Find a Penny

All the day you’ll have good luck…

The thing is, I haven’t had a day of good luck in weeks. And that sort of thing tends to make you cynical. It’s not as if I’ve walked under any ladders recently, and I haven’t had a black cat cross my path that I can remember offhand. Maybe I’m still working off the seven years I got for breaking some mirror long ago. I don’t know. But it seems unlikely that a penny’s going to do much at this rate.

But now I’m stuck thinking about it. It was just a block ago, winking at me like a golden eye. Now I feel like it’s taunting me. Come on, what’s the rush? I dare you. What could it hurt? Shut up. I was perfectly happy moping before and now you’re actually making me stop and turn around. Damn you.

All right. Comfortably in my left shoe now, giving me a corn. I have tried a thousand times to remember where I heard that superstition about putting the penny in your left shoe. Nobody I know has ever heard of it, but I’m sure I learned it somewhere. Forget good luck, wearing a penny inside two-inch heels ought to give you a Purple Heart. I feel like the princess with the pea. It’s going to be fused to my foot within the hour.

Now where’s my good luck?

I could get promoted today. That’d be nice. God knows I deserve it. Never mind the fact that I don’t want it. Can’t I get a raise without having to manage people? I hate managing people. I have enough trouble managing myself. As you can tell by my dependence on small change for assistance. At least I don’t have to ask for it with a tin cup. (Even beggars used to be able to afford tin cups. These days they’re paper. How society has fallen.)

Or I could find a winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk. I pick up those scratchers sometimes, praying in vain that the person who discarded it overlooked the last matching number. Never comes to pass, but then again, it could be the start of a nasty lawsuit about the fellow who paid for the ticket wanting the money, and I could lose more than I gain. God, I even manage to ruin my own fantasies. It’s enough to make a…

Holy mother of… oh… oh, shit, that hurts…

Or, on the other hand, maybe I could get plowed into from behind and end up on my hands and knees, my butt wiggling in the air, and the penny could go flying out of my shoe in sheer fright at having been associated with anyone so patently unlucky. Yeah, you stupid penny, who needs you, anyway? I have skinned knees and ripped pantyhose to deal with now. At least the person who rammed into me is apologizing and offering a hand. That’s kind of him.

Nice, warm hand…

Oh.

Oh, my.

Maybe that is a lucky penny after all.

 

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The spring people

(From Seventh Sanctum’s Symbolitron generator: The fantasy story where the races map to the four seasons (spring-summer-autumn-winter). Purple prose, yes, but stream of consciousness with very little revision.)

It was winter for the spring people in that time.

This Alaka had told me when I began to ask why the flowers were made of stone, why the birds neither flew nor sang but waddled in the courtyards like undersized oxen. Alaka held my hand as we walked over the cobblestones and said not to look. But I looked. How could I not? We the summer people never mitigate our gaze. Like the sun we are harsh and unblinking, but we are above all just. So Alaka may develop a frost and her eyes may fall to the earth like the leaves of the autumn trees. I was not so temperate.

When she brought me home, put me into the bath, her eyes gained that faraway tint and that is what she told me: It was winter for the spring people. It was their time to be cut down, for their powers of creation and birth had gone beyond a blessing to a nuisance and beyond a nuisance to a stifling curse that threatened to destroy all that had come before.

And so the winter people came, pouring down from the sky in their white robes with their spears of ice, and they did what winter does and killed. And now there is no one left to call forth a flower or bid a bird to fly, and we of summer and autumn live in the squalid aftermath of our own excess.

This makes me weep, but I can no more shrink from the truth than the sun can blink her summer’s eye.

