All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘What is that you’re holding?’ Aubrey barks.

  Molly is silent. He takes a few steps closer.

  ‘What is that you’re holding, child?’

  Three more steps closer and then he stops.

  ‘It’s a sky gift,’ Molly says, nervously. ‘It’s my grandfather’s pan. He wanted me to have it, so he dropped it from the sky.’

  Aubrey studies his niece again and then he removes his black hat and wipes the sweat from his forehead. He breathes and sighs loudly, pulls a hip flask from his pocket, unscrews the cap and takes a long, hard swig. He pockets the flask and runs his dirty right hand across the stubble of his cheeks. And then he marches quickly to his niece, gritting his white wolf teeth, and he digs his wolf claws hard into Molly’s right shoulder and pulls her towards the milkwood tree. As he drags her across the cemetery ground, he reaches for the pan in her hands, pulls hard at it.

  ‘Gimme that feckin’ pan!’ he spits.

  ‘No,’ Molly screams. ‘No, Uncle Aubrey! It’s mine. It was given to me.’

  The tall black shadow uncle’s hairy black wolf arm wrenches the pan violently from his niece’s hands and he tugs Molly Hook towards the milkwood tree and the black rock frog rock, and she digs her feet hard into the dirt to slow their movement but the tall black shadow uncle is too strong. He grips her body like he grips a shovel. Closer and closer to the milkwood tree he hauls her, until she can see the hole in the ground.

  ‘No!’ Molly screams. ‘Please, Uncle Aubrey. Noooooo.’

  A rectangular grave with no headstone. A rectangular dirt prism of air sunk into the earth, with no name and no epitaph. No story of a life. No existence. No goodbye. No luck.

  Her father stands at the foot of the grave. Her father can cry, and he’s weeping here. Aubrey yanks at the girl’s arm and swings her forward to the edge of the grave. ‘Say your goodbyes,’ he roars, furious and volatile.

  The girl’s feet nearly slip into the grave but stop at the edge where she can’t help but look down inside the hole. She’s terrified of what she will see, but what she sees is nothing. What she finds is a dig with no end. The hole goes on forever. She could dive into that grave right now and she could fall through the earth for eternity and every muscle in her body wants to do just that. It’s a bottomless grave. It’s a black void, and this black void proves Molly Hook right and she shouts at her father across the grave. ‘I told him, Dad. She’s not down there.’ She points to the sky. ‘She’s up there, Dad!’

  Her father offers no response to his daughter beyond weeping. Her father has gone away. Gone away like Mum. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. I will feel only rage. Then Molly makes fists with her hands and she clenches them so hard that her fingernails draw blood from her palms and she screams. ‘She. Is. Not. Down. There!’

  Aubrey steps to the side of the grave and talks to his brother calmly. ‘Control your child, brother.’

  But Horace is blank. Horace only weeps. Molly’s banshee screams echo across the cemetery. Loud enough to wake its eternal residents. A scream from the bottom of the endless black void inside her. High and sharp and piercing. ‘She. Is. Not. Down. Therrrrrrrrre!’

  Aubrey shouts at his brother now. ‘Control your child, Horace!’

  But Horace Hook has gone away. Horace only weeps. And with every tear her father sheds, the gravedigger girl grows more and more hysterical.

  ‘What are you crying for?’ she screams. ‘She’s not down there. She’s not down there. SHE’S NOT DOWN TH—’

  And the gravedigger girl is silenced by the back of her uncle’s knuckle and bone hand landing flush across her face. Molly Hook falls back hard on the hard cemetery dirt. She wipes her nose and looks at her fingers covered in the same blood that’s spread across her face. This place is hard, she tells herself. Rock is hard. My heart is hard as rock, she tells herself. I will never be afraid. I will feel no pain.

  Molly looks up at her uncle, who is still holding her grandfather’s pan when he turns his back on Molly and looks back down into the grave. Molly stands and wipes her face with her yard dress and she spits half a mouthful of blood on the dirt and then she runs fast at her uncle and she drives her shoulder hard into his back and she pushes against him with her legs. She will send him to hell where he belongs and the quickest route she can see is through that endless black void.

