"If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you meet your father, kill your father. Free from everything, bound by nothing. Live your life as given."

This, too, tastes sharp and addicting, heady and ashen and needed. He watches the rain comes down and is admonished.

The feel of a broom in his hands is familiar as the cigarette clenched between his fingers, red leaves on the ground, a world gone suddenly unsteady. Koumyou Sanzo's smile was something, he thinks, that could destroy anyone and make them over again, inexorable as a river flowing to the sea. He does not know how anyone could have looked at that smile -- how those shit priests could have looked at that smile -- and not been changed. Gravity, orbit; worlds would fall into the pull of that smile.

The cigarette is down to the filter, and the rain isn't stopping, and Genjo Sanzo rubs out the stub on the lid of an empty beer can. When he lifts his hand from the glass of the window's pane, a faint, heat-fogged outline is left behind.

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