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Upon A Red Stain
I've written a short story for a class at uni, but...I think I might need your help to get it right. Any Americans on the friends list, please to be helping me keep my US-speak consistent. To the one or two of you who I know can probably pick factual mistakes from a mile away (madshutterbug and slave2tehtink, this is for you...), please to be nitpicking.

I'd like to know about problems or mistakes before I hand this in!




All good fairytales begin once upon a time, long before anyone can remember hearing them and long after everyone forgets why the stories were told in the first place. They just sit quietly with their legs crossed beneath them, thinking about magic rings and dragons’ treasure and how maybe, just maybe if you’re very, very lucky (and also happen to be in Japan), a white crane can make wishes come true.

No one actually believes it, of course. That’s just dumb.

*****

When he looks back on it later, this is how it begins.

“Hey, Silk!”

They’re young men, maybe twenty-three at most. Probably less than that. They’d be lucky to total forty-five between the pair.

They have boots that should be too heavy to jog in, dog tags, hair cropped into identical high and tight bristles that fall well short of the delicate skin on the backs of their necks. One of them – the shorter one, maybe a little less broad across the shoulders – has a row of tiny black musical notes creeping out from under his camouflage jacket, the sleeves rolled into tight white cuffs above each elbow.

“You saw it, you stopped us, you can get it out.”

“Not happening, buddy. We’re being timed on this one.”

Silk sighs, scratching at his notes. Most people don’t recognise it when they see it, but he has the pick up and the first eight measures of Minnie the Moocher crawling along his bicep. “Why’d you tell me if you weren’t going to do shit?”

“I didn’t know you were going to channel Francis of fucking Assisi, that’s why. Besides, I didn’t know what it was when I saw it.”

“Well, we can’t leave it here.”

It’s tangled in a mass of wire. One wing is stabbed right through, ragged and bleeding and muddy. The barbs on the wire gleam in the rain.

“Why not?”

Emmy would never forgive him if he walked away, but Mancini doesn’t need to know he still answers to his little sister. She’s got this look, that’s the problem – damned if he knows how she does it, but saying no always feels like he just punted a puppy across the room. “I’ll get it. You want to be a total pussy, scared of a bird…” Crawling forward cautiously and “Ow! Sonofa…it bit me!”

Emmy is also the only person he knows who can make the word ‘Adam’ come out like she’s cussing at him…but maybe that’s what sisters are for. Especially when they’re fifteen.

“Would you just…oh, you stupid…damn it, stay still.”

He throws his jacket over its head, claws and flailing wings and that long snake neck snapping out to get at his eyes. When he crawls out backwards there is mud on his knees and blood on his face. Loose white feathers are plastered flat against his t-shirt.

“Welcome back, Dr Doolittle.”

“Shut your face.” Silk smiles as he says it, shifting his grip to hold more gently. The bird rattles its beak angrily, but at least it doesn’t seem to be fighting as hard now. “We were going through town anyway. Find a vet, drop this off, double time back to Foster and no extra PT for good little boys.”

“If we’re late and Stafford asks, I’ll just tell him you were helping a boy scout cross the road, okay?”

“Yeah. Sure you will…”

They keep running, heavy boots sloshing through puddles. Silk cradles the crane in his arms as carefully as he can.

The chain of command in the United States Marine Corps does not, on the whole, encourage fairytales.

*****

Grey sky a bitter sting
Rainclouds, a crane on the wing
All out beyond horizons
Grey sky…

*****

Gunpowder. Sugar. Noodles frying in a pan, tipped on a plastic plate and drenched in soy sauce. Wet blacktop. People…there must be thousands of people here.

They play at all the festivals. It makes the locals like them better, especially if they get free range of the base. Besides, this one comes with free fireworks.

A ten minute break is only just long enough to slather more lip balm on, check the valves, grease up the slide on third – it kept getting stuck during the last number, and a trumpet is pretty useless if you can’t hit a C# in tune – and maybe grab a drink if he’s lucky. Silk scrabbles in his case to find the grease, slams the lid down almost on his fingers, straightens up…

“You are lucky.”

He nearly drops the trumpet on his foot.

“Thank you, ma’am.” There are rules about what you can and cannot do while wearing dress blues. Unspoken rules for the most part, but still rules. Politeness is pretty well a given, even if he doesn’t have a clue who he’s talking to. “I hope so.”

“It was the crane.”

“Sorry?”

He turns.

Wow.

Just…wow.

This girl has to be the best-looking thing from here to the gates of Hell. He could go on for ages listing every single reason why – see, this is the kind of thing that happens when your girlfriend breaks up with you right before you’re due to ship out – but seriously, the hair alone would do it; sleek and dark like lacquer halfway down her back. There’s a coppery smudge in her bangs where the stage light catches them just right.

