Tokyo Stirs: (Short Stories about Asia)

by Harmon Cooper

  The sliver she first cut herself with is sticking out of a Mexican coke bottle (she finds this most ironic) next to the piece of broken stained glass. She picks it up and sets it back down. Today she needs something sharper. It’s the best way to reopen the words between her thighs.

  Girl slides past Boy on her way to the kitchen. He doesn’t look up at her as she passes, so concentrated he is on what he’s sketching. His tongue is out and he’s gorging the pencil into the paper. Too much pressure. He’ll learn finesse later; Girl can see it in his technique. He’s been sketching ever since she could remember. He was the best artist at Huntington, and has already displayed some pieces at a local art show for teenagers.

  She opens the drawer where Mom keeps her coupons and miscellaneous kitchen utensils. An X-Acto knife sits on top of a stack of coupons for hair dye. Push those gray clouds away, it says. Girl pulls the knife out and pops the blade. She thumbs it to make sure it’s sharp enough.

  It is.

  ‘Where you going?’ Boy asks as she walks by.

  She veers to the right with her back away from him, concealing the blade. ‘Bathroom,’ she says.

  ‘Number one or number two?’ he asks, not looking up from his drawing. He is tracing a picture of a disproportionate comic book character with a mask pulled tight across her face.

  ‘Number it’s-none-of-your-business,’ she says. ‘Anyway, I’m taking a shower. Is that ok with you?’

  ‘Fine by me.’

  ₪₪₪

  Glass Wings is lumbering over to his sister. He’s a predator, a nightmarish freak, a gnarled being. His shoulders are heaving up and down, his breath is gargled and whispery. The moment Boy has been waiting for is at hand. Under his blankets, pressed cold against his body, is an aluminum baseball bat.

  Boy was never one for sports, could never understand their appeal or the mob mentality. He remembers Mom’s boyfriend from a few years back when they lived in Tennessee. The man would be reduced to tears if the Volunteers didn’t win a game. He’d wear his two jerseys for good luck, his orange Vols hat for good luck, his knee-high Vols socks for good luck, his gold Vols necklace he had specially made for good luck. He tried to get Boy into all sorts of sports, and he is the one who bought him the aluminum bat.

  Mom tried to keep up with her boyfriend, tried to follow the team alongside him, but the type of obsession exhibited by men and women who have nothing else to live for aside from a sports team they have absolutely no control over is deep. Eventually, Mom too fell to the wayside, and then like always, they moved. Easier to move than accept one’s fate. Same thing Girl’s father, Santiago, did.

  In a way, Boy was no different than the sports fanatic boyfriend. He’d made the decision at the start of seventh grade that he would pursue his art at all costs. He had seen how Mom lived, working her fingers to the bone for pennies sprinkled into her greasy palms like piss into a urinal. He’d seen how she blamed her poverty on those more or less impoverished than her. Scapegoats are a dime a dozen.

  ‘Last chance, asshole,’ Boy hisses at Glass Wings. He’s trying not to recoil from the monster’s sickening form, trying to focus, trying to get a good grip on his baseball bat.

  Glass Wings ignores him. He shuffles closer to Girl, his massive wings scraping against the floor. He reaches his curled fingernails out and latches on to the blanket covering Girl’s body.

  The time is now or never.

  The creature’s tongue flaps out of his scarred lips. It cascades down his chin, his neck and falls onto Girl’s reedy legs. His foul tongue travels up her thin brown legs and into the opening of her sleep shorts.

  Blood returns to Boy’s hands and he finally manages to get a good grip on the baseball bat. He squeezes it tightly, gradually taking his blanket off with his other hand.

  Glass Wings finishes.

  His spoiled, blood-dipped tongue crawls back into his marred lips and the fucked monster turns from the bed. Boy steadies himself on the floor behind him.

  Boy’s knees are wobbly, his breath short and staccato. Glass Wings pauses, seemingly aware that someone is standing directly behind him. Too late. Boy takes one last look at his target, and leaps forward with a swing.

  The bat connects with the grotesque creature’s wings. Hurled over, Glass Wings shrieks on the floor in front of the two beds. He begins to lift his massive body weight off the ground. Boy steps around his throbbing wings, to his left side.

  Glass Wings tilts his head slightly to look up at Boy. His pupils have condensed into fine red slits. He’s seething, furious at Boy. His huge black tongue starts to press its way out of his lips and his brow folds into an angry V shape. His eyes flash white.

  Summoning all the courage he may ever have, Boy taps Glass Wings on the cheek with his bat.

  The disfigured creature snorts and a low growl emits from his throat. Boy pulls back and swings with all his might, connecting with his jaw and sprinkling his glass teeth onto the floor. The creature gargles, tries to right himself. A stream of saliva and black blood dribbles out of his mouth.

  Glass Wings lies in a heap, his broken wings shaking spastically. In one fell swoop, Boy brings the bat down onto the creature’s mangy head.

  Glass explodes onto the floor.

  Girl wakes to find Boy standing in front of their dresser, her collection of glass smashed to tiny pieces. She watches with panic-stricken eyes as her brother slivers back into his bed, burying his head deep under the blankets as he sobs.

