Created •
a serialized online story
by Tommy Schmitz
Chapter 7 - Windows, songs, voices and hands.
(here is the link to Chapter 6.)
Katie crouched and kept her head and shoulders
under the spill of light.
The jungle, Hebi-yama was right there.
The blackness was not something you carefully approach:
Slip out the bedroom window,
and you're there.
Katie continued hearing the piano, the flute, the moonlight lullaby,
her grandmother in polite and high octave voice
still chattering away.
She felt her socks and ankles grow cold and wet from dew,
felt a single drop of sweat running down the ridges of her ribs,
heard the drone of ten thousand bull frogs,
and could smell the jungle in a new way.
If her eyes were opened any more
they'd be falling right out of her head.
The chance of the flautist not being alone,
with a small group maybe,
produced a flash of fear:
she could be snatched if he had somebody, some goon
waiting just inside the wall of bamboo black.
She stayed crouched and moved along,
knees bent, head up, ankles feeling strained,
and eyes focused out there, at nothing.
"Great." she thought,
but on a lower level
she hated it when she allowed this sort of sarcasm
to vouch for feeling afraid.
Right now fear is fear, she thought.
Right now there's nothing much funny about it.
"You're out here," she thought, "Don't screw up. Don't get caught.
And by all means
do not scream if the situation does not allow."
"Yea right," she interrupted herself..
"Dang. I gotta pee." she thought.
"No I don't. I just peed. Stop this nonsense."
The moonlight scattered at random the thinnest of fingers of itself,
eery and pale blue beams,
acting more leery than herself.
Wings flapping,
arranging themselves
seven, ten meters above, in nests.
Jungle crow not used to having human company,
not even during daylight.
"At least they can't swoop down here in this thick mess."
"The bullfrogs are so loud."
She tried remembering Oba-chan telling her about
how the bull frogs were imported from America decades ago,
Alabama bullfrogs.
Japan's rice crop had failed and
bullfrogs were food,
bull frogs were protein,
bullfrogs were breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Now, just a pain in the butt.
"We got them back, I guess, with kutsu."
She recalled reading about the invasion of kutsu,
or kudzu perhaps they call it there,
in the the southern states of America.
"Sorry, didn't mean that."
She thought again . . . still swatting down thoughts.
"What am i thinking about? Kutsu? Pay attention, Katie!"
The flute was thirty or forty meters due west of the house wall.
"I'll crawl along the edge of black, here,
past the back of the house,
then over the retaining wall, four feet, piece a cake,
up the hill about twenty meters,
then west into the jungle.
And I will go
really slow,
as quiet as a snake."
She felt her heart pound now,
"Oh god, the snakes!
I forgot.
do snakes sleep?
Snakes sleep like sheep, don't they?
like kittens?"
"Great." said Katie again.
Katie crouched lower and slipped sideways into the jungle.
holding herself up with her right hand,
her right forearm sometimes.
"Oops, no room...
Do right elbow, Katie,
left leg push,
left arm grab,
oh god, make sure its vegetable or mineral
or anything at all but snake."
Her body shivered at the thought.
"Right arm slide." she continued.
Right foot drag and stop."
And she shivered again - that gross feeling of yuck and fear.
and moved again
and shivered.
(chapter 7 continued here.)
