The Kami Way

Posted on Wed 28th Feb, 2018 @ 9:11pm by

495 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: A Phaser as Deadly as a Candlestick
Location: Starbase 109, Deck 1554

After lying in bed staring at the ceiling for most of the day, Aiko MacBeth got up, put on her oversized charcoal sweater and a pair of rainbow-patterned tights, and told her dad she was going for a walk. At the back door, she added her ultramarine blue slip-on sneakers and headed out. In the park enclosed in the center of the block, she could hear the sound of the village blacksmith's hammer ringing on the anvil. A small crowd of tourists had gathered; Aiko hoped Mr. Hibben was making his wrought-iron roses, not knife blades as he sometimes did. The possibility made Aiko avoid the forge, though, and the alley between her family shop and the quilt store held unpleasant memories.

She gravitated toward the west side of the park. There was an alley there as well, between the musical instrument store the Yamaha family ran, and the Suzuki's practice and lesson hall. Absently, and not for the first time, Aiko wondered why so many people of Japanese descent had been drawn to the "American" village.

On First Street, she turned right, up the North River toward the cedar and cypress forest. She passed the pebbly little beach where she'd learned to swim. No families were there, no teenagers out of school. A single gray crane with bright blue head plumage waded in the shallows near the far bank, its skinny neck bobbing its head back and forth as it searched for food in the water. Death, she thought. What is it Doctor Addams said? "Life for the spider is death for the fly."

The road turned from tessellated pavers to random cobblestones. In the trees, a tiny red wooden house sat on a slab of mossy rock. Aiko paused, facing it. It was a hokora, a shrine to a neighborhood spirit -- the sort her Scots ancestors would have called a landwight. She wished she'd thought to bring a nut bar, mixed nuts stuck together with honey. You could call it an offering to the kami, or just feeding the squirrels, but she liked to do it when she came out this way. She clapped her hands to draw the Kami's attention, and then paused. She should pray, she thought, but what should she pray for? A swift passage through the bardo for the man whose body she'd found, and for Colonel Drake? Somehow, she suspected that neither one of them had reached enlightenment, yet.



She looked upriver, thought about going up to the main shrine. But no... what she needed now was not to obsess about the meanings of life and death and everything; but just to sit, and to be. She turned down-river instead, walking back toward the bridge. Perhaps she'd just sit and watch the water flow, and the fish swim; maybe she'd play a game of pooh sticks.

 

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