Eien stopped mid-step, startled by the sudden seizure of admiration the surrounding stillness evoked within. Leaves, orange and red and brown, snoozed peacefully on branches hanging over the open field before him. The birds had vacated the area in favor of trees a greater distance from the field. Even the insects nestled within the sea of grass refrained from buzzing whatever business it was insects normally buzzed about. Such was always the case when nature’s children sensed the promise of death in the air. It was what he had often heard referred to as the calm before a storm and he feared today’s storm would prove fearsome indeed.
The sun still held enough strength to light the wildflowers waving along the horizon ablaze but it would be dark soon. Sunset. He recalled how fond he’d been of watching sunsets when he was alive. Many memories from his living days had rotted away to foggy webs of speculation but his once daily practice of watching as days drowned into nights remained vivid. He’d always preferred to watch from up high, in a neighbor’s tree or the closest roof he could climb on top of. He’d marveled at the transformation the cycle of night suffocating the day and day burning out the night wrought upon the sky. The eternal battle of sun and moon, darkness and light, life and death; it was a dance the entire universe performed in more ways than he could have imagined at the time.
He stood staring into the dying sun until the realization that his hands had begun to tremble distracted from his thoughts. Strange, seeing his fingers curled into fists. Unexpected, the feeling the sight of his own fist caused to swell within his chest. How human it made him seem, trembling beneath the knowledge that this moment of golden stillness could not last. The storm was approaching even as he stood staring and the sun would emerge victorious from tonight’s struggle to find the peaceful field dyed crimson in its wake.
Light after darkness, but darkness follows light.
He wondered at the real reason behind his body’s curious behavior. He had seen a lot of bad things in his line of work. He’d accepted there was little he could do about that just as there was little he could have done about the bad thing that had happened to him. Love coupled cruelty, death remained wedded to life, and sometimes one changed the other for the better. Sometimes lovely, undeserving souls were simply scarred by the ugly because the ugly had no one better to damage at the time.
“It is what it is,” his sensei was fond of saying. “Those seemingly senseless things play an equally important role as things clearly deserved in terms of keeping order. One lives on so another dies. One suffers so another knows joy. It’s never anything personal – making it personal would send the universal order out of alignment.”
He had learned to be all right with that. He remembered little about the bad thing that had happened to him and supposed that made it easier to forgive. Sensei called his spotty memory a blessing. It bit at him from time to time, came in blips of sound and image like a television with poor reception. It bit especially hard in moments such as this, when he sensed a violent storm on the rise. Not every storm was one generated by the weather, after all; it was those orchestrated by human hands that never failed to set his soul on edge.
It had been sensei’s idea that he come here. They worked as a team, he and sensei and two others, though they were hardly the only collectors performing similar duties around the world. Sensei had been rather insistent that he take this case though he hadn’t offered any explanation and Eien hadn’t bothered to ask any questions. He had learned the futility of asking “why?” a long time ago.
So it was he had gathered up his gear and made haste to this small town, unaccustomed to working completely on his own though he was. Things had felt both familiar and strange, as things so often did since the bad thing had happened, when he’d passed the faded sign that welcomed him into town. He had and hadn’t been surprised by how easily he’d found his way around, as though he did but didn’t already know where every house and business might be found.
He couldn’t shake the feeling he had been in this town before though it struck him as strange considering he hadn’t ever been on assignment in the area. Stranger still the town would have made such an impression even if he had for it certainly wasn’t much to look at. He had spotted two pharmacies, a few fast food joints and restaurants, an all-night grocery store, and the obligatory Wal-mart and Starbucks no town seemed able to be without these days. Nothing new and certainly nothing exciting.
The shops closed around 10pm, creating the sense of a ghost town after dark. Police patrolled mostly empty streets in between visits to McDonald’s for a refill on their coffee. It was a quiet place, a place where one felt safe walking around on their own. Safe like he’d felt while watching all those sunsets. The thought of that now sent a chill throughout his soul and he noticed his hands had begun to tremble once again. He let them shake, willed the fists to linger.
The storm was on its way.