Kenji

Winter had come to Brum the way it always did: without warning and staying too long. Communal bonfires burned in the central square, and the townspeople gathered around them with cups in their hands, talking about nothing in low voices, as if the cold demanded a certain silence. The smoke rose straight into the gray sky. The cobblestones were covered in a white layer nobody had bothered to clear. Children didn't need bonfires. They had snow.

Kenji pressed the ball between his palms until it was perfect. Round. Compact. The cold numbed his fingers, but that was part of the game: if it hurt, you endured it.

A few meters away, Ren had his back turned, distracted with his own snowball. Perfect target.

He calculated the distance. Calculated the angle.

He missed by a meter.

The ball hit the man by the bonfire on the back of the neck just as he was lifting his cup. Ren turned, saw what had happened, and walked away pretending not to know him.

"Hey, you little brat!" The man stood up with a speed surprising for someone his size. The cup fell to the ground. Nobody picked it up.

"Catch me if you can!" Kenji was already running.

The laughter chased him longer than the man did. The afternoon went like that, between snow and shouts and the smell of burning wood clinging to their clothes, until the sky turned the color of coal and mothers started calling their children by their full names. The kind of call that doesn't allow negotiation.

Kenji heard his. He ignored it.

His feet carried him on their own toward the edge of town, where the perimeter torches were already lit.

The training field was empty at that hour, which was exactly the point. The perimeter torches cast long shadows over the trampled snow. The straw dummy had been waiting for him for weeks, worn down by hands that weren't his, tilted to the left from accumulated blows. Kenji planted himself in front of it, set his feet, and struck.

Once. Twice. Ten times.

He had no technique. No method. He just hit until his knuckles ached and the frozen air burned his lungs, and then he hit a little more. The impact traveled up his arms. The straw shifted, came back, waited for him. At some point he stopped thinking and there was only the strike, the dull sound of fist against leather, the breath growing shorter and rougher.

His father made it look easy.

"Kenji?"

He stopped.

Rina stood at the entrance, arms crossed over her chest, wearing her dark coat and that expression he knew better than anything else in the world. It wasn't anger. It was something harder than that.

He walked toward her looking at the ground. The frozen mud crunched under his feet.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I won't do it again."

They walked back together. Rina said nothing at first, which was somehow worse than if she'd shouted. Silence had a specific weight when it came from her.

"How many times, Kenji?"

"Many."

"Many…" she repeated, as if the word carried a weight he still didn't understand.

Halfway back she stopped and crouched down in front of him. The wind moved her hair. In the distance, the bonfires in the square kept burning, small and orange against the dark.

"If you want to train, you tell me." Her voice had changed. The anger was gone. "Things have been happening in the surrounding area." She squeezed his hand a second too long. "I don't want you to be alone outside at night. Do you understand?"

Kenji nodded. Then he hugged her, because he couldn't find the words and the hug said more anyway.

"I promise it's the last time," he murmured against her shoulder.

She pressed the back of his neck with her hand, the way she did when he was smaller and the world felt too large.

They walked home hand in hand. Kenji said nothing more, but he didn't let go of his mother's fingers until they reached the door.

Inside it smelled of cumin and something sweet he couldn't identify. Kenji took the stairs two at a time, washed his hands quickly — the water was ice cold — and came back down before Rina had finished setting the table.

"Already?" she said without looking at him.

He was already seated.

Dinner disappeared in minutes. Rina watched him with her spoon suspended, somewhere between amused and something else with no exact name. The way a mother looks at a son who doesn't yet know what he carries.

"Were you that hungry?"

Kenji held up the empty bowl as an answer.

"There's more."

"Obviously."

She served him without asking how much. He kept eating with that absolute focus he gave to things that mattered to him and nothing else.

"Mom." The words came out between spoonfuls. "Do you know if Dad and my brother are coming back soon? It's been months since they left."

Rina set the pot back on the coals. With her back to him, she took a moment before answering.

"I don't know anything yet. But they won't forget your birthday." She turned and smiled at him. "You know how they are."

Kenji nodded and went back to his dinner.

He didn't notice that his mother's smile didn't quite reach her eyes.

When he finished he was so full and so tired that he dragged himself upstairs, his knuckles still red. Rina followed, waited for him to lie down, and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave under her weight.

The room was quiet. Outside the wind pushed snow against the window, a soft, continuous sound, as if winter were breathing.

"Kenji." Rina looked at him. "Do you ever think about the future?"

His eyes were almost closed. The question arrived from somewhere far away.

"Mmh." A pause. "I want to be strong. Like Dad." Another pause, his voice already half-asleep. "And take you to the great capital. So we can all be together."

Rina looked at the window. The snow kept falling.

"Do you want to go to the training field tomorrow?"

Kenji's eyes flew open.

He sat up so fast he almost fell. He hugged her before she could say another word, arms tight around her neck.

"Hey!" Rina held him, laughing. "You're going to hurt yourself."

"Of course I want to go!"

"Then sleep." She adjusted his pillow with a gentle pat and pushed him back onto the mattress. "I'll wake you up early."

"Good night, Mom."

"Good night, son."

Kenji closed his eyes. In less than a minute his breathing was steady, deep, without worry.

Rina stayed a moment longer than necessary, watching him. The candlelight drew soft shadows across his face. Then she stood, blew out the candle, and closed the door without a sound.

She put on her coat in the hallway and went out.

The wind had gotten worse. The last bonfires in the square flickered in their death and the moon was barely a white smear through the snow. Rina crossed the yard leaving her footprints on the ground, the only marks on a white that the darkness turned blue.

Passing by, she saw the tree house. That crooked structure with poorly hammered boards the two boys had built together, one summer when nothing felt complicated. Since her younger son had left, no one had touched it. One board hung loose. The wind moved it, barely.

She kept walking.

She opened the storage room with the key she always carried. Inside it smelled of old wood and still cold, the kind of cold that doesn't circulate. She searched through the boxes until she found the envelope, kept where she had left it since the day he went away. She didn't open it. She held it for a moment, then put it back.

She locked the storage room. Outside the snow kept falling, the same as always, indifferent to everything.

She went back inside without hurrying.

In her room she opened the small wooden chest on the shelf. Inside: the family drawing, with its crooked lines and impossible proportions from someone who still didn't know how to draw but had something to say. And the crow-shaped medallion, handmade, cold to the touch, which she took out carefully and set on the table next to the envelope.

She took a sheet of paper and the quill. She sat staring at the blank page.

The father's letter would say what it always said. Promises. Words that sounded good and weighed little. Kenji would read them with that smile of his, that smile that still believed in things, and he would believe them because he still could. That had to last a little longer.

Rina began to write.

It wasn't a letter for tomorrow. It was a letter for later, for the day Kenji reached where he said he wanted to go. For the day he had paid for everything with things he didn't yet know he was going to lose. A letter to be opened only when he had earned it.

When she finished she folded it, left it next to the medallion and the father's letter, and blew out the candle.

She fell asleep without difficulty, with the chest closed on the shelf and the wind still beating against the window.