Long legs, too. Jesus H. Buckminster Christ, she’s got great legs.

“I said…” she closes her eyes. Maybe she has to think about it. Not everyone here speaks English all that well, and he knows he can’t speak Japanese worth shit. All things considered, her English is actually pretty awesome. “I said the crane did it. They always bring good luck.”

He stares at her.

“Dr. Sato told me what you did. The vet.”

She must be his assistant.

He didn’t know the vet had an assistant. He didn’t know the vet’s assistant could smile like that, small and shy behind her hand. She has a dimple – only one – on the left side of her mouth, and a bandage peeking out from beneath her sleeve. It runs down most of her right arm. “My name is Suzuko.”

He didn’t know that either.

Still no words. Shit. Is he still gaping?

Smooth Silk, real smooth…

“Um. Adam. Adam Silk.” He scratches the back of his neck fitfully. “This’d be so much easier if I spoke Japanese…”

She laughs at that, but doesn’t tell him why.

“You should learn,” she says, and smiles. “I can teach you.”

She’s gone when he glances up again.

They’re back on stage two minutes later. As always, he makes a show of playing to the audience - stripping his gloves off, flicking lint off his trousers, idly spinning the trumpet over the fingers of his other hand. It took him months to learn it back in high school, but the spin, switching hands mid-note, playing upside down…he knows they’re crowd-pleasers if he can do them fast enough. He sets his spine perfectly straight, knowing that Mancini is already counting them in behind his back.

He knows this game. He loves this game.

Hey Mancini, how do you know when a drummer is sitting on a flat surface? There’s drool on both sides of his mouth!

He has stage lights shining in his eyes, sweat streaming down his face and into the gap behind his collar. He has mutes – straight mute, bell mute, scabby red bathroom plunger – on the floor between his feet, since there’s only enough room to keep one of the three jammed between his knees. He looks for Suzuko and her red streak, but keeps losing her as she dances in the crowd.

He has got to get that girl’s number.

*****

My crane wife
She came to my home in the moonlight
All star-bright,
And tongue-tied
I took her in…

*****

He gets her number. Eventually, when he finally gets his shit together well enough to ask.

His Japanese gets better – he actually knows what kaa-san means now, well enough to (politely, if he can) refuse lessons from the busload of chattering housewives that turns up at Camp Foster once a week. Suzuko still can’t pronounce Centerton, Arkansas…but then again, he has trouble even remembering the name of the place she said she was from. If he ever has to find it on a map, he already knows he’s in trouble.

She laughs at him sometimes, but it’s not too bad. Hell, for all he knows…far as he can tell, he could be calling himself a donut by mistake.

She’s got him eating all kinds of weird stuff, too. He’s about as good with chopsticks as he is with Aramaic, but some of the candy is definitely coming with him the next time he goes back home. Emmy would love it.

She knows about Emmy. He told her.

She works with Dr. Sato. He has rehearsals, performances, a training exercise in Thailand. They catch up when they can, and when he gets back the first thing they do is go hiking. She says there’s a shrine she wants to show him.

The shrine is just three stones in the middle of a pathway, completely swept clean. The stones, some flowers, candles, a bowl of candy, a soda bottle half-full of rice wine. She folds a tiny bird out of red paper – the whole thing is about as big as his thumbnail from the tip of one wing to the tip of the other - and puts it in pride of place on the ground. He asks her to show him, and the first one he makes that isn’t completely lopsided…well, there’s only one place it can go.

He tucks it behind her ear.

*****

Up among the stars we’ll find
A harmony of life to a lovely tune
East of the sun
West of the moon my dear,
East of the sun
And west of the moon…

*****

They still have the earphones in – her left ear, his right ear and the iPod flat on the ground between them – but there’s no music. She hit the pause button at least half an hour ago. He props himself up on his elbow in the tiny patch of grass.

Three days leave isn’t long enough to bother going home for, but it has perks. It’s not like the weather is awful or anything – it never really gets cold here. They’ve even picked a day with some sun.

“That’s…wow. That’s seriously messed up.”

“That’s how it goes.”

“I mean…yeah, okay. She told him not to, and maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have…but the poor tailor is supposed to just stand around watching while she flies off out the window? What kind of fucked-up story is this, anyway?”

Dammit. He’s been trying not to cuss in front of her. So much for that idea.

“That’s how it goes. I don’t choose how fairytales should end,” she tells him patiently, cracking the seal on her drink with her teeth. It’s some kind of weird peach stuff with a funny little orange bead jammed into the neck of the bottle. They definitely don’t sell that in Centerton. “If it makes you feel better, I always thought she cried about it after.”

