The Red Shark - Chapter 5

A few days after my third birthday, my mother decided I was going to learn to write.

It was early, and the mist was so thick that the window showed nothing but gray. I was sitting on the floor of our room with a stick, scratching lines into the film of grime that collects on the stones no matter how often she sweeps. She was mending one of my tunics. Her hair was tied up loosely, and a few red strands kept falling into her face. When I looked up, she was watching me with an expression I hadn’t seen on her before.

“Arashi,” she said. “Come sit with me, my little storm.”

I went over, playing the curious toddler. She unrolled a small sheet of rice paper on the low table, set a brush next to it and poured a little ink into a dish.

“It’s time you learned to read and write,” she said. “You’re growing fast. In this village, what you know matters as much as how strong you are.”

Three years old. Back in my old life, kids that age drew on the walls with crayons. But this was Kirigakure, where childhood didn’t last long, and in a clan like ours anything you learned early might keep you alive later.

There was also a problem she didn’t know about. I could already read some Japanese, mostly kana and a handful of kanji picked up from years of anime, manga and games. If I learned too quickly, she’d notice. I made a note to be slow.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to pretend very hard.

She showed me the first character, あ, in three smooth strokes, the ink sinking evenly into the paper. Then she put the brush in my hand and folded her fingers over mine. “Like this. Even pressure. Don’t hesitate.”

I tried on my own. The line wobbled, and the ink pooled at the end of the stroke in a fat black drop. Knowing what a character looks like turns out to have very little to do with making one with a brush.

She shook her head. She wasn’t angry; she had the same look on her face as before. “Again. It has to be right. A ninja’s hand doesn’t shake.”

That was how it started, and it didn’t let up.

Every morning after rice and fish, she cleared the table and set out the paper, the brush and the ink. “Sit up straight.” She’d fix my shoulders with two fingers. “Writing is discipline. It trains your head as much as your hand.” Hiragana first, then katakana. She wrote each character once, perfectly, and then watched me try. If a line came out too thick or too thin, she handed me a damp cloth, and I wiped it out and started over. “No. Look how it bleeds. Control the flow. Again.”

I’d never seen this side of her. My mother was the one who put herbal paste on scraped knees and told stories about the sea until I fell asleep. At the writing table she turned into a drill sergeant. As soon as the lesson ended she was herself again, laughing and hugging me as if nothing had happened.

It took me a few weeks to understand why. She was the tenth wife, the foreigner, the one people watched. Being gentle was how she got through her days here. Under that she was hard, and I could only guess at what had made her that way before she came to Kirigakure. She pushed me because she knew nobody else would go easy on me.

“You’re special, Arashi,” she told me once, during one of the rare breaks, with her hand on my head. “But special things need polishing before they shine.”

My fingers cramped, and my hands were black with ink most days. She rarely praised me. “Better.” “Closer.” When she did, it meant more to me than any sweet.

I’d also noticed something I kept to myself. Holding a brush steady and holding chakra steady were nearly the same skill. In both cases you were guiding something liquid so it went exactly where you wanted and no farther. Every morning at her table was extra practice for what I did at night.

The chakra training hadn’t stopped. Sticking leaves to my forehead for a few minutes had gotten easy, and easy wasn’t teaching me anything anymore. In a real fight nobody would let me lie still and concentrate. I needed to hold chakra while I moved, while I talked, while people shouted around me.

So I made a new rule for myself: one leaf, stuck to my skin under my clothes, all day long.

It sounded simple until I tried it.

I’d press the leaf against my chest before getting up in the morning and start a small, steady flow of chakra to keep it there. Then I’d get out of bed, and that was usually the end of it. Walking jolted it loose. Laughing at something Rokuta said made it slide. One sneeze and it was somewhere down inside my shirt, scratching my stomach. My chakra still rose and dropped with whatever my body was doing, and every rise or drop cost me the leaf.

I changed my approach. Instead of pushing chakra at the leaf whenever it started to slip, I kept a thin, constant loop running under the skin, like a battery on a trickle charge. In the mornings I sat in the common room scratching at the floor with my stick while the mothers talked over tea, and each time the leaf began to slide, I steadied it without stopping what I was doing. The noise made it harder. Dishes clattering, kids yelling, someone always calling someone else’s name.

It took weeks. Leaves fell out of my shirt during lunch, during naps, and once right in front of Akemi, who picked it up, handed it back and said I’d been rolling around in the garden again. Then one day it lasted until after lunch. By the middle of the year it lasted from morning to night.

That was when I switched to stones.

Leaves are light, and they forgive mistakes. I needed something with weight, something that would fall the moment I slacked off. While Yori had her back turned, I picked a few small, smooth pebbles from the edge of the garden.

The first one hit the floor before I’d finished setting it on my palm. It needed more chakra, but too much would wear me out or show on my face, so I had to find the right amount. I worked at it at night, the way I used to tune a circuit: a little more, a little less, test again. Pebbles clicked across the floor in the dark, and my head ached. After a few days one stayed on my palm for a few seconds, and soon after that, for minutes.

Then I moved it under my shirt, against my ribs. It pulled down much harder than the leaf ever had, and I had to keep adjusting all day.

Near the end of the year there was a morning when I sat at my mother’s table with a pebble against my chest and a brush in my hand and wrote the whole row of katakana she’d set for me. She looked it over for a long time.

“Better,” she said.

The pebble hadn’t moved since breakfast.

———

Author’s Note

Thank you for reading! Advanced chapters of The Red Shark are on my Patreon, and you’ll find my other stories right here on Parallel World.

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