there in the center of his chest surrounded by blackened skin was the line-drawing of a dragon, wings folded in, claws wrapped around a sword. He'd had that tattoo done on his eighteenth birthday to match his father's. Haruki men had dragon tattoos going back to the reformation when they'd once been a powerful clan. Having the symbol tattooed on their backs was to remind them that they'd once worn the symbol proudly on the backs of their armor. He remembered how much the tattoo had hurt and how he'd bloodied his lip by biting down on it, damned if he'd show pain in front of his father.
Daddy is on backwards, his son had said.
How had the tattoo moved from his back to his front?
That's impossible unless...
He stared imploringly at his wife and son.
"I am Itoro Haruki," he said.
They shook their heads.
Then he realized that Itoro Haruki had died in that train station. Perhaps by heart attack or by the explosion sucking the oxygen from his lungs or by the sheer weight of the men who'd melted together, the man who'd once been Itoro Haruki was dead. He'd died, but his spirit had lived on, needing desperately to return to his family. Like the skin from the little schoolgirl or the skin-birds hanging from the line, his mortal remains had lived on after his death, striving to find a home for his memories.
His body was that of the man behind him.
His soul was his own.
So who was he?
He became as frightened as the woman he'd thought was his wife as he realized that he did not have the answer, might never have the answer, and was as lost as the woman on the bridge who could only sing that song as the bodies bobbed past and Hiroshima fell all around them.
***
Story Notes: I was invited to an anthology called A Dark and Deadly Valley. The idea was to write horror stories based on different events of WW II. I wasn’t given a choice. The editor assigned the bombing of Hiroshima to me and I was daunted. Not only was it a terrible thing for the Japanese, but it was also a terrible thing to have done. It was a lose-lose, and I was supposed to write about it somehow without doing a pastiche or inadvertently being disrespectful. Consequently, I spent a lot of time researching the event. What happened in the train station actually happened, hundreds of men melted together as they waited to go to work. So I began there and focused my story on the nature of identity.
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 12
The Crossing of Aldo Ray
Starring Aldo Ray as a father who only wants to
return to America in order to save his child
“Puts the whole mess of illegal border crossing and desperation in a whole new light.”
–Homeland Security Weekly
Soundtrack by Blue Oyster Cult
“Deep in each man is theknowledge that something
knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot
be fled nor hid from.”
—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
In the long cold evening with the darkness dripping from the sky, I stood among them all. I, Aldo Ray, was ready to cross. I was ready to die. I was ready to do anything so long as I could get home. I had to get to my son. He had been taken and here I was, caught on the wrong side of the border.
A breeze smelling of sage and tumbleweeds swept across us. I swayed with those around me, allowing the wind to push me as if I were a stalk of wheat or a wildflower along the side of the road. To do anything else would be human, and they were far removed from human.
So was I.
We moved forward into the fence. We pressed as one. I could feel it give. I could feel it groan. In answer, we all groaned, adding our miserable symphony to the wind that raced along the thin barrier of metal all the way to the Pacific Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other.
We had walked for two days, dragging, tripping, stumbling through torpid heat and bone-chilling cold. El muertos did not feel anything anymore, but for us animados it was all too real. We wanted to wipe the sweat from our faces and clutch our arms to our bodies, but we could not. El caminar muertos never would. The walking dead felt nothing. Nothing except the need to feed, to find that which they had lost, to move towards something they could