 

Getting to Work

(Prompt-a-day: Force was necessary)

He had to muscle his way through the throng. It wasn’t his favorite thing to do, but sometimes, especially this time of year, force was necessary to survive the overflowing mass of shoppers. So paying no heed to the moms and kids, the frantic fretting and cries and giggles silenced, he threw out elbow and knee with abandon, doing his best to drag his frame along the endless aisle to the front of the store. It wasn’t easy, especially with this piece of crap weighing him down, but a man had to do what a man had to do to pay the bills. So groaning and grumbling and cursing under his breath, he arrived, sat down, and fixed the child in front of him with the meanest of glares. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said flatly. “And what do you want for Christmas?”

 

a beginning 4

That had been the most stunning thing about getting here, she noted as she climbed the steep hill with slow, trudging steps. Not how her apartment had been full of pastel plastics with bizarre uses. Not how the neighbors had left a package full of soap and laundry detergent on her stoop. It was the sheer number of torii. Not that every place was like Fushimi Inari, with hundreds and hundreds. But here, there was another, wedged between two modest homes. And earlier there had been one sitting in the middle of a rice field, like it was a lone boat on the ocean. And another greeted her across the road from the train station, next to a hardware store. A hardware store, of all places! Torii here, torii there. Sometimes not even on a full shrine. The one she was facing now was just a single altar by the roadside. Sometimes wood painted and shiny, sometimes plain gray stone. The country was speckled with torii like delicious candy-coated freckles. Just seeing them gave Jane a boost, and she raised her chin defiantly as she ascended to the crest of the hill.

The school was a rickety building with two floors that looked like the slightest jarring would pancake them together. As Jane approached the grounds, the chicken-clucking of idle chatter from the endless folds of pleated skirts and dangling strands of hair hushed. Dozens of dark-eyed faces turned to her for a brief moment of incredulity, and then the schoolyard noise returned in earnest.

A boy with gel-spiked hair and drumsticks of arms poking through the threadbare elbows of his uniform fell into an easy glide next to her. “Harroh,” he said, grinning. His teeth were crooked.

“Hello,” Jane answered politely. She hovered in indecision for a moment, then decided to take advantage of his interest to ask directions to the principal’s office. “Kohchoh-sensei no jimusho wa doko deshou ka?”

This brought a gasp from the boy that faded into a croak as he opened his mouth too wide. Jane disregarded him and strode through the main entrance. She’d find it herself.

 

Art Imitates Life 3

Sean came out from the shooting with shaking fists. “What the hell?” He slammed a fist into the soda machine before he caught her staring.

“I wouldn’t buy a soda from that machine for a week or so if I were you,” she said, watching it vibrate on its heavy haunches.

“How could you write that? What kind of sicko are you?” he demanded.

She tilted her head. “The kind of sicko who writes screenplays,” she said calmly. “What bothered you so much about it?”

“What both–” He sputtered. “What kind of woman is that? I can see where her son got his DNA!”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” she frowned.

“Maybe not,” he said crossly, “but it’s nothing comparing to blaming that poor girl for driving her husband to drink!”

She smiled. “Who else is she going to blame? Her son’s nowhere to be found, and here’s this girl claiming he hurt her. She’s a mother. Who’s she going to believe, her son by blood or her daughter-in-law?”

“She has to know what kind of person he is,” Sean argued.

“Maybe she does,” she said. “But he’s not around for her to yell at, now is he?”

He stared at her a moment. “You’re telling me she’s just blaming her because she’s the only one there?”

She returned his stare. “Sean,” she said gently. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

 

highway scene

(Three Word Wednesday prompt: Empty; Highway; Ignored)

A heavy gray mist hung over the highway like the shawl of an old woman over twisted and knobbled knots of her spine. Gray on gray, concrete and exhaust smoke, incorporeal and immutable, wrapped around each other in a dance of the depressing. The grass tufting along like a stalled train seemed almost obscene for its streak of green, although it was the mist’s wet touch that dyed it that color.

