leishe
Dream Country
The train was like a long, giant snake, slithering noiselessly through the tall buildingtops of the city's skyline. It was made of reinforced aluminium plates, and floated an inch above the magnetic track. It curved in and out of the city's main streets and avenues, sometimes going down, sometimes up, and was piloted by an empty chair, which, oddly, swivelled in all the right directions, as if someone was sitting there. But it was driven by a computer.
Everyone knew that. And it was the safest commuting machine in the world. No one had been killed by riding the snake train. Yet.
I.
Sakura watched her reflection in the thick glass as the city maze passed by below her. Her face was still very pale from the refrigerator incident, and it had been hard to remove the dark red stain from her pajamas. Luckily, Asuma the gardener was able to help her drag the creature's rapidly rotting carcass out onto the street, where it would be run over by the grey blur of cars, crushed into the asphalt until it was no more.
The girl sighed and fiddled at the fringes of her school uniform. School. So…plain. Of course, there were the boys and the girls and her giggling schoolfriends who relished attending unisex parties and whispering to each other in the hallways about people. There were also the teachers, who smiled and shouted and whipped and growled, but they too were only parts of it. She sighed.
"Academy 00674223." Said the speaker.
beep. beep. beep.
The snake train began to slow, and Sakura gathered up her things. Her black shoes squeaked against the floor. They still smelled faintly of the refrigerator creature's blood, even after hours of vigorous scrubbing and cleaning and perfuming. The doors to the train opened and then they closed with a puff of air, and she was gone.
II.
Breakfast from the machine was never enough for Naruto and Hanabi and consequently, some others. Once they got back to the homeless factory, the smell of food brewing reached the boy's nose, and it twitched in eagerness.
"Mmm…smell that Hanabi? I think it's stewed fish today!"
The scrawny girl sniffed the air. She nodded a little. "Yeah. Isabella probably got tired of lifeless cabbage after a few months."
Naruto let out a light chuckle. "I guess."
The walked, carrying their metal trays, to a corner of the factory where the other people were gathered. The small crowd was dressed similarly—in oddly assorted pieces of cloth, with worn-out patterns and laces and dots of all sorts. In the thick of the crowd was an old woman with sparse grey-white hair and rearranged teeth. She was bent over a fairly large black cauldron from where the fumes of cooking food emanated.
"Hanabi," the old woman croaked, once she and Naruto neared, "Hanabi, come here."
Rolling her eyes, the young girl obeyed, shoving her tray into the boy's stomach so that he could hold it. Naruto sent her an irritated look but she ignored him, going up to the old hag. Wordlessly, she took hold of the long wooden ladle that the woman used to stir the food with.
A man handed her his bowl, which was a used and washed plastic container of instant ramen. Hanabi took it and put a spoonful of fish stew inside, and did so for the next bowl, and the next. One by one, each of the homeless handed their bowls to her—some were discarded pieces of Tupperware, others, used plastic cups and ice cream tubs. The girl filled them all until there was nothing left to fill.
The old crone nodded, showing her teeth, like always. Hanabi left the ladle in the cauldron, to go and fetch her own bowl, and Naruto's too. It went like this almost every morning, the only difference being that the soup today was fish stew instead of cabbage soup. A rarity, but then it would most probably be gone by the next day.
"It…tastes…different."
"Hm. A little colder than the cabbage soup, but this will do."
"The eyes taste nice."
"…yeah."
They sat on the steps of the factory, which led into the now-locked doors where the workers used to go in. The concrete was cold and hard against their bodies, but Naruto and Hanabi sat there, braving the spiteful, shivering breeze that blew against their necks.
He spooned a helping of quickly cooling fish stew into his mouth, and watched as the blackish smoke clouds floated like sleeping monsters, on the horizon. Mother was fully awake now, and he could hear her sounds; grumbling, lurching, complaining. It was like always and yesterday and perhaps, tomorrow.
III.
