs stood curled atop shivering goosebumps. My refrigerated blood left my extremities and my pallid face contorted in an elixir of horror, despair, and pained rage. My willy shrunk to the size of an acorn, and was getting smaller still. Yet, the seething flame of resolve would not be smothered. Each labored lunge pushed me further into the torrent, until I was engulfed entirely within its icy reach, as if I had climbed an alien mountain into the cold vacuum of space. I pressed on, against impossible odds, bearing the stings of windy blizzard and pangs of biting frost like the early Antarctic explorers. 

I threw my outstretched arm beyond the cascading wall of crystal knives, and grasped the chromed originator of the wintery tempest. With strength diminished, and muscle control nearly gone, I heaved my stiffened figure upon it, forcing it completely down and abruptly stopping the downpour. Slipping off, I fell prostrate upon the puddled floor, and found myself unable to move. I felt a strange calm overcome me as my vision faded from my periphery, and I drifted into comatose comfort. By apparent divine action, I later awoke on my bed, having survived the ordeal and being very much not in the mood to see water. 

The water gods giveth, and they taketh away. 

Orange Summer

There used to be an orange grove across the street before the apartment complex was built. Rows and columns of black branches that rivaled Paul Fisher’s Tangerine. My mother could always tell by the mud sticking to our toes that we were playing somewhere we shouldn’t. But I think she was secretly fond of the smell of earth and citrus we brought into our home. On the wrong evening my dad came home weathered from working at the field behind the school to find a pair of young saplings roughly erected in our backyard. My oldest brother was bent over a knee and spanked with the wooden paddle, my dad yelling a lesson on stealing and the bible. My mother silently, gracefully picked bits of black mud from her fingernails beneath the veil of the kitchen faucet. 

Our tree is the only one left in our neighborhood that still produces fruit. The smell attracts stray cats.

On weekends we piled into the van older than me and complained when my dad played his music instead of ours. Sometimes our soccer games were at the same times, so my parents pitched a tent near the concession stand to watch from and ate oranges and sunflower seeds, discarding on the patchy grass the shells of both. When my brother played on the field near the Mexican olive trees, my sister and I picked the whitest bell flowers from the low branches and put them in our hair, just like the mermaids we saw on TV.

When my dad lost his job in 2008, he went and sold cupcakes in the breakroom of a telemarketing company. I still don’t know what telemarketers do, except ask when my dad was bringing strawberry cupcakes with vanilla frosting instead of chocolate. On the days when it was my turn to help bake and frost, I scraped my pinky along the inside edge of the bowl while stirring the batter, so I could say “oops, my hand got dirty” over the sound of the television in the living room and lick it off. 

When my parents visited for my 19th birthday, I asked for a strawberry cake with vanilla frosting.

When my father got a job in San Antonio, my mom bought us an xbox. My grandma picked us up from school everyday and took us on her errands. We liked it the most when she took us to the dollar tree and let us pick one thing out. We hated it the most when she took us to church with her. The service was only in Spanish, so we moved our mouths in “ooos” and “eees” to the hymns and competed to make the deepest throat sounds during chants. When my mom takes us to church with her, she waits until the song at the end of the worship to cry about my dad being away. 

The path through the gardens outside this church didn’t have any shade, but we followed my grandma up to each disciple’s statue in the 4pm heat with no protests because none of us knew enough Spanish to suggest doing something else. 

My dad opened our restaurant in 2012 next to the store that sold sweet bread. 

My mom got a job at the school we went to because my grandma said we were too rude to her, and she was already walking home alone when she was our age. My mom taught music, but had to work late into the evenings planning lessons to make elementary school children want to sing and practice their recorder. Each day when my sister and I finished class, we walked to the music room and played instruments for an audience hiding in the darkness. My favorite was the rosewood marimba because I knew how to play the song from “Village Bridge” on it, and my sister could hum along. When my mom asked me why I chose to play the violin in middle school instead of the marimba like my siblings, I said it was because it was the only instrument I had never touched. 