A hitchhiker stood, wearing a faded white cotton shirt and slinging a sagging, empty backpack from his shoulder. A sore thumb, sticking out his own sore thumb. In the not-nearly-dawn stillness, he was the only thing moving. Pretty soon the first of the day’s trucks would push through the curtain of gray and rumble by, shattering the stillness with the mighty groan of tires and perhaps the clear, flat blare of a horn. And the hitchhiker would be ignored for the first time, but not the last, that day.

 

a beginning 3

Now, Jane used to call herself Joan, for no other reason than she thought Jane was far too token a name. She didn’t want to share a name with Mary Janes, or plain Janes, or Jane Doe. And it was funny, because Jane was as plain as you could get. She had the brown hair for which the word mousy was coined, and she wore it close to her skull and manageable. She’d never met a blowdryer she spent more than five seconds with. Showers were a waste of time, when there was so much else in the world she’d rather be doing.

Mostly, Jane would rather be teaching. From girlhood, when she sat on the steps of the living room teaching her younger sister Lauren to read at age 2, she’d found her niche, her sense of importance, from being the one who knew things. It made her an expert and a role model, and it made prettier eyes than her own shine at her, despite the dullness of her complexion. Maybe she didn’t look like much, but Jane was worth something when she could teach.

The other thing she enjoyed was puzzling. She was off of regular crosswords and onto cryptics by the time she was 15; by the time sudoku started being popular in the United States, she was bored by most of the regular ones and sought out new varieties. It was sudoku, in fact, that cemented her love for Japan, despite the fact that in the country itself, it was never called sudoku; that wouldn’t be nearly exotic enough for the foreign-stuff-loving Japanese. No, they had to name it in English: Number Place, or nanpure for short. But that was too boring for American publishers, who had to invent a Japanese name for the puzzle. Who knew. Maybe by now Japanese people had picked up the American name for it. It certainly must sound at least as exotic as the English equivalent.

But it wasn’t sudoku that was the origin of Jane’s Japanophilia. No, that honor belonged to a photograph she’d seen when she was twelve. It looked like an outdoor tunnel, leafy green background suffused with sunlight and through the middle of it all, an endless set of orange gates like train tracks. They looked like pi symbols, or top-heavy letters H, and there was just one after another after another for what must have been miles. Jane was sure that if she ever found that place in the real world, it would transport her into another dimension entirely. And she wasn’t the type who thought much about other dimensions. She’d just never seen anything quite so otherworldly in her life.

The photo, she learned later, was of Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto, and the gates were called torii. Literally, “the place where the birds alight.” Jane started flapping her wings that very day, confident that if she just tried hard enough and flew far enough, she, too, would be able to alight atop the gate to a Shinto shrine and find her opening to another dimension.

 

a beginning 2

“Are you lost?”

The voice, boyish and barely inflected, came from beneath a braided sun hat, a kasa, standing four feet below her in the neighboring rice field. And it was in English– regular, gentle English, with a trace of an Australian accent. Jane jumped back.

The stranger was holding rice plants in each fist. He tilted his head back, and she could see the glimmer of a smile beneath the shadow cast by the kasa. Her eyes wandered further south and took in the loose-fitting cotton shirt and baggy pants, rolled up almost to his knees and yet still floating on the surface of the water that surrounded the evenly spaced spikes of green. “Are you lost?” he repeated. “Eigo o hanashimasu ka?“

“H…hanasu kedo,” she stuttered. Strange how it was easier to find her tongue in a foreign language than in her own. “I’m, I’m looking for the high school,” she said. “Kurimoto Kohkoh.“

He waded through the water and laid the plants down on the edge of the irrigation gutter. Then, bracing strong arms on the concrete blocks, launched himself over the small stream and onto the highway’s shoulder to stand face-to-face with her.

Jane’s knees went a little weak. It was such a natural gesture, so fluid and relaxed, all a single motion. Yet to summon the strength to make such a leap he must be built like a tiger. She let her gaze flicker to his hands, huge and callused, and the tanned skin of his arms, just as tight and muscled as she’d expected. And then he reached up, again in a gesture both larger than life and utterly effortless, and pulled off his kasa, revealing a tuft of wild, wheat-colored hair.

