She stood up even though her knees trembled, breaking away from her father’s grasping hands. She couldn’t stand the thought of her father dying at her feet, begging. The man who had taught her to be strong above all else, had lied to her about his plans for glory, had made her think that she was special because she was born to a samurai family, but in the end, he was only a coward.
She picked up her sword from the pool of blood at her mother’s feet and stood behind her father. Her hands trembled violently, the blade shuddering in the darkness.
Samuraikillin one strike, she heard her father saying as she tried desperately to steady her grip.
She is not a warrior. She’s just a maimed hare limping through the forest. Put her out of her misery.
“Shut up,” Sen whispered, the blade nearly slipping out of her sweaty hands.
“Please, Sen,” her father whispered, shuddering on the ground, choking on his own blood.
She tried to take a steadying breath, but her hands hardly felt like they belonged to her anymore, her whole body racked with shivers, her breath coming too fast.
“Sen,” her father groaned, curling up around his wound.
“Stay still,” Sen whispered. “I can’t—”
“Can you do nothing right?” he said, the words a bitter whisper. “One simple cut is all I’ve ever asked of you, and you can’t even do this much for me? I should have—”
Sen brought the blade down.
There was a thump as her father’s head hit the floor, and he fell silent. The sword slipped from Sen’s fingers and clattered to the ground.
Sen let out a broken cry, falling to the floor and scooting back against the wall. She gripped her hair and tried to breathe, but it felt like the whole house was collapsing on her.
She had failed. Everything her father had trained her for had come down to this moment, and she had struck out in anger instead of strength.
Maybe she still could gather herself and defeat the soldiers when they came for her.The last samurai of Satsuma, that was what her father had called her. The failed rebellion was her father’s shame, and now that dishonor had been lifted and Sen could live on as she pleased. She could have her own children and raise them as samurai, and someday when the world wasn’t expecting it, the samurai could return. That was what her father had intended.
Sen picked up her father’s tanto and examined the gleam of blood on it, her hands now strangely steady. She tipped her head back against the wall and imagined another life in which her father had been quietly stripped of his samurai title like everyone else, had gotten a new job, maybe working wood or metal. Her family had stayed in Satsuma and she had gone to school and never had a reason to raise a sword to anyone.
I won’t do it, Sen thought, the tears drying up on her face,her blood running cold, her breath slow and even.This is what I think of your last request.
She turned her blade on herself and sliced across her abdomen.
The pain was blinding, but it pulled her away from the sight of her dead family, so she let it consume her, bloom inside her, steal away her vision, her senses, her dreams of what her life might have been. She could only exist here and now, her belly warm with blood and bright with pain. Her blood spilled through the floorboards, into the earth beneath the house.
She collapsed back against her closet door, whichthunkedand slid open.
On the other side, there was a man.
If Sen had had any strength left to move, she might have jumped back and drawn her sword at the sight of a foreigner in her house.
But this man was not a threat. He was barely even there at all.
Covered in blood, paler than snow, lips blue. His chest rose and fell quickly as he panted for breath. He looked up at her with eyes the color of a forest.
Sen felt, somehow, that she had seen him before.
Maybe in the soft edges of a dream, or while meditating. Or maybe in another world, a life she might have had.
All of us are alone, her father had said.
Her vision blurred, and she leaned her head against the side of the closet, unable to move her gaze from the sword held limply in her hand, the sword guard with gold turtles. In her fading vision, the turtles leaped from her sword guard and swam in the pool of her blood, leaving ripples behind them as they circled her feet, which she could no longer move.
She thought of the story her mother had told her about the fisherman who rode a turtle to the bottom of the sea, only to return three hundred years later. Sen imagined she was there now, in her mother’s arms, when everything was warm and quiet.
“When Urashima Taro opened the box,” her mother had said, “all the years of his life washed over him, and he became an old man and turned to dust.”
