CODE NAME VERITY by Elizabeth Wein
After I write this confession, if you don’t shoot me and I ever make it home, I’ll be tried and shot as a collaborator anyway. But I look at all the dark and twisted roads ahead and this is the easy one, the obvious one. What’s in my future—a tin of kerosene poured down my throat and a match held up to my lips? Scalpel and acid, like the Resistance boy who won’t talk? My living skeleton packed up in a cattle wagon with two hundred desperate others, carted off God knows where to die of thirst before we get there? No. I’m not travelling those roads.
Remember, I was twelve years old. A boy, yes, but a boy who had already seen his fair share of grotesqueries. The laboratory had shelves along the walls that held large jars wherein oddities floated in preserving solution, extremities and organs of creatures that you would not recognize, that you would swear belonged to the world of nightmares, not our waking world of comfortable familiarity. And as I’ve said, this was not the first time I had assisted the doctor at his table.
Above all, mine is a love story.
I turn away, trying to see where the perimeter ends and the Wasteland begins, but the sun is nothing but a fiery mirage below the tree line now, and the shadows have taken over.
The etheric energy zips across my eyelids, my wrists, slithering down my stockings into my boots. I am suspended in the crackling field for several seconds before my palms and knees hits the floor.
The raw crunch of metal sends me reeling back and puts everything on pause for one brief, critical moment where I edge around the wreckage and try to focus on one thing that makes sense. This: Mr. Jenkins is spread-eagle on his lawn, in his housecoat. He’s twitching. Mrs. Jenkins is kneeling over him. She rips his shirt wide open. Heart attack, I think. Mr. Jenkins has bad heart. She’s giving him CPR.
I hadn’t killed anyone all winter, and I have to say I felt pretty good about that. Sure, I’d wanted to, but too many suspicious drownings got people talking. Fearful townspeople were the last thing I needed. Besides, I was getting a sick thrill out of denying my body what it craved. Self-control was my latest obsession. I doubted my sisters could say the same thing.
Arashiyama is only forty-five minutes from Kyoto by local train. But it feels remote and sleepy, steeped in humidity. It’s a different humidity than in Tokyo. There’s a freshness in the air, and a scent of grass and water, that makes me think of the dark green matcha we once drank at Kenji and Mitsue’s house. The town itself is surrounded by lush, tree-covered hills – the same hills Hiroshige and van Gogh put in their art. Shop owners take their time unlocking doors, washing down walkways. Couples go out for morning strolls. Men in pointed hats pull rickshaws. I can smell breakfasts cooking: salty, pungent smells of rice and miso, seaweed and salty plums and pickles, staples of the savory Japanese breakfast. Nobody’s in a hurry.
He taunted me with lips curled into a mocking grin and a bring-it-on wiggle of his fingers. “Oh, I’m not worried about you.”
I don’t remember much of that night besides her bloody shape slumped against the cracked driver’s-side window, but I remember those fucking bushes.
He stared up at the ramshackle cottage on the bluff, its yellow paint peeling, the roof sagging. His mother’s studio window faced this way, the best view in the house. Now the window was full of sky and autumn clouds. He could not see her moving about inside.
I remember being born.
It was quick.
They stare, but not at me.
The boy lay there in his sea-soaked tuxedo. His body was chained to the sharp rock by a series of thick metal links, and he was stretched out like he was on a torture rack. Blood drooled from his mouth down onto his bare chest, where his captor had ripped open his white tuxedo shirt. The lower half of his body was submerged beneath the water.