Squinty eyes blinked blue at her. He was young, and his pale face was out of place above the sun-tanned arms, as though it had been dropped atop the wrong body. He stretched out a hand. “You see the gas station on that corner?” he said, and Jane nodded, although she couldn’t turn her head to actually look. He was too interesting to turn away from. “Take a right there and keep walking. You’ll pass a bus stop on the corner, Kurimoto kohkoh-mae. Go up that side street to the top of the hill, and on the other side you’ll see the high school.”

“Oh my God, sounds like a trek,” Jane sighed, ruffling through her short-cropped hair with the fingers of one lean hand.

“In this weather, yeah,” the man agreed. “You picked a weird time of year to show up.”

“I guess,” she said. “I didn’t really think about when I was getting here, I just–”

“Got here, right?” He grinned as though he’d gone through the same thought process himself. Jane wondered if he had. Was he as enamored of the country as she had been? But his Japanese was so distressingly pedestrian– he spoke like he’d memorized it all from a phrasebook. She sort of wanted to beat him about the head for making foreigners look bad.

Then God got her for being self-righteous. An elderly farmer wearing an identical outfit was wading through the rows of rice and waving a hand. The farmer shouted something that Jane, to her great chagrin, couldn’t
for the life of her decipher. Served her right, she supposed. What had he said? He was going to put on the tea? Cha hairu zo, with a weird regional dialect, maybe?

The man in front of her waved back, and then turned toward Jane and wrinkled his brow at the sight of her quizzical expression. “It’s my name,” he said. “Child.”

“Oh.” Chairudo. That’s what she’d thought he’d said. Utterly pleased with herself, Jane forgot to ask why the heck a grown man would be going by the name Child.

“Well. I need to get back to work,” he said. “See you around. Welcome to Kurimoto.” And in one more stunningly easy gesture, he reached his arm up in a great sweep and plopped his kasa onto her head. Then he was jumping down into the field again and within a few blinks was deep in conversation with his farmer friend.

Jane stared after him a moment. “T- thank you,” she called out halfheartedly, but there was no sign that he’d heard her. Puzzled and feeling slightly lightheaded, she adjusted the kasa and trudged her weary way toward the gas station.

 

a beginning

Jane looked at her map again and ran a hand over her forehead. What planning genius had forgotten to name the roads? There was a name for each section of the city, and there were a few numbers, and that was the only clue she had. And it was like that through the whole country. The Japanese were clearly insane, she decided. It was too bad, because they were so very polite, but they had to be insane.

How do you deliver a letter without a street address? How do you say to a taxi driver what road to look for? What if, like Jane herself, you’re new to the area and need to find one single building in the mesh of maddening crisscrosses? It was bad enough that cars tended to drive on the sidewalks and that the side of the road was lined with a gutter full of rushing water that was just perfect for tripping and falling into if your heel caught on the ridiculously patterned pavement. Honestly, if the engineers had time to design those intricate spirals of pink and green cobblestones, you’d think they would take two seconds to give the streets names.

As it was, Jane was wedged in between a series of ugly-looking office buildings and a seemingly endless array of rice fields. Between horizontal and vertical, only a strip of highway keeping urban and rural from running all over each other in a sticky mess. America didn’t let its farms get this close to the cities. It ruined the whole idea of pristine farmland. Clearly the Japanese were insane.

That said, she loved them, and had loved them for years, which she figured gave her the unique ability to call them insane and know precisely what she was talking about. She couldn’t wait to get out of school and into this country doing what she did best, talking and teaching and translating. Now here she was, with a school-subsidized apartment waiting for her somewhere in this tiny town at the foot of a row of brown, muddy mountains, and aside from the man at the station who had cheerfully informed her at 9 a.m. that he was drunk, she had yet to have contact with a single local. And she was lost.

So far, Japan was failing to meet expectations.