  But her uncle doesn’t move. His bones are too hard from digging. His bones are too hard from living. ‘This is your grave!’ Molly screams, pushing with all her strength as her bare toes slip in the soil beneath them. ‘This is yoourrr grave!’

  Then she gives up pushing against her uncle and reaches for the pan he holds in his right hand. ‘This is mine,’ she screams. ‘Give it back.’ She tugs on the pan and pulls back on it with all her strength and all that is left of her will. ‘Give it back.’

  Aubrey Hook is still gripping the pan when he turns and smiles at his niece as though he’s going to enjoy the thing he’s about to do, and the gravedigger girl is still bulldog-clinging to the pan when her uncle swings his right arm with such fury and power that Molly’s feet are lifted from the earth and she is thrown through the air and the only thing that stops her wild forward motion is the impact of her left temple meeting the edge of the large black rock frog rock next to the grave. Then she might as well be the one who is falling through that endless void towards hell because everything in her world, even the day sky, has turned to black.

  THE SEED OF A STORY

  A black flying fox in the predawn pink of a wet season sky. Gravity turns the fruit bat’s faeces into a teardrop falling fast to the earth and inside that teardrop is a single seed. Wind pushes the teardrop towards a eucalypt woodland with a vast understorey layer of vibrant green spear grass. The teardrop falls hard and finds its own permanently moist pocket of earth. The sun rises and falls in the sky and rises and falls in the sky and the black flying foxes of the Northern Territory fly east and west with and towards their kin.

  Wet seasons turn to dry seasons and turn to wet again, and suns make way for moons and then a tree grows out of a pocket of moist earth where once a fruit bat’s seed found a home. It has rough dark-grey bark, stands thirty feet high and has glossy, round leaves that bounce light like the inside of an oyster shell. And from among these leaves, on the morning of 7 December 1941, a small round fruit appears before the world. It is the colour red and it is ribbed all around. It is a red bush apple.

  YUKIO MIKI AND THE BLACK DRAGON SKY

  His gloved hand reaches for her photograph in the grey blindness of a cloud. ‘Nara, make me strong,’ he whispers. The photograph is fading, stuck by gum above the circular fuel gauge of Yukio Miki’s Mitsubishi A6M ‘Zero’ long-range fighter. The original photograph was wider: Nara Nui kneeling on the floor beside the right leg of her father, Koga Nui, who was seated on a wooden chair, his right palm resting on his right thigh and his left hand concealed by the long sleeve of his hemp and silk kimono – his winter kimono – patterned with pine trees that Yukio always considered a fair pictorial representation of Koga Nui’s existence: towering and bristling and hard to kill with anything but an axe.

  Yukio sliced the photograph in half, weeks ago, with his pocket knife pressed against an aircraft carrier mess hall table in Hitokappu Bay, in the Kuril Islands, leaving only Nara to grace the sacred gum space above his fuel gauge. Nara’s not looking at the camera in the photograph, and she told Yukio she was looking, in fact, at her nine-year-old niece, Soma, who was walking precariously behind the camera on a pair of empty soup tins tied with rope. It was Soma who was making Nara smile so wide, she said, but Yukio knew the truth, that it was life that gave Nara Nui her smile; it was children and snow and harlequin ducks bobbing along clearwater streams and it was fat fish hanging from her hook and it was a red paper kite stolen by the wind and carried across southern Osaka; it was the air and the sea and the sky that formed that smile. Nara wears her one and only kimono in the photograph, patterne
d with plum blossoms, winter cousin of sakura – cherry blossom. The plum blossoms always bloomed in time for the cold days when Nara would nestle into the soft cushion of flesh between Yukio’s right breast and right shoulder. He would feel her lips moving on his chest as she spoke of their love and their future, and all he saw as he lay with his back on the snow-flaked grass were the gold hearts of hanging white plum blossom flowers against a sky as grey as the cloud he flies through now. It felt, then, like Nara was talking to his chest on purpose and when she whispered ‘zutto’ – eternally – she really was meaning to say it up so close; she meant to say it directly to his fast-beating heart.