The car accident happened when I was in 6th grade.  My dad put his arm out in front of her because she was too small to be sitting in the front seat, like he knew my mother would blame him for getting T-boned by a driver running a light if he didn’t. My younger sister escaped with six herniated discs and severe PTSD. My brother and I sat outside the middle school waiting to be picked up, annoyed like all preteens are when they don’t understand something bigger than themselves. My dad’s last neck surgery was on my fourteenth birthday, but I was still annoyed that now we weren’t allowed to ride in the front seat anymore. 

I pleaded for a rabbit, and my parents gave in when I offered to wash the dishes everyday for a month. It lived in the side yard away from our dogs, in a house of golden wire and brick I spent all summer constructing. When the dog escaped, it seemed to crave with domesticated passion to explore the unknown expanse of our house’s other fenced enclosure. The rabbit, upon the explosion of such a predator into its sheltered mind, jumped against its enclosure and wedged its neck between two of the golden bars protecting it fully from the perceived chaos. When the dog approached the head sticking out of the cage for an excited sniff, the rabbit kicked with such powerful hind legs against the confinement that its spine snapped in half, killing it before the door to the side yard was opened, the dog rushed into the house to return to the familiar and known, and my mother could yell at me to check on the rabbit. 

My mom wanted a bigger house, so we moved to the X-Crossings in the city next to ours. When Hurricane Dolly came through, our cousins from Monterrey were visiting because my parents wanted them to see our two-story house with a porch in a gated neighborhood. The storm lasted for a week, and my mother, in quotes,  ‘couldn’t find’ our cat that scratched her arm last week to bring him inside. We couldn’t afford to pay for the flood damage to our floors and appliances, so we moved back to our old house a year later. 

We have lived there now for over twenty cumulative years. The shower in my parent’s bathroom still doesn’t work.

We used to pretend to be asleep when we heard footsteps flattening the plush carpet installed on the stairs. None of us could reach the switch to the xbox behind the TV without standing on the ottoman, which now sagged in the middle like it was trying to hide from him too. My father would smack his palm against the wall to wake us from our feigned rest. Brian and Natalie. The youngest sibling remains still, a rabbit camouflaged beneath the comforter dragged from my bed, spared from the fate of a Saturday shift peeling shrimp in the back kitchen that poked your palms in posthumous defense. I hated the work shoes. My toes only reached the middle of the black sketchers because we all shared them, but I pulled them on without even tying the laces because I knew better than to make my father late. 

The Cat

The boy walked through the woods. He felt the crunch of the leaves under him, felt the crisp autumn breeze blowing through his hair. He rounded a corner in the path and turned to a small shed. 

“Here cat,” he called, opening the door. 

He saw the flick of a gray tail in the far corner of the room. Walking slowly so as to not scare the cat, he sat down beside him. 

“Boy am I glad to see you,” he told the cat, wearing a blank expression on his face. 

The boy reached his small pale arm out and stroked the cat’s body. 

“The fifth graders were mean to me again today,” he explained, “They called me names and pushed me around. My teacher got angry when I spat at them. I hate the fifth graders and my teacher.” 

The boy rested his hand on the cat’s head. 

“Dinner!” he heard his mom call from their house. The boy stood up slowly and patted the cat goodbye.

“I’ll see you again tomorrow,” he told it, pouring it its daily food and water. 

The boy exited the shed and went home. The cat sat in silence. 

# 

The cat laid the whole next day in the darkness of the shed, waiting for the boy to return. Eventually, the crunching of leaves could be heard as the boy marched to the shed. 

“They made me angry again today,” he told the cat after having entered the dilapidated shed, “They threw me around. The teacher saw. She didn’t tell them to stop. I am angry now.” 

In a controlled manner, the boy began to thump his foot against the wall of the shed, trying to release his anger. When tired, the boy sat back down next to the cat. “I am glad I have you, cat,” he told it, “You listen to me like no one else does.” 

The boy heard it meow in response. 

“I will feed you now. You’re nice to me.” 

He fed the cat and petted it for a few minutes, before he heard his mom’s familiar call to dinner. 

“Tomorrow I’ll see you,” he told the cat again before enclosing it in the tomb of darkness. 

#

The huffing got louder and louder as the boy approached the shed. He visibly shook as he closed the door and sat next to the cat. 

