Blossoms

I eyed the grain of rice suspiciously. It smelled old and moldy, but I didn’t care, I was a rat after all and the greenish hued grain would make a chewy snack…I didn’t need the grain, I found plenty of things to eat. I was intrigued by the man who’d been brought to this place the day before.

The man had placed the grain on the old fruit crate that served as the man’s table, one of four items of furniture in the twelve-by-twelve-foot hut that served as the man’s prison cell. There was another fruit crate and two flat futon like beds on opposite sides of the dirt floor to each side of the steel grate that served as a door. Each futon was actually two pallets covered with a reeking, mold-blackened mattress of old burlap bags.

In my two-year life span to date, I’d seen a total of fourteen men come and go in this depressing place.

‘Not depressing to me. Don’t get me wrong,’ I was talking to himself. I used to talk to my seven siblings, but they weren’t around anymore. Some went off to forage and never came back. Some were entrapped by the man that used to live here before this one. 

They had been eaten.

‘I actually like it here.’ I thought to myself.

I am Taro and live under the pallet across from the occupied pallet. Taro in Japanese means first born, or eldest. I have tunnels through the straw that are warm and full of bugs to eat.

I watched the man sitting on the pallet across the room. It was midafternoon so the candle was cold, the light coming in through the bars spread over the damp dirt floor was dim, but I could see the man just fine and could see that he was poised like a hawk on a limb…ready to pounce.

The man was not like the others. He smelled differently from the others. A smell I could not quite place. I knew the physical scents of flesh rot, inside and out, and the scent of a myriad of diseases that took the majority of the human men in this depressing place. I knew the smell of despair and insanity and hopelessness. These smells permeated the fetid air as the men wept and cried for their mothers near the end.

I felt the weight of the man’s stare. This was odd because only my nose and one eyeball were out from the hole in the burlap six feet across the floor, my eye a mere round spot as shiny as polished onyx and small as the head of a pin the seamstresses used when converting old uniforms into POW garb.

It was as if this man had a second set of eyeballs the old women in the nearby village called babla.

‘Only women have this thing, this babla…’ I thought. ‘Yet…maybe that’s not so.’ I was intrigued.

The man was emaciated like all the rest. The tatters of his grey clothing were hanging of his bones like old dirty laundry blown into tree branches after a deadly hurricane. His face was discolored with a miasma of storm colored healing bruises- ochres and indigos, his noise was cocked off to one side like a barnacle attached to a slab of pale white rock. His beard was crawling with lice. The man’s hand trembled not with palsy, but more like a forcefield of mind power to keep it still.

‘He doesn’t want to frighten me off. I fear he wants to eat me.’

The man sighed inaudibly as I retreated back into the darkness under the pallet.

I sniffed the air and detected not the anger or frustration of a foiled predator… but sadness.

“WONK WONK WONK WONK WONK WOOOOOOONK.”

A guard in Japanese militia garb, armed with a type 99 rifle came and opened the man’s gate. He didn’t speak, there was no point, the man did not understand Japanese. But the guard’s face bespoke of the kind of loathsome disgust reserved for the lowliest of God’s creatures…the ones that make no sense...why make lice? Why create ticks? Why make bed bugs? I knew I was on the list that was decoupaged onto the flat, robotical face of the Japanese guard.

The man in the cell ducked as he passed the guard, instinctively feeling the turn of the man’s pelvis as he brought his 99 up and prepared to bring it down.

I was impressed by the man’s ability to foresee such actions and understood why this particular man had lived as long as he had. ‘I wish you well today. I am fascinated by you and hope you live in the yard long enough for another night.’

This was my little prayer for the man that fascinated me.

The man came back. It was near dark. I watched.

The man sat heavily and hunched forward.

I could smell his salty tears. I knew that scent as well as so many others. I watched as the man’s shoulders heaved up and down in gentle waves like a tide going out. I looked up, remembering something like an alarm, like a person realizing he’s late for a class or a work shift. The man looked at the table and smiled when he saw that I had taken the rice he had left.