  There is a parachute pack stuffed behind his seat. Few Zero pilots carry parachutes. He could slip his on here now in the cloud, he tells himself. The Zero’s cockpit can’t be jettisoned but it can be opened in flight. He could exit here, slip away unseen by his brothers and feel no shame. The high winds of the Pacific would carry him to a tropical island, carry him to Egypt, to Paris, to London with its big round yellow ticking clock in the night sky. A strong enough updraught could lift him and his parachute up through the clouds, even, through the sky and the stars and into Takamanohara, the Plain of High Heaven.

  No, he tells himself. A Zero samurai fights to the death. Death, he tells himself. Death. The only answer to every question he ever asked about life. The shortest route to heaven. The quickest road to Nara.

  *

  The shortsword that rattles against metal in the left-side gap between the Zero’s pilot seat and cockpit door is called a wakizashi. The shortsword’s blade is only thirty centimetres long. Wakizashi swords were traditionally made for close-quarter fighting or to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, but Yukio carries the sword today not for the sharpness of its blade but for the power of the object’s story. A gift from father to son. A sword more than two centuries old, passed through the hands of Miki men, all of whom, with the exception of Yukio the fighter pilot, worked in the artisan knife-making workshops of old town Sakai, on the edge of Osaka Bay, at the mouth of Yamato River.

  There is an image of a butterfly engraved on the handle end of the sword’s blade. The blade was forged in the Miki family workshop in the heart of Sakai, a bustling fishing port and one of Japan’s busiest and oldest foreign trading hubs, filled with the sacred air of maritime commerce and tuna blood and the guts of fat red queen crabs. It was in the same modest and small and well-kept laneway knife-making workshop that Yukio’s father, Oshiro Miki, passed the wakizashi to his first-born son, then aged in his mid-twenties, on the day he left Sakai to join his military brethren in the selective and punishing Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service pilot training programme. Oshiro had told his son the story of the sword’s creation many times but on this day of sad departures he felt he needed to tell him again.

  ‘No more stories, father,’ Yukio pleaded. He had grown tired of his father’s stories. As a boy, Yukio had lived for his father’s tales. Tales of how the Miki family had been making blades for six hundred years. Tales of samurai swords forged for great warriors. Tales of how the flames of feudal war were finally extinguished and the need for samurai swords was blown away with the ashes of the dead, and how the Miki family elders then turned their sword-making skills to creating the sharpest fishermen’s filleting knives in all of Sakai. Knives forged for cutting the heads off tuna that could still carve through the neck bones of any fisherman foolish enough to doubt the integrity of Miki family steel.

  Yukio would sit for hours behind the workshop counter on an upturned wooden wash bucket, polishing and sharpening filleting blades as he watched his father dazzle fishermen with increasingly elaborate tales of each sold knife’s mythic creation. Fishermen from the Black Sea and from the Mediterranean and the Pacific and the Atlantic, and from seas as high and cold as the world went, and as wide and warm. They would come to Sakai port to hear Oshiro Miki tell his knife-maker tales. And, every single week, young Yukio was surprised to find that his father had miraculously acquired a new sacred and old blade that he had promised never to part with but might consider selling to one lucky foreign fisherman if he deemed him worthy of the knife’s ownership.

  ‘You carry yourself with honour,’ Oshiro would say to that week’s particularly fortunate customer. ‘You have treated my family and me with respect, and for this kindness I will repay you by showing you a most uncommon blade. I will now tell you the story of this blade, but you must never repeat it and you must never speak of where you found this blade.’

  What followed was usually a tale of adventure, courage, sacrifice, tragedy and, always, true love. The blade Yukio’s father held in his hands was invariably the sacred object with which the tragic hero of each story managed to overcome a malevolent force – deceitful loved one, old wizard, seductive witch, many-limbed sea monster – standing in the way of true love’s triumph. Oshiro would complete these lucrative counter transactions and then turn to his son and whisper about the wonders and importance of story. ‘The finest blades are forged not with steel, son,’ he would say. ‘But with story.’ Oshiro Miki knew full well that his customers would speak freely of where they found their precious new blades. He knew his strict requests to keep his hallowed workshop and its treasured stories secret was the very reason Miki family blades were spoken about over tuna nets and chopping boards across the globe.

