Ending (Starting)

By Eline

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Jien always asks Gojyo that question before he goes to work these days.

Gojyo's happy that Jien has a job and that things are working out, of course. But it means that Gojyo has to stay home--alone with Mom.

School had never really worked out. Gojyo could get most of it if he concentrated on the lessons, but that was pretty hard to do when people tripped him up in the aisles and recess-time was a never-ending war. Jien had not insisted that he should stick to it after Gojyo started to stay away from school and shied away from all the other children who lived nearby. The youkai children and the human children alike. Even Jien knows that children can be exceptionally cruel.

Be a good boy. Stay at home with Mom. Watch Mom. Help do the laundry. And perhaps take a bath too.

Gojyo would like to go out after doing his chores. There are hares and rodents he would like to catch in the shady patch of woods near their house. But he dares not. Just last week, Mom had almost set herself and the kitchen on fire. And almost two weeks before that, the children from the settlement down the road had thrown clods of earth and pebbles at him when they spied him sulking in the long grass.

So he nods at his older brother and dutifully waves as Jien goes to work. The foreman would not have any children running around underfoot, and there was the matter of Gojyo's unmistakable hair . . .

Gojyo tiptoes to Mom's room to see if she is awake but she is not there. To his relief, she is wringing out the clothes in the yard and hanging them out to dry on the sagging clothesline. It is something so routine that she can remember to soak their clothing overnight and hang them out to dry the next. She does not, however, remark on the increasingly threadbare and torn state of the clothes in her hands.

Gojyo tries to help by discreetly dragging the washtubs away and emptying them. She does not seem to notice him at all and returns to the house, her eyes vacant and almost as expressionless as stone.

Tailing her at a safe distance, Gojyo watches as his Mom goes into the kitchen and picks up odds and ends as though she intends to tidy the place up. She forgets whatever her purpose is soon enough and wanders on.

Satisfied that she is not going to fly off the handle, Gojyo takes his bath and remembers to scrub everywhere because water is not to be wasted in their house for slapdash washes. Afterwards there is nothing much for him to do. Jien has forbidden him to smoke and he has no money to buy any cigarettes. It isn't a good habit, but it's something he does to pass the time when sulking alone in dark corners, pretending to be invisible.

He dozes off sometime in the afternoon, waking up to the familiar and dreaded sound of Mom having a tantrum. When she is like this, Gojyo knows that he should hide. Jien always tells him to hide but he cannot.

With fear tying knots in his belly, he listens as she calls for Jien. He listens as she calls for the man who is their father. But that soon degenerates into a vicious spat of name-calling and cuss words as she stamps back and forth. Then she is crying and that noise is Gojyo's undoing because he cannot stand to hear her cry. It is the saddest sound in the world and like a moth to a flame, he always creeps out to find his mother even though there is nothing he can do to stop her from crying.

He is relieved that she has not found anything to break this time in her wanderings about the house. Hiding behind the staircase, Gojyo watches his mother stagger through the kitchen and then out into the backyard. Should he follow? Make sure she doesn't wander off in just her housedress and no shoes? He hesitates because the he knows that the sight of him isn't going to make things any better. The sight of him with his red hair and eyes would drive her even deeper into madness--this he knew from painful experience.

She is back again soon enough but she is silent this time and Gojyo does not hear her until she has seen his bright red hair under the stairs.

She stalks him barefooted across the floor and Gojyo knows that he should run. He does, but he runs the wrong way as usual. She has cornered him and her hand sends him stumbling to the floor.

Her nails rake his cheek and he wonders why he cannot move. Is it because of her silent tears?

She has the axe. The axe that Jien had sharpened a few days ago to cut wood for the iron stove that served as their sole heat source. Gojyo had helped him tie the cut branches into bundles that evening.

And Gojyo knows that he is going to die.

Mom is a fairly tall woman. Taller still when she looms over him at times like this.

From that day onwards, Gojyo will always remember his mother as a tall woman--eternally taller than he was as she loomed up in his dreams. An angel, terrible and beautiful all at once. He knows that he would gladly die for her if only she would stop crying.

Gojyo waits for death to come down on him, but it never comes. Instead, a red flower appears on his mother's breast and she crumples to the floor without a sound.

Jien stands behind her body, crying with a sword in his hand.

Gojyo never knew how long that tableau held. He must have blinked at least once, because Jien is not there when the weak rays of the morning sun streams in from the broken window, dispelling the gloom but not the nightmare on the floor.

Inch by inch, Gojyo forces himself to move. He had been staring at Mom for almost the entire night and his legs are numb.

He stumbles out onto the back porch in the dim light of dawn, blinking his aching eyes. It seems so quiet--unnaturally quiet. The withering long grass and weed patches are still. No birds, no small rodents scavenging amongst the debris.

The emptiness inside him expands so much that Gojyo feels that he might burst just so that the hole inside him could become one with the nothingness outside. The emptiness tells him that Jien was not coming back. Would never come back again to tell him to take a bath or eat his vegetables.

*Something* needed doing. Later, he might be able to think about what he would do. A single purpose rules the emptiness within him now--a task he must do before he could do anything else.

Gojyo drags in an old tarpaulin from the backyard--it had been used once to cover the wood supply in better days. It never occurs to him to be scared as he rolls his mother onto the tarp, folding half of it over her to cover her terrible, beautiful face.

He goes out to the yard and fetches the shovel from the trunk. They seldom had any use for the long-handled shovel and it is dull and rusted with the patina of time.

At the far corner of the property that surrounds their house is a copse of straggly trees. The ground here is softer, though no less rocky. The shovel is of little use. He pries stone after stone from the soil and takes up the shovel again until he strikes another stone. It takes Gojyo the better part of the day to hollow out a reasonably sized (Mom-sized) hole in the ground.

When he returns to the house, he realises that his hands are all bloody from the erupted blisters. The cold water stings the ruins of his hands as he washes them, but he wants to have clean hands for what he's going to do next.

He cannot lift her body up with his aching arms. He is still too small and skinny like his brother always said he was. Gojyo drags the tarp with her body in it out to the backyard, barely even wincing every time it thuds against the aged wood on the way down the sagging porch steps. It is getting late and there is a damp, sharp smell of autumn rain in the air.

He buries the body in the shallow grave, piling the rocks on the tarp first and then flattening the crumbly soil over them as the storm clouds gather overhead.

His task is done but something is missing. As the first drops of rain fall, Gojyo searches the weed-choked lot around the house until he has found what he wants.

He returns to stand over his mother's grave and lets the rain come down, drowning the tiny flowers he has placed in the soil.

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