The man continued to leave a few grains of rice before going out to the yard or off to the pits for work duty. ‘Odd. Why does he do this? If he wants to eat me, he’d stay and sit like a hawk on a hill ready to pounce…like the previous one had.’ That one had been quite mad. Older, with grey in his scraggly beard, and reeking with insanity.

That one had gnawed my siblings, raw.

During the next two weeks, I followed him out to the yard where all the prisoners of war were corralled. I’d studied the yard during my lifespan and understood it was the highlight of all their days. The men mingled and smoked and shared. Some even laughed. That was a sound I liked.

The fence surrounding the yard was not sturdy and broken in places. It was as if the guards wanted the men to attempt escape. The more I studied the cold flat faces, the more I realized this was not speculation, but fact. Though they remained stoically rigid and appeared blasé, their black eyes sparkled with excitement and their boney white fingers tapped on their long guns as if to a jazzy dance beat in their heads.

Only the suicidal who’d given up all hope, or ones so diseased they urinated blood clambered over the fence. The shots rang out and the man who ran became a puppet made of flailing sticks, one’s whose strings had been cut, his blood a spray before him like a last shower before his meeting with his god.

The guards became animated, as if someone had wound the little keys in their backs; they chattered excitedly, and folded bills were exchanged. Head shots paid the best.

I discovered that my man was called Jacob, Jake, and even Booboo-J, although, I don’t get the last one. The men in the hut with the red scarf hanging over their door call him that. They’re funny and weird because they wear ladies’ kimonos and bright red lipstick. I still understand that Jake wants to eat me; he stupidly tries luring me with rice while I’m content feast off his lice and ticks and bugs. But I am still intrigued by him.

The days are getting warmer, and the camp is getting smellier. Fine by me. But I find myself concerned about Jake’s discomfort. His lips pull down at the edges, and he shudders often after returning from work duty. I’ve followed him on his duties. He mostly buries dead prisoners in the pits and though they smell fine to me, I can tell he is beyond repulsed.

He has just returned from field duty, which he actually likes, and has placed a few grains of rice from his slimy brown bowl on the table, and once again is staring at my hidey-hole.

The door slams open. ‘Whamp!’

“Yo brotha! What’s happ-“The dark brown skeleton with patches of nappy black fuzz on his scarred scalp stops before the crate. “Ain’t you caught tha lil fucker yet?”

Jake had jumped at the sudden disturbance, his right hand cocked back towards the place inside his mattress where the sharpened willow stake hid like a cobra in the grass. He looked annoyed but forced a cool attitude like an actor on a stage…he was good.

He even smiled a bit. “Hey Batman.” Jake ignored the question and said, “Can’t you knock?”

Batman laughed. He sounded like an elderly man dying of asthma. Quick as a lightening, bolt he pounced on the mattress above me and plunged a razor-sharp blade into it. ‘Thunk.’

“Hahahaheeee! I’ll get the fucka forya! Ya knows he’s in---”

“Quit it!” Jake had grabbed Batman around the throat and pulled him up. The blade had missed my head by an inch. “Don’t go messin with my space man. Not cool, okay? Chill”

“I didn’t mean nothin, just tryin ta help ya. Done you like bar-Bee-qued rat my man? Better n the vomitus swill they serve in this dinah.”

“No man. I don’t eat rats.”

“Then why the lil pile there?” Batman gestured towards the rice then looked at the stabbed futon and shrugged.

Jake said, “Never you mind. Maybe it's just a snack for later.”

Batman’s eyes narrowed, “Whatev I guess. Just seeing if youse wanted ta play some cards, weese gotta game goin on at Barry’s. Da hooka smellin sa-weet…”

“Yeah. Sure. Cool Batty, I’m gonna go down and clean up. I’ll be over in a bit, K?”

