Sound in the Silence

Sometimes it seemed like the only thing Shoto was good at was running. Running from his problems and responsibilities, the real world, his mother, the cops, you name it. "The textbook definition of a problem child," his mother would say with one hand pressing a phone to her ear while the other pinched the bridge of her nose. She only said those things late at night to Grandma when she thought no one else would hear. Shoto always heard.

It wasn't his fault, not really. Everything just felt...wrong. There was no fixing it for him, no solution. He didn't belong anywhere, there was no right spot for him. He never liked being home, for a multitude of reasons. He'd stay out so late past the town's curfew that he'd have to dodge cop cars on the way home because he knew he'd get caught. It happened once, and he'd been taken down to the station. Never. Again.

School was hard, too, so he'd started to skip most days. Shoto could never focus, could never get his work done. Reading was a chore, and in the science classes he was forced to sit in the middle of a bunch of bullies that picked on him and called him slurs. Not that he actually cared that much anymore, but it was pretty annoying having things thrown at him from all sides. Math may as well have been a foreign language to him. He'd been in remedial classes since his second year in elementary school. He was kind of sick of it all. The rare days he did show up to their tiny town's sole school building that kindergarten through grade 12 shared, he'd choose a window seat and zone out for the duration of the school day.

"Space cadet," his oldest brother Toya would call him along with a few other choice expletives, voice laced with malicious intent while holding Shoto in a headlock that he never fought once he was in it. His mother's half-assed scolding words could always be heard in the background from the other side of their ramshackle house during those moments--the walls were paper-thin, so of course she heard. She was always preoccupied with something else. Other than actively try to do anything about Toya bullying his little brother, she'd just tell them to stop roughhousing. Fuyumi used to be his savior, until she moved into a dorm for college all the way in Kyoto. If Natsuo was ever home he'd try to intervene, but, unlike Shoto, Natsuo had a social life.

Shoto was inclined to agree with Toya, though, if he had to be honest. He didn't know why he was the way he was, for many reasons, but the nickname fit. Sometimes he wished he could change. Most days he couldn't bring himself to care.

Something about animals really brought Shoto out of his shell, though. And the new litter of kittens that belonged to the cat who lived behind the convenience store was no different. If anybody who knew Shoto were to see him behind the rundown store playing with the five little balls of fur, a dirty shoelace in hand with split-colored hair in his eyes and a rare toothy smile on his face, they would've thought him possessed. Shoto didn't smile. Not like that, not at anybody. Not at anybody except for five little kittens that he'd named after brands of candy because they were such sweethearts.

He would've loved to have taken them and their mother home with him, but he was anxious their dog Sora, an absolute tank of a pittie with floppy ears and a smile that could melt hearts, would get too rough with them. "He's a sweetie, but he's as dumb as a box of rocks," Shoto's mother once said three years ago when he was still a puppy and got his head stuck between the bars of the stair railing. It sent his then four-year-old sister Nozomi into a giggle fit that was so loud Shoto had thought she was throwing a tantrum when he heard her screeching.

It wasn't long after he discovered them that those cats became his entire world. He found himself thinking about them several times a day, wondering if he had enough spare change to buy the mother a can of wet food, what toy to bring them--going so far as to skip school. This by itself wasn't out of the ordinary, of course.

He'd originally planned on showing up to school that day (read: forced to go by his mother "or else"). But when he walked by the alley and saw the now much bigger kittens batting around an empty pill bottle without a care in the world, he couldn't ignore the temptation to stop and say hi to them.