“Hmm?”

“Why shouldn’t she? She had a home, she was happy…cranes like being around people, and she loved him.” Suzuko shrugs, coughs discreetly behind her hand. She’s been coughing all day. He’d swear she’s losing weight, too. “In secret, I’m sure she grieved a little.”

*****

Grab your coat, your tie, your hat
Leave those troubles on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street
I can hear the sound right there, heart sings a happy tune
Life can be so sweet on the sunny side…

*****


She has a lot of secrets.

He still doesn’t know her full name. He still can’t point out the town she told him she comes from, or even say with any certainty at all which island the town should be on. He still doesn’t know when she met Dr. Sato, or how she started working with him. She knows all about his family – Emmy, his mom – and never talks about her own.

She’s been on the base at least a dozen times. He’s never once seen her apartment, doesn’t even know what the building looks like.

She still coughs. She’s definitely losing weight. There are dark smudges under her eyes if she’s not wearing makeup heavy enough for even him to notice. That shining black hair loses its smoothness, prickles against his palm when he runs his hand through it. The faint reddish streak in her hair starts to look like dried blood. She says she’s fine Adam, just leave it alone. Don’t ask me again.

Mancini asks him how much he knows - really knows - about her, and then furrows his brow when he hears the answer.

*****

There is no such place
I have seen it too, just a little different from how you do
A river winding blue among the dunes
And the marble bay
And the sun that doesn’t set…

*****

There’s an answer here somewhere. There has to be. Just…not this one. Any other answer, but not this one.

He’s running at full stretch before he makes it off the stage.

Something’s wrong with her. Something’s really badly wrong, and she won’t tell him, and…fuck it. She was supposed to be at this performance, she was here – he knows she was; he saw her – and now she’s nowhere in particular. Gone. Completely gone in the time it took him to blink the sweat from his eyes. Everyone he sees gets the question, but they all shake their heads.

Except one.

“Oh…yeah, I saw her. Go that way.”

Dress blues aren’t designed for running in. They’re impressive – hell, his uniform is at least half responsible for every hook up he’s had since graduating high school, quite possibly including this one! – but they’re not meant for this. The shoulders of his coat are too stiff, the fabric’s too heavy, the whole thing always moves half a step out of time with the rest of him. He made pretty good time on the three mile run in boot camp, but there’s no way he can match it if he has to carry his hat jammed under one arm.

If he runs into an officer, he’ll probably knock the guy flat on his ass instead of saluting. Right now, he can’t force himself to give a shit.

No one disappears like that. Not that fast. Not on their own.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit…THERE!

She’s standing in clear silhouette against the window, three floors up on a building he hasn’t needed to set foot in for months. If she sees him down here, she doesn’t show it. She’s not even looking.

“Hey!” His boots clatter on the stairs. He’s scrabbling with the doorknob, palms too sweaty to get a good grip on it. “Hey, Suzuko! Are you-?”

She’s not there.

The lights are still switched on. Her clothes are in a neatly folded pile on the floor. The window is open. There’s a note on the windowsill, weighted down with a tiny paper bird. Red paper. Always with the red paper.

She’s been sick lately. She refused – refuses – to see a doctor about it, but she’s sick. Did she get woozy and fall out? Did she…please God, don’t let that thing be a suicide note. Please…

“Suzuko?”

Nothing.

“What’s going on, sweetheart?”

Nothing.

“Are you even in here?”

Nothing.

He swallows nervously. There can’t be a worse sound in the world than the hollow one his feet make as he walks towards the window and looks down to the street. There is no body, naked or otherwise. Nobody’s coming – if she jumped there’d have to be someone who noticed, but he can’t see a single person so much as facing the right way.

Nobody saw.

“Suzuko?”

His hand brushes against the note, sweeping the little red bird onto the floor. His calligraphy is patchy at best, but hers…she’d shown him once, in ordinary ballpoint pen on paper torn from an exercise book (a lot like this note, actually), and he’d still seen how graceful the lines were. She’s had a lot more practice than he has.

It looks the same now.

Adam,
I wanted to tell you. I’m sorry.

When he bends to pick up the paper bird, a bloodstained white feather – a down feather, small and soft – falls out from the space between its wings.





This story is based off the Japanese fairytale of the Crane Wife. Any lyrics used throughout are lifted from various parts of the Decemberists’ Crane Wife Cycle (off their album The Crane Wife), Billie Holiday’s cover of East of the Sun, Duke Ellington’s jazz classic Sunny Side Of The Street and There Is No Such Place by Augie March (off their album Sunset Studies). I own none of them, am making no money from them and mean no disrespect by their use. The title also comes from The Crane Wife Part 1.