Akira S. Mura

Second Place: Fiction

“Fujiwhara” 
by Akira S. Mura
11th grade, West Orange High School

—

He doesn’t sleep, but sometimes he dances. That was all most would say about the Burgundy Man. It was probably because urban legends are different in the country; not the city kind of country, with roaming cattle and just few enough houses to feel spacious. The real country, where a pollen allergy is a death sentence, and you can go a hundred miles without seeing something breathe. You don’t have police out there, or hospitals, really. If something’s not done, then it isn’t done. The why isn’t important. 

But youth and free time can be a bitter marriage. I was seventeen and had already done one thing my father, my Chichioya, had told me never to do: enlist. Come fall a bus would arrive and take me to an army base somewhere south. It was late afternoon when I told him, and afterward he cried in the next room while I sat on my narrow bed and tried not to listen. His voice had fractured during the shouting, and he’d begun to whimper softly into my auntie’s shoulder. “How many more of our boys need to die, just to prove they’re American?” American is the only thing I ever was, but I’d given up telling him that; to him every soldier was JiJi. Guilt brushed up against anger and I became restless. I needed to walk.

Leaving behind our squat, dusty house and the tremendous strawberry fields we lived on, I walked until the sun bobbed on the horizon. There’d be dinner soon, one of my last with my Chichi and my brothers—but I didn’t go home, instead falling into the grass and letting my eyes wander. A slip of red drifted over a distant hill, a kite swaying back and forth like some insomniac finch in air-dance. He doesn’t sleep, but sometimes he dances. What I did next is obvious; the perfect, harmless rebellion. Just a joke between me and myself. I never saw who was flying the kite and I never looked, but in the moment, I owed them my life.

The land he supposedly lived on was barren, even by the standards of the Grass Sea. The closest things to shifting elevation were shallow craters and the corroded hulls of dead tanks; the area had been a battlefield, spared the atomics but treated to every other ministration of war. Sometimes we joked that it was all the corpses in the soil that made the strawberries grow so sweetly. In hindsight I looked at war like that field, serene chaos, something I could take in during a walk on a summer day and believe amounted only to crickets and machine death. 

Instead of the Burgundy Man, I found the woods. A tiny forest lofted over the brush and long grasses, with thick trees of dark wood like I’d never seen before. I spent the night there, enamored with dense, alien life; I even found a family of wolves, small and brown, that I watched from a distance. Sunbeams parted the canopy in shafts, licking at their backs, so when they sprinted, tufts of light trailed from their coats and the red from the animals they caught ran from their snouts like liquid fire. 

I left in the early morning, feeling at ease enough to face my family. But as I did I noticed a figure down the road. He was a white man, indistinct besides that he was very tall, and wearing a boxy, palpably filthy jacket that looked suffocating even at sunrise. I panicked quietly, falling into a crouch only because it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. After some long uneventful minutes, I left, staying wide of the road. Before I passed I saw the inside of his coat. Red, certainly, though all I saw was a thin strip of the fabric turned out by the wind.

After that night I spent my dinner in the woods, though Chichi berated me for it every morning. I saw the stranger regularly but didn’t think much about it. I’d convinced myself he was harmless, even after I realized he came incrementally closer each time we met. One night, after the first leaves had turned, I passed a lone boar. We looked at each other, and it sniffed at me, and we went our separate ways. 

I’d started thinking of the wolves as mine, and it became routine to tail them as they came upon a rabbit or a duck. Instead they found the boar in a clearing. The stranger stepped out from behind a tree on the other side and twirled. The wolves rushed forward, tearing into the boar’s sides with frenzy. He began dancing silently, flashing the inside of his coat. It was indeed strawberry red. A wolf went flying and folded against a branch, hanging there as the stranger disappeared in a pirouette then returned with the inverse motion, like Fujiwhara, the meeting of two typhoons. The whole of his coat turned the color of bubblegum and blood as another wolf’s head was parted to the neck. He continued, shedding ballet for a ballroom waltz while the boar thrashed, leaving the little wolves like smashed fruit on the ground, warm and seeping. He finished his dance, coat dripping a sickly-sweet color. The boar eyed me again with its guts tumbling from its flank, swaying softly. The stranger bowed. The boar toppled.

Chichi didn’t scold me when I returned home, nor did he acknowledge the dry, dark blood that came to my knees. He didn’t speak to me at all, and when everyone else at home followed suit, I went to bed without changing. The army came the next morning, but I’d left an hour earlier with my things after waking up from night-terrors, heading north. Chichi saw me go from his chair among the fields and surprised me with a wave goodbye. My trouble sleeping persists, but there’s plenty of clubs where I am, and I’ve gotten quite good at dancing.