Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
General Yamamoto Softens
Friday, May 28th, 2010
When Women’s Battle College went on Candlemas break, Dana Yamamoto went home to Japan. She took the Orient Express to the hydrofoil from Vladivostok, caught the Kyoto Limited, then shouldered her pack and walked through the blossoming streets to her mother’s high wooden house. When she entered the courtyard, the General chided her.
“I would have sent a chair,” she said.
“I know, Mother.”
“Well: welcome back,” said the General.
They sat in the spring silence and drank tea, looking out at the rock garden; Dana saw that her mother had raked it into a new pattern.
“What do you see in the sand, Mother?” Dana asked suddenly.
Her mother took a sip of tea, set down her cup, fastened her eyes on a river rock near the center of the waves of stone.
“Lives I could have saved,” General Yamamoto replied. “Wheels that turned too quickly.”
Dana put out a hand and found that her mother’s arm was living bone clothed in flesh, warm to the touch; somehow she had expected river stone.
“Mother!” She said. “I am studying with Dr Fujiwara. I will learn to save the lives, to slow the wheels.”
General Yamamoto looked at her with the kindest eyes Dana had ever seen in her mother, and did not tell Dana that she too had studied hard for the same end.
Instead she said, “I know, Daughter.”
Until Death
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
“Listen,” she says. “The way the nighttime air sings through the trees. Nature is brilliant. I love this world, I love this life, and I love you.”
Top down on the stolen Corvette you’re driving at a nick over a hundred fifty, all you can hear is the roar of the exhaust and the rush of wind. Her hair whips around and around and the smile on her face is angelic and mischievous at the same time.
You can believe that she really does love you, even with the trail of destruction left behind her, the smell of boiled blood and seared ozone, the laser pistol pressed to your side.
She digs the weapon into your ribs and says, “Go faster.”
“How far are we going?” you ask.
“As far as we can,” she says. “We’ll know when we’re there.”
Cities on fire, her eyes ablaze with the power of life and death, and you alone between her and man’s total obliteration. She never expected to meet someone like you, she says. She was supposed to kill everyone. Men fall short of her expectations. Always. Maybe, she says, you will be different.
“Our love will guide us,” she says. You believe her. It’s not that she cannot lie, rather that she doesn’t need to. The gun in your side, the weapons in orbit, her smile. To you they are one and the same, all devastatingly precise. Her power over you is absolute.
You decide you have to try, even if it kills you.
“Yes,” you say. “Yes, I love you. I will go with you.”
Her eyes soften, for just a moment. She’s thinking, processing, judging.
“I believe you,” she says.
Many things blur together. Time and space expand, contract, swirl. She takes your hands off the wheel. She climbs on your lap. She kisses you. She takes control. She pushes the accelerator to the floor. She pulls the trigger.
The nighttime air sings through the trees. It sings of love and death. It sings loudly.
Who knows what happens after that?