Papa November

by Rudi Dornemann

The shortwave radio still sat on the desk at the back of the cabin and it felt like more than luck when Shelly found a numbers station on her first run down the dial. A woman’s voice read the numbers, calm, never pausing for breath, reciting five-digit combinations.

When she was young, Shelly’s grandfather only gave those stations a few seconds if they found one during the day. They’d move on to more interesting transmissions, accented voices from places she’d find in the old atlas with musty-sweet pages. At night, he’d let the numbers ramble.

“Soothing,” he’d say, and make her cocoa in a metal cup. “Codes sent around the world for spies, supposedly.” He’d open another beer, grandma would read fat historical paperbacks, and Shelly would doze off.

The monotone numbers soothed her now, while her mind spun questions for morning. Take or avoid the interstate? Go north to the city?  How near was a town where she could top off the tank? The further she got tomorrow, the better.

“I know how you think,” Glen always said. “You’ll never leave me ’cause I’ll guess where you’re going before you even get there.”

But he hadn’t known she would leave. She hadn’t known until she drove past work and onto the onramp. Then she couldn’t go back — even if she got home by five like everything was normal, he would know.

The radio voice repeated the call sign “Papa November Pa-pa Nov-em-ber,” and maybe Shelly did doze, because a man unfolded himself from the air up near the ceiling, his gray skin nearly silver in the light of the bare bulb. He climbed down the dresser and looked at her.

She tried to speak, but all the muscles in her throat and neck froze rigid. The man’s shoulders were twisted, one leg was too short, one foot too big. He stared as if seeing into her, and evened out. He had Glen’s eyes and forehead, then he didn’t; there was a hint of grandpa’s many-times broken nose, then his face went mannequin blank.

Shelly felt her lips moving with the numbers, as if she knew them.

The gray man replied with codes of his own: “35-A14, 24-C9, 63-J2…”

She woke just before dawn with a hunch. In the atlas, she saw she was right: those were pages and map-grid coordinates. Places she could go.

Glen might know her, but he didn’t know Papa November.

Dr. Fujiwara’s Several Surprises

by Kat Beyer

Students at the Women’s Battle College had awaited the arrival of Dr. Fujiwara for months. They saw a tiny, wizened old woman in an indigo wrap jacket, sword stuck in her obi—not surprising. But she had short, spiky hair dyed fire engine red and wore jeans instead of hakama—quite surprising.

“Give my regards to your mother, Miss Mountain-root,” she said to Dana Yamamoto. She didn’t say “your mother the General” but all the students heard it.

“Your name isn’t Mountain-root,” pointed out Mirabelle Hayes.

“It is, actually,” replied Dana.

Dr. Fujiwara passed into the school. She (and the contents of her covered cart) disappeared for a week.

Monday morning, Martial Principles Class A arrived at the dojo to find a teahouse built on a cotton pad in the middle of the mat. Dr. Fujiwara waited beside it.

The door to the teahouse stood only three feet high. The students grumbled, finding they had to remove their weapons to avoid knocking them against the door frame; then the low height of the door forced them to bow as they entered. Crowded inside, they looked at each other curiously. Dr. Fujiwara had not become famous for making tea.

“Don’t,” said Dana when she saw Mirabelle gird herself to ask why they were studying tea instead of sword work. Mirabelle looked startled and kept quiet.

“You will wonder why I am teaching you about tea instead of sword work,” said Dr. Fujiwara, looking straight at Mirabelle. “I will tell you.  I teach this for the sake of the dead. When I was young like you, I thought I had a calm mind, and knew how to do honor to my enemy. I thought I had compassion. I understood none of these things: I killed one hundred twenty-one people in duels or in battle against the Chinese before I understood,” she went on, nodding to Bao-Yu Zheng as she spoke. “Since then, I have taken only three lives, those of people who insisted there was no other way.”

No one breathed.

“Make no mistake, you are being taught the art of killing. Yet your teachers also teach compassion here; grammar and arithmetic too. Study only killing, and you will be only killers. Study all that they teach, and you may yet become honorable warriors.”

She did not seem to notice the silence.

“We will begin with the mixing of the tea.”