The ball came off the wall wrong, spinning flat instead of true, and a young boy stretched his whole body sideways to keep it from rolling into the gutter where the water never fully drained.
He got there as he always got there.
“Oi. Blondie.” A voice, from the fence, flat with the particular boredom of a teenager who’d decided cruelty was a hobby worth keeping up.
“You eat in the morning or evening?”
“Both,” Answered the boy, without looking up and started juggling the ball with boots noticeably two sizes too big.
“Really, that’s a lot. I guess Kurobuta is more fitting than blondie.”
The boy didn’t answer.
He flicked the ball up under his arm and walked toward the gap in the fence, and behind him leaving the other boy as he went back to whatever he’d been doing before, which was nothing, which was most of what boys his age did around here if there was nowhere left that wanted them.
Not long after a car stopped nearby, a feminine voice could be heard shouting “Kenta!”.
The boy left behind walked steadily through the gap toward the black car parked a few metres away, opened the rear door and climbed inside before looking at everyone with an annoyed expression “what took you guys so long?”
Next to the driver’s in the passenger seat, a young man in his twenties turned to look at Kenta, his piercing blue eyes settling on him.
“Brave, aren’t we, these days?”
Kenta went stiff and was about to say something when the driver cut in.
“Knock it off, Ito. Anyways, it’s only thirty minutes, Kenta.”
She started driving, the car pulling away as Kenta grumbled under his breath about having to spend thirty minutes with Blondie.
The girl chuckled, but her mind had already returned to the boy Kenta disliked, Rui.
An image of a 167-centimetre boy you’d mistake for a girl, dipped in caramel chocolate, with sharp hazel eyes, not uncommon in the country except for the combination with his dark-blonde hair akin to gold that screamed foreign.
His appearance was rare, exotic even, yet some of his features said he belonged.
I get why Kenta is jealous.
Rui was visibly too healthy and beautiful for someone from these parts of Osaka, Hell, even the low class weren’t as healthy as him, let alone those battling poverty around here.
A rare catch.
The girl thought this while licking her lips, salivating as she imagined what she would—
“Oi, Momo.”Her thought was interrupted.
“What?”She responded, visibly irritated.
“We have a lot to do today. Boss says Nakada wants it done by midnight, so speed up”
“Is that all?”She asked, almost dismissively.
“Ohh, yeah. Before I forget…”Ito paused, then continued.
“You’re disgusting, Momo-chan.”
Momo immediately hit the brakes.”The fuck you on about?
Watch how you talk to me, or are you tired of living?”
Ito, who had been looking at his phone, finally looked up.
He met her eyes without any hurry, as if her anger had nothing to do with him.
“It’s written all over your face, Momo. You’re twelve years older than him, and the boss said Nakada instructed everyone to lay off.”
Momo stared daggers at him and Ito simply held her gaze.
For a moment, nobody said anything.
Then Momo looked ahead and accelerated, the car taking off down the road.
Kenta remained quiet in the backseat, knowing better than to even breathe too loudly lest he becomes a victim to whatever this was about.
Rui on his way home observed how the street outside was already loud with men dispersing from the corner by the shuttered pachinko parlor, cigarettes cupped against the wind, after getting dropped by vans that picked them up in the morning.
Some mornings it was construction, some mornings it was port-side cargo work down toward the bay, and some mornings nobody came at all and the men just stood there until eight or nine, then drifted off toward the welfare office or the covered market or nowhere in particular, the way water flows wherever it’s allowed to go.
Rui had grown up learning the rhythm without anyone teaching him, he knew which vans meant real pay, which foremen shorted you at the end of a shift and dared you to say something, which corner to avoid on the first of the month when the welfare payments came through and the men who drank them away by noon were loudest by evening.
The apartment block he lived in sat two streets back from the worst of the doya lodging houses those narrow, stacked rooms rented by the night to men with no fixed address, no family, nowhere else the city counted them.
Rui used to press his face to the stairwell window as a kid and watch the line for the food distribution truck form in the little triangle park down the block, women from some church or another ladling rice and pickled radish into bowls held out by men who didn’t meet anyone’s eyes while they waited and didn’t stop talking once they’d eaten.
He knew four of those men by name.
One of them, Fujita-san, used to fix bicycle chains for cigarettes and had, at some point nobody could quite date, simply stopped getting up in the mornings, and the neighbourhood had absorbed his absence the way it absorbed everything, without much comment, because comment didn’t fill anyone’s stomach either.
That was the painting of the place, not misery laid on thick but misery worn in, the way a floor wears smooth under years of the same footsteps.
People hustled.
That was the word for it, more than survived, more than suffered as they hustled all day and every day, at a hundred small operations that either worked or didn’t.
Old women sold individually wrapped rice crackers out of repurposed vending machines nobody had ever bothered to repossess.
A one-armed man ran a card game out of the back of a shuttered noodle shop that the police mostly left alone because the men who played it needed somewhere to lose small money instead of somewhere to lose big money.
Kids from Rui’s age scalped tickets for the exact same festival every summer, worked the exact same three-card trick on tourists who wandered too far south from the tower and the neon, and none of it was cruelty exactly, it was just what there was to do with a day when nothing official wanted you in it.
His adoptive father fit into none of that, he did as he liked and what he liked to do he didn’t know but he was doing well, too well, which was its own kind of loud.
He was on the step when Rui got back, folded onto the low concrete with a newspaper he wasn’t reading, hair catching the sunset gold that matched the fading sun.
Men on this street didn’t look like him, it was blatant.
His mannerisms too, that stillness that wasn’t idleness, the way he could sit doing nothing and somehow still look like the only person on the block who knew exactly what was happening in every direction at once.
“You’re late,” he said, not looking up.
“Kenta was talking.”
“Kenta talks like his mouth pays rent.” He folded the paper, patted the step.
“Eat yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Come on, before the good pickles are gone Aunt Reiko’s already got the pan going.” He stood, unhurried, the way he did everything, and started up the street without checking whether Rui followed, because Rui always followed.
Aunt Reiko wasn’t anyone’s aunt; she ran a food counter out of the front room of her building, four stools and a hot plate, and charged half what the chain places charged for twice the food, because she said this to anyone who asked ‘a man works better on a full stomach than an empty wallet.’ She saw them coming and had two bowls out before he’d even reached the counter.
“Hello Sora, the usual.” she said, not really a question but confirmation as she prepared their food and sliding an extra egg onto Rui’s rice without being asked.
“Boy’s going to owe me a debt he can’t pay by the time he’s grown.”
“Put it on my tab,” Sora said, and there was something almost easy in his voice here, on this street, at this counter, that didn’t show up many other places.
“Your tab’s longer than the Imamiya road.”
“Then it’s in good company.”
Reiko laughed at that a real laugh, quick and rough, she swatted him with the dish towel before turning back to the hot plate, and Rui ate his rice and watched the two of them talk over his head about nothing, about the price of mackerel, about whether the ward office was really going to knock down the old Center building this time or just threaten it again like they’d threatened it every year since before Rui was born.
This was the rhythm of it too, not just hunger and hustle.
(Author)
Thank you for reading.
Constructive feedback to improve appreciated.