  As Yukio grew into his teens behind the workshop counter, his father taught him how to tell these knife stories to foreign travellers in broken English and broken French and broken Spanish. The stories, he said, could sound even more mystical and significant when told in a few carefully selected English words.

  ‘Love!’ Oshiro hollered in perfect English to a wealthy American couple sailing the seven seas, oil money spilling from their pockets. He waved his hands excitedly at the long-married husband and wife. ‘I see . . . love!’ he declared. And then he explained in broken English that the word ‘love’ was his favourite word in the entire English language because it was the first word of English he ever learned. How perfect, Oshiro recognised, and how fortunate was he that the first word of English he ever learned was also the language’s most profound and sacred and joyous. ‘True . . . love,’ he said with a smile.

  And Yukio watched as the Americans smiled with the newfound knowledge that their shared love, despite whatever feelings they may have harboured to the contrary, was clear and strong enough to cross even the divides of sea and language. Then Yukio’s father spoke of how that couple’s true love reminded him of a true-love story behind a sacred and expensive wakizashi that he just knew would make the perfect souvenir to show their many friends back home in Pennsylvania.

  ‘Was “love” the first word of English my father learned?’ Yukio asked his grandfather Saburo Miki, who was an old and quiet and thoughtful man, as they washed dishes that night.

  ‘Ha!’ Saburo laughed. ‘The first word of English your father learned was “dog”. The second word he learned was “fish”.’

  ‘Then my father is a liar,’ Yukio said.

  ‘Your father is a storyteller,’ Saburo said, washing thick brown fish sauce off a dinner plate. ‘He tells those stories to fill this plate for you each night. There is a difference between liars and storytellers, Yukio.’ The grandfather passed the clean dinner plate to his grandson. ‘Some storytellers still make it to heaven.’

  *

  ‘Just one more story,’ Oshiro Miki said, holding the wakizashi in two hands before his son. He prefaced this story as he’d done every other time he told it, by acknowledging its more questionable narrative turns. ‘For this story to reach your heart, son, you may need to swallow it down with a sprinkling of salt from the shores of the inland sea,’ Oshiro said. ‘You should write the facts of this story only on tissue paper. But you should carve its meaning in stone.’

  Yukio patiently and respectfully listened, again, as his father spoke of how the shortsword was made in the 1700s by a quietly spoken and diligent knife-maker named Asato Miki, who had
discovered that the love of his life, Rina, had left Sakai in the arms of his younger brother, Uno. All but swallowed up by the dark shadow of grief and betrayal, Asato Miki willed himself to forge the perfect wakizashi blade, with which he was determined to cut out his own beating heart and toss it into the furnace that had forged his own murder weapon. For such an impossible act, Asato reasoned, he would need to forge an impossible blade and, in a single, dizzying twenty-four-hour haze of fevered and hate-filled industry, Asato hammered two types of metal together – soft and workable jigane iron and hard and deadly tamahagane steel – in a furnace so hot he could only work in thirty-minute blasts of furious activity between guzzles of fresh water fetched by his apprentice, which would also serve to cool and harden the blade. Asato felt so strong that day that he came to believe the very breath of Futsunushi – god of swords – had filled his workshop and a dragon’s fire had filled his blood. Asato forged the two metals into a single blade so sharp it cut the four legs off the bed he had shared for three years with Rina in four swift strokes.

  The tortured ironworker was stunned by a newfound artistry born of pain. He was more stunned, still, to discover that the joy of his newfound gifts had swallowed up the sorrow that had driven him to make the sword in the first place. Asato began demonstrating and advertising his miraculous ironwork skills in sake houses across Sakai by having loose-pocketed drinkers throw objects – apples, oranges, carrots, potatoes, unlucky alehouse kitchen rats – at him, each of which he would slice into two perfect halves with a single swipe of a short but swift sword as thin as a Yamato River ghost.

  One day a legendary vagabond assassin known as the ‘White Tiger’ sailed into the Sakai port, his thick mane of pure white hair braided and hanging almost to his calves. He began asking questions about an impossible blade forged by love and betrayal and loss and hate.

  ‘That sword is not for sale,’ Asato told the stranger in his workshop.