“Cool. Cool.” The tall scrawny black man glanced at the mattress for a spilt second. He shook his head and left.

Jake released a big sigh and looked with trepidation at the mattress across from him. He got up and pulled a rock from a small tunnel in the ground. From the small tunnel, he pulled a grimy linen pouch; from that he pulled a small brown morsel. With a slightly trembling hand he placed the morsel atop the grains of rice. He replaced his secret stash like a miser depositing wealth into his wall safe. He left.

The morsel was a hunk of steamed yam. My favorite.

The next morning, I followed Jake out to the yard. It was sunny but the air was crisp with a cool breeze wafting over the camp. It brought the scent of cherry blossoms.

A ghost of a smile lit his eyes, and it made me happy to detect it.

He’d smelled them too.

He walked cautiously to the fence facing the rising sun, with his eyes only, he kept watch on the guards. I was disgusted by their rapt attention.

Jake stopped at the fence and looked out at the hills surrounding the camp. The entire eastern hillside was alive with cheery pink splendor. I’d seen it twice before but had a feeling Jake had not experienced the blooming of the Hiroshima hills. It was cherry blossom season, that meant it was late March, the year was 1945.

Jake inhaled and hung to the fence like he was about to pass out. The mellow yellow sun was a half inch above the hills. The sky was streaked with wispy tangerine and fuchsia clouds, their flat bottoms a deep magenta and indigo haze. The hills were pink with fluttering cherry blossoms. A single tear slowly sank down Jake’s face and I resaw the entire scene through his tortured eyes.

The guards had grown bored. There was to be no shoot the guy game. They watched but went back to chattering about other stuff.

The next morning Jake left the hut. I did not follow. I made my way to the pink covered hills. It was my favorite time of the year. I rolled in the fallen petals and snacked on them like a grand poohbah snacking on grapes served by a wench. The petals were delicious and scented my fur better than the finest perfumes from France. As I rolled and languished in pure delight, my thoughts went to Jake. I worried for him.

On a whim, I scampered up an ancient cherry tree abloom with pink splendor. I looked around and selected the perfect branch. It was a mere twig, only four inches long, but densely covered in pale pink blossoms. I gnawed through the soft, gnarled wood and carried my prize back home.

Jake came back to the hut just after dark as usual. He sank to his pallets and rocked for a minute with his head in his hands. I smelled his tears. He’d been on pit duty. He slumped to his side as if ready to die but with weakly shaking skeletal hands, he lit the stub of his candle. He sank back with his eyes closed.

As I watched, his eyes flickered open. Then widened. He sat back up and leaned towards the crate. For the first time since I’d seen this man, he smiled a real one. He reached out a tentative hand a touched the delicate petals of the blossom-laden twig on the crate. Tears streamed down his face but in a happy way I’d never seen in this place.

Jake brought forth from his hidey hole rice, a yam hunk, and a crust of bread only half moldy with green. He put them on the table and laid back, cradling the cherry blossom twig and weeping.

I came out and nibbled the yam. Jake’s wet eyes only watched. He did not want to eat me. He said, “I miss my dog most of all. His name is Max. Is it okay if I call you that?”

I nodded. He burst into tears.

‘Whachunk!’ The door burst open.

Batman started to say something but saw me on the crate, and still lightening quick, slammed his fist down upon it, “Ha! Gotcha!”

He did have me! My reflexes turned me from the crate tabletop as the door opened but he’d dropped his bony hand upon my tail. My feet scrabbled on the soft wood, and I involuntarily screeched.

Jake lunged at the black man and wrapped his hands around his throat. Batman let go of me and I stumbled of the crate in a daze. Batman whirled on Jake, his blade flashed and came down. Jake cried out as the blade went into his chest just under his left armpit. Jake crumpled to the dirt floor, clutching his stab wound. His terrified eyes did not follow Batman as he fled out the door; they searched the floor across the hut …for me.

Jake’s last words were, “Thank you little friend. My little Taro.”