“I did something bad today,” he told the cat, stroking it. No remorse was evident on his thin face. His clenched fist trembled as he held it stiffly in his lap. His other hand petted the cat more roughly than the day before. 

“They made me angry again,” he said to the cat, “They didn’t stop when I told them to, so I made them stop.” 

His voice quickened. 

“Now the other people at the school are mad at me. The other people wouldn’t be mad if they knew how bad the fifth graders and teacher were to me. The principal ran after me. I was too fast for him,” the boy informed the cat, still petting it, “He saw me go into the woods. But with you, I’m safe here. You know I did nothing wrong.” 

For an hour, the two sat in silence. The cat slept in the boy’s lap as he touched it. The boy drifted off to sleep too, but he was woken by the shed door swinging open. He quickly grabbed for his backpack. 

“No, you better not!” the policeman shouted, “Put your hands on your head.” 

The boy complied. He knew he would be let go once the policeman heard his side of the story.

“Stand up!” the policeman commanded. 

The boy obeyed, but the cat fell out of his lap onto the dirt floor. The policeman, along with one of his associates, escorted him out of the shed. Three other policemen poked around the boy’s room. 

“What the hell?” one policeman started, picking the cat up off the floor. 

His companions looked sad and shrugged. The policeman, disgusted, flung the cat’s mummified body back onto the dirt floor. Grabbing the backpack, the only other item left in the room, the policemen left, taking the evidence with them. The shed door swung shut, and with it, a somber hush filled the darkness of the room.

Comhar

Ding dong ding dong 

“The stars are aligning,” the newsie shouted, his voice rising sharply, “ The comets are coming!” 

He shook the brass bell clutched tightly in his fist. 

The grim cobblestone street he stood upon emanated the squalid mood of the town. Heads turned and looked at him as the steady clack of wooden wheels and horses’ hooves could be heard slowly cantering down the road. Nobody smiled. Nobody talked. The town had already heard his news. 

Every five hundred years, his article read, when the stars are situated just so, a special comet comes flying over the land of Comhar. With it, it takes half of the town’s citizens. On the night of the comet, a bright blue flash lights up a purple sky, and half their population is no more. Women and men weep, and the children cry. 

Already this year, the town was wearing all black for those that would be lost. It is quite notable that everyone in the town wore all black. The people set to disappear are not known beforehand. However, the townsfolk know that half of them will disappear. The newsie watched as one man’s black felt bowler hat disappeared down the lane. It bobbed to and fro as he jostled through the busy street. The newsie sighed and headed back home. Nobody wanted to buy his papers. Families needed to conserve their money, just in case their source of income happened to disappear. 

A loud ‘pop’ jolted everyone from their gloomy stupor. A bright orange flame lit up the sky. It weaved and torsoed around, a bright painting on a solemn background. A woman pointed, shrieked, and fainted. 

“Go to the dying man,” the flame spelled in the sky, “It is not yet too late to save him.” The crowd broke from its standstill and started haphazardly running away, to try and find the dying man. 

‘Pop’ cried the sky before it was again its normal baby blue. 

Brown cockroaches ran from the street, frightened of the shuffling commotion. Shouts of joy and shouts of desperation could be heard vibrating through the crowd. A lone baby crawled down the path, unbothered, tickled even, by the frantic crowd. He giggled and cooed, thinking that the people celebrated. They knew not what the sky meant. 

Quickly, the town formed sides, and the street turned into a land of war. No longer was it a depressing, but albeit safe, solace, a way to and from work, it was now a humming mob of dangerous ideas. 

“Kill him!” one man’s gruff voice shouted. 

“No, we need to save him!” disagreed another. 

Two men began to tussle in the middle of the street. Their black clothes became brown with dust as they rolled on the cobblestone, and bright red streaks of blood appeared on their fists. 

“Stop!” cried one voice, “We need to find the dying man!” 

“I agree!” chimed in another.

The men continued to roll up and down the street, their dark brown hair getting mussed in the process. A circle formed around the two, composed of the town’s frantic civilians – yet, none of them tried to break up the scuffle. 

“We need to help the dying man!” a woman shrieked, eyes darting to and fro, hoping in vain that someone would step forward and agree with her. 

She did not want to be the only one to voice that opinion. 

