Touch
The apartment complex had whitewashed walls, and heat dripped off of them in sticky currents, wild static and cones. On the sidewalk below her window, Sakura liked to watch the traffic of people as they hurdled past.
Men walked around shirtless, muscles displayed like the finest of museum art, and women wore skinny-strap tops, gripping the sweaty hands of their kids. Children's feet dragged on the pavement where ice cream melted, and the soundtrack that annoyed parents moved to consisted of whines and begs and high-pitched groveling.
The cooling units were broken, and the fat, steely pipes rattled in Sakura's closet. She had always found it fascinating that these pipes reached every member of the complex; that every person living there was connected in some unknown but strongly defined fashion. In her mind she pictured a dragon sitting on the roof, breathing fire and spitting water into each room.
Her elbows rested on the hot plastic windowsill, and outside, planes floated lazily in place through the sky, spreading behind them the puffy clouds that they had cleared. A collage of cotton-candy shapes formed in their path; butterflies and bumblebees, imitation snowflakes and holiday stockings.
The elderly women from her mother's sewing circle were conversing on the corner, shaded under floral-print parasols, wearing pearls, their hair curled tightly. They waved to eachother as they spoke, upturning lemon-pursed lips in half-smiles.
Sakura's eyes were soupy pools of pea green by the time she spotted them: Ami and the group of dysfunctional brats that followed her. Cradled in their arms were sweet dolls with beady eyes and penciled smiles, clothed in shades of magenta and bright orange that reminded her of the loud blonde boy she sat behind at the academy sometimes.
Underneath her chin, she balled a fist. Her nails dug into her skin, imprinting stinging crescents there, but she ignored the feeling and did her best to ignore the objects of her sudden fury, too. In her other hand, she held a shiny shuriken, something both deadly and delicate, pointed like a flower fierce in the wind.
In a swift motion, her head turned stiffly to one side, and she noticed the sun finally: a gleaming disc suspended above the life that hurried and happened, the love that bloomed and blossomed in Konoha.
Sakura was seven years old. The taste of a summer lollipop—long gone—whispered against her tongue, and curled in one hand was the tool that would carve her future.
Fin.