  Boy versus Self is available on Amazon here.

  Finally, if you have a moment, please leave Tokyo Stirs an honest review on Amazon. Reviews are essential for independent authors such as myself to reach a wider audience. If you liked what you read, or you thought it could be better, please let me know. As always, you can contact me at writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com

  Thanks for the support!

  Harmon Cooper

  www.harmoncooper.com

  Also by Harmon Cooper

  (Click on the title to go to the book on Amazon)

  The Feedback Loop: Pulp cyberpunk. Groundhog Day on crack. Set in the 2050s in the same world as the Life is a Beautiful Thing series, The Feedback Loop follows the journey of a man named Quantum Hughes who is stuck in a gritty dreamworld called The Loop.

  Life is a Beautiful Thing: Hallucinatory cyberpunk, meta sci-fi satire. The future is futile. Books 1-4 available now!

  The Zero Patient Trilogy: Coming 2016.

  Boy versus Self: There are moments when a creation pushes its creator to the brink of their imagination, to the fine line between true ingenuity and blistering insanity. Boy is such as an artist, an artist who can't seem to shake the demons he has himself created – Glass Wings. With his career taking off, will Boy overcome the darkness within? True fear is easily created and rarely destroyed. True art is always the opposite.

  Short Story Collections:

  Dear NSA: A collection of politically incorrect stories about the troubled times we share.

  My Machine Doll: A short collection of satire that explores the depths of human delusion.

  Table of Contents

  Stuffed Prey

  The Sciatica Goblin and the International Motley Crew

  Tokyo Stirs

  Modern Nomads

  Tani House

  Pouring Hearts

  Dreaded

  Fishing with Shiva

  (sample) Life is a Beautiful Thing

  (sample) The Feedback Loop

  (sample) BOY versus SELF

  Also by Harmon Cooper

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  [1] Author’s note: in the summer of 2014, I attempted to go to a maid café in Akihabara with my brother. We stepped inside the maid café, and once seeing how bizarre it was, we quickly stepped out. As we walked away from the elevator, I watched a young girl in a maid costume bow at us and thank us repeatedly, even though we didn’t patronize the place. This story was inspired by her as well as the experience of a Mongo
lian woman who studied in Japan. She had spent most of her student stipend trying to win stuffed animals at Japanese arcades and had even developed a system to do so. This got me thinking about humans as a whole, and how everything in life is simply a way to game the system, from religion to education to science to war. Even monks want to win.

  [2] This is a slightly fictionalized account of something that actually happened to me in March 2011. I decided to include it in the collection of stories due to the nature of its message. I hope you never get in a bus accident in India while suffering from sciatica nerve damage and subsequently being forced to bus-hop across the Punjab. If you do, my only advice is to let it happen and see where the road takes you.

  [3] Seeing a man stuffed into a subway car Tokyo in 2015 is what inspired this story. I watched as a subway worker tried to cram the man onto the train and the story in its entirety came to me in a flash. I wrote portions of it on the subway ride home, typing it on my cell phone. The story, and the collection, are named after a small passage in a book by David Mitchell called Number9dream.

  [4] I penned this story by hand in the summer of 2013. At the time I was into Japanese mythology, particularly a book called Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, and wanted to write something that blended magical realism with the way many Japanese myths are told. Reading it back two years later, it has become clear to me this story is a metaphor for Mongolia itself, a society that has recently democratized and is going through growing pains rooted in rampant inflation, the residue of their socialist past and an enormous gap (bigger than the States) between the have and the have-nots.

  [5]This story was hand written in Kyoto in August 2013 at the Tani House. I am one of the American brothers in the piece. The surreal portions of the story were heavily inspired by and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work and practically every movie by Hayao Miyazaki.

  [6] Journeying to Korea in December 2012, I wrote what became this story on New Year’s Day 2013. Through some connections, I was able to interview a soldier who was stationed in Korea through the US Military in the 1990s. His recollection and my observations became the core of this piece. This piece is the first part of the Once upon the Ganges trio of stories, the second being ‘Dreaded’ and third being ‘Fishing with Shiva.’ All of these stories take place in the same universe, connected by a book called Once upon the Ganges. Further, Henry Latchman is Bob Latchman’s younger brother and Tommy, from ‘Dreaded’ is the son of the man whom Henry finds in California, dead from a car accident.

  [7] I ventured to Pokhara in March 2012, where I suffered a mountain biking injury (one does not simply fly over the handlebars without sustaining some type of abrasion). I recovered at the very Gurkha restaurant mentioned in this piece, where I penned what would later be called ‘Dreaded’ on hand-made Nepali paper. It is part two of the Once Upon the Ganges trio of stories, the first being ‘Pouring Hearts’ and the last being ‘Fishing with Shiva.’

  [8] The following story has gone through about thirty drafts, over the last four years. Having studied Tibetan in Nepal in 2010, I met many people trying to escape in Kathmandu and find themselves in one way or another. Bob Latchman, the lead in this story, and also Henry Latchman’s older brother from ‘Pouring Hearts,’ is also trying to escape, albeit in a different direction. This is the final part of the Once upon the Ganges trio of stories.