“Let’s just forget about the dying bastard,” called someone else, and the women retreated back into the safety of the circle. 

“Yeah,” commented another man, “Half of us are going to be dead soon anyway.” The town rallied with this man’s words. 

“Why is his life more important than ours?” queried one of the crowd. 

“It’s not!” cried several others. 

The woman wrung her hands, holding the front of her black dress. She knew what mobs could do, and she did not want her best attire getting ruined. 

“Please,” she quietly begged, not wanting to draw too much attention, “There is no reason not to help this man. He is one of our own, one of this town’s people.” The loud hum of the crowd along with the grunts of the two fighting men droned over her pleas. Satisfied that she had done enough to advocate for this man, one that even she admitted to not knowing, she made her way back into the circle. 

“Damn the dying man!” the crowd cried, and they rallied again around the policemen, who abruptly grabbed their night sticks. 

“I saw him! I saw him!” a young voice shouted out, “He went that way, around that building!”

The policemen led the shouting mob around the post office where the boy had pointed. The boy smiled to himself. He hadn’t really seen anything, but he wanted to feel important. He succeeded. 

The crowd left the two fighting men alone on the street, and when they both observed the absence of their cheerers, they looked at each other, shrugged, stood up, and ran after the other people. They didn’t want to be left out of the fun. It would upset the men too greatly if they missed the best part of the mob finding the dying man. 

“And you bet he’s dying once we all get ahold of him,” one man thought to himself, “I don’t think we should waste our time worrying about him when half of our families, and maybe even ourselves, will be gone soon.” 

The two fighters quickly caught up with the rally and brushed the dirt off of themselves in the process. 

The group rounded a few more corners before finding themselves at a dead end behind the firehall and the deli. They gathered around each other and gazed at the sky, collectively wondering where the dying man went. 

“He must have circled behind us again!” an excited woman exclaimed, starting a stampede back the way they came, out to the main street. 

The crowd rounded the red brick corners faster coming back than they had going there. They weren’t going to hurt their pride and let a sickly dying man get the best of them. Again they crowded together on the main square, jostling each other and humming their mad rages in the process. Angry with one another for letting the dying man get away, the townsfolk started shouting at each other, demanding to know why that person didn’t catch him.

Louder and louder the crowd continued to roar, with even the woman who, earlier, had advocated for helping the dying man, joining in. 

“You’re faster than me!” she shrieked at her husband, “You could have easily caught him if you just would have tried!” 

Her husband, too busy yelling at someone else, didn’t even hear his wife’s words to him. The crowd became more and more feverish, more and more violent, more and more frantic, until it seemed to reach its climax, it couldn’t possibly get any louder – “You fools, you are the dying man collectively!” an omnipresent voice boomed, “You have waged a war against that which you should have saved!” 

The people stopped quarreling and gasped as they saw a growing comet shoot through the sky. Pandemonium broke loose again, but seemingly worse this time; some people abandoned their loved ones, others hugged them closer. 

And with a loud cathartic pop, the noise was no more, the crowd was gone, and the streets were still. Just a black felt bowler hat floated and drifted through the busy air, with no owner running to claim it. All was finally well in Comhar.

Chapter Excerpt from Reasons to Die

“Watch ya head, stranger!” 

The human boy yelled behind him as Kiyama banged his head on a pipe. The boy’s names he had learned through their constant bickering were Aaron, the full human boy; Lucas, the boy with cat ears; and the full Kunai whose name was Owen. The boys had taken him through a sewer leading him through the catacombs of the city; the passageway was small, and Kiyama, who was a little small by most standards, still had to constantly duck to avoid the stray pipes. The boys led Kiyama to a small wooden ladder that looked like it might break if a gust of wind hit it. 

“Alright,” Aaron spoke softly. “We’re here, stranger. When we get up there, let us do the talkin’; Gramps doesn’t like surprise customers.” 

Kiyama followed the group up the ladder, gingerly walking up; he was almost blinded by the light as Aaron pushed the door open. Climbing into the room, he was surprised to find it spacious. Around the room were blue walls with shelves in every corner. The shop had everything imaginable: guns, clothes, even canned food lined the shelves. 

