How Ninja Brush Their Teeth

Chapter 9

Nine

The bus ride home for Tetsuo was troubling. He had enjoyed himself at the barbecue, but he didn’t want to think about its cost. For the first time in his life he felt at home with another group of people, as unlikely as they were. They had accepted him for who he was and had even extended the hand of friendship after he had threatened one of them with a broken beer bottle.

 Who does that?

For years, he was told the world had no place for him. The same world which discarded him as a child and made him an orphan, would never accept him now, especially after the things he had done for the clan. Since he could remember, there were only three choices he could make for his life: the clan, prison, or the grave.

And now there was another option.

And the other option disturbed him.

Blind obedience and devotion to the clan was easier than this. And he was disgusted by his years of intellectual laziness to have never asked himself the harder questions.

The thought of going back to work the next morning twisted at his stomach. How could he go back when he knew what business they were involved in? It went against everything they prided themselves on as a clan. Why hadn’t anyone been questioning it? And more importantly, why hadn’t he?

His bus stop was approaching and the thought of just staying on the bus and never getting off tempted him. He could survive without the clan, it would be hard, yes, and he probably couldn’t stay in one place for very long, but it wasn’t much different than his life now. The bus jerked from running over a pothole and the paper back of barbeque scraps he had brought home for the orange cat crinkled in his arms.

 He pulled the bus cable and got off at his stop.

***

In spite of himself, the idea of feeding the cat some tasty scraps made him cheer up a little. He hurried home from the bus stop, clutching the greasy bag of spare rib bones and pieces of chicken gristle and took the stairs to his second floor apartment two by two. About halfway up the steps he felt it. A wave of prickly nerves washed over the top of his skull and down his spine.

She was here again, but something else was wrong. It wasn’t until he topped the staircase he knew what it was. In front of his door to the apartment lay the orange and white cat. And it was very still. Too still. By now the cat would be prancing down the banister toward him, sniffing at the bag he held in his hands. But it just lay there, a slight breeze ruffling some of its fur.

“No,” he whispered. A structure which had been inside Tetsuo, built up by hours and hours of training and discipline by heartless masters and unsympathetic teachers, snapped inside him, no longer able to hold the weight of what he was experiencing.

He ran, like in a dream, with tunnel vision focus on the just the cat, the bag of scraps forgotten on the steps and knelt beside the lifeless body of cold orange fur. He was so engrossed in it he failed to see his apartment door open and his enemy sitting just inside staring at him and the cat.

He tried to wake the cat, but its limp body just rolled listlessly as he nudged it. He picked it up, the body so light and thin he could still feel the fine bones shift beneath the fur as he held it. Even after all the food he had been feeding it, the cat was still skinny as a rail.

Clutching the dead cat, he stopped short when he saw her.

She smirked at him, “Did you love it?” As cruel as her face was, her eyes told a different story. They were red, sad and bitter.

“You did this?” he asked, his own voice sounding far away and faint in his ears as it cracked with rage. “Why would you kill a stupid cat?”