There was a small desk at the end of the room, and behind the desk there was a man, back turned to the entrance of the room. He was a massive dark figure; his back stretched for what seemed like miles which directly contrasted the thinning white hair on his head. 

“You boys are back early,” the man grumbled as he worked on some device hidden by his massive frame. 

“Hey Pops … we brought back a customer for you.” 

The man wheeled around quicker than his age should have allowed him. He seemingly grabbed something below his desk and stared intently at Kiyama. 

“Boys, what did I say about bringing people in here?”

“Pops, he’s got a Katana! And he wants to sell it to us!” The old man eyed Kiyama up and down suspiciously as the boys ran up to him. 

“A Katana?” The old man’s eyes narrowed. “And why didn’t you just take it from him?” He turned his head towards Aaron. “You forget how to use that pistol, boy?” 

Aaron shuffled nervously as he looked at his brothers. “I tried, Pops … but he deflected my shot with his sword!” he exclaimed, “I’ve never seen anything like it, Pops!” 

Moving quickly once again, he revealed what he had under his desk: a massive gun. A long barrel protruded from it as it extended into three separate muzzles, all aimed forward at Kiyama. 

“You’re one of them Samurai,” the man said quietly, angry black eyes focused on him.

“No.” Kiyama spoke quietly; he wanted to avoid conflict, especially with the equivalent of three rifles pointing at him. 

“Don’t lie to me,” he said, cocking his rifle. “What’s your name, boy?”

Kiyama paused, looking down at his sword and then back at the old man. “My name is Yuki Kiyama.” The room was frozen, four pairs of eyes focused on Kiyama, complete shock on their faces. 

“Show me the sword,” the man said, his rifle still trained on him.  

Kiyama brought his sword up, grasping the handle. He slowly pushed his sword out of its sheath. As the dark metal emerged, the Kiyama family crest shone brightly, the silver metal moons displayed for the group. The room remained frozen as they all took in the sight of the symbol. The old man, after several tense moments, lowered the barrel of the gun, placing it under his desk. Looking back at Kiyama, he said with a chuckle, “I never thought I’d have a Kiyama in my store…what are you doing here, son?” 

Kiyama let his body relax; the situation was no longer dangerous. Still, he had to be careful: the old man seemed to have some  knowledge of the samurai, any wrong move and he could still face the barrel of that rifle. After some thought, he decided to be honest as there was no point in trying to be deceitful, especially since his family name seemed to hold weight here. 

“I’m on the run,” Kiyama spoke. “I need money to make it to Okami.”

“Okami, huh?” The old man stroked his beard. “And you’re lookin’ to sell that?” His eyes narrowed on the sword in Kiyama’s hand. 

Kiyama sighed; he knew this was the only way. He couldn’t carry a Katana and expect people not to recognize him. He approached the desk, laying the sword down on it. The old man picked it up, looking it over. 

“Well, I can offer ya 2500 Koban for this.”

“2500!?” Kiyama almost scoffed. He knew that a sword of this quality was with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands more than that price.

“Look, son.” The old man leaned back in his chair. ‘I can’t offer any more than that, and if you think folks around here got more than that, ya wrong.”  

Kiyama sighed. It wasn’t much, but 2500 could probably get him to Okami.

“We have a deal then?” 

Kiyama let out one more sigh, 

“Fine, I’ll take it.”

As he poured the small golden squares into a bag, Kiyama took one last glance at the sword. As a child, he had dreamed of holding it to fight under the Kiyama banner for honor. It felt like that was a lifetime ago, Kiyama thought. The sword ended up being a curse to him.

“Alright, here ya go.” The old man pushed the leather bag over to Kiyama, Taking it, Kiyama began turning around, ready to leave the shop.

“Listen, son.” the old man cried out, “Just cause you’re a Kiyama don’t think that changes anything!” 

He reached under his desk again, this time coming up with a pistol and throwing it across the room to Kiyama. Catching it, Kiyama observed the simple flintlock in his hands, its silver  seemingly flashing back at him. 

“The name’s Tanaka, don’t forget it,” The old man said one last time before standing up and leaving the room down a slim hallway to his right. Kiyama turned back one last time, noticing the boys waving at him. Giving them a quick wave goodbye, he headed out the door.