Brown, tailored cloth. The suit was a little too snug for the thin, canary-like man, and the cuffs of the white shirt he wore underneath stretched out a little too far. The back of his head was bald and shiny, with exception of the bottom portion, where a smattering of black-green hair still grew. The teacher's hand moved methodically against the blackboard, drawing white against dark green, and saying unintelligible things.
Sasuke stifled a yawn and sat up straighter in his seat to chase the sleep away. One of the girls sitting in his vicinity giggled adoringly, and the young man fought the urge to roll his eyes.
The teacher stopped writing, and the warning bell rang. The sounds of students shuffling and getting up and walking away echoed into nothing, as Sasuke got his own bag and exited the room. The teacher collected his teaching materials and went out as well.
"Hi Sasuke-kun," said someone he didn't recognize. Sasuke nodded once and continued to his next class. Biology, or was it Chemistry? His feet made muffled sounds against the floor, and a door was pushed open.
"Good morning class!" said the teacher. "Today we shall be learning about a grasshopper's tracheal tubes!"
Sasuke sat down and tried to fall asleep.
IV.
Her friends were in the girls' bathroom when she arrived, talking excitedly about something that probably had to do with the upcoming prom. Sakura wandered inside, dropping her bag tiredly on one side and going to the nearest sink to wash her face of stress. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw that there was still a faint shade of red clinging to her left pinkie.
"Sakura!" said one of her friends. They smiled at her and talked some more, and then gathered around the girl to look at her in the mirror.
"What happened to you?" asked one friend, who smelled like artificially-bred lemonized strawberry. "We didn't see you for the whole day!"
Sakura smiled emptily, and squirted some blue-colored soap onto her palm. She started scrubbing, and a nice blue lather began to form. She didn't talk as she scrubbed, and her friends grew tired of waiting, so they started talking about the prom again, and about dresses and dates and boys…about things that schoolgirls usually got excited about.
She turned off the faucet after rinsing, and raised her eyebrow at them all. "A sewer creature got into my house, and I killed it."
Her friends gasped. "A sewer creature? How? Where? Why?" "Maybe your mother forgot to have your house fumigated last month." "Ick" "You killed it!" "What did it look like?" "Was it like the one that they showed on TV last time?" "How did you get it out?" "Did it smell like flies?" "How many teeth?" "What did you use to kill it!"
The torrent of questions ensued, and suddenly, Sakura regretted ever telling her friends about the sewer monster. She turned back to the mirror to check her hair, and smiled once more at them, with a hint of weariness in her beleaguered expression. And then Sakura left the bathroom, leaving the girls with a ton of unanswered questions dangling on the ends of their scented tongues.
V.
The tall woman was in her garden in the afternoon, watering her plants. She didn't like doing this. Plants were for decoration. For pleasure. But then they had to live, as well. The woman grunted, aiming the stream of water at the far corner, so that it would rain down on the crusty palm plant whose leaves were beginning to brown.
A window opened, somewhere in the second floor of her house, and a voice rang through the air.
"Miss Tsunade!"
The woman looked up to see the young, fair-skinned face, framed by dark locks and painted with a small smile. She nodded once, returning the smile.
"Shizune…?"
"I…um…kind of tried to rearrange the blue china! Where do the teacups go?"
"In the left side of the bookshelf." she answered, turning back to her gardenwork. The young woman called Shizune looked puzzled.
"Bookshelf?"
"Tap it thrice. A compartment should come out."
Shizune's eyes widened, but she nodded nevertheless, and her head disappeared back into the house. Tsunade continued spraying her plants with cold rainwater, humming softly to herself as she flipped one of her pigtails to one side. In a few minutes she stopped the flow of water from the hose, and coiled it back into place.
Her eyes landed on a rosebush, and the woman smiled. The rosebush was one of her favourites.
She let out a breath that she didn't know she was holding, and cast a glance down at the empty street and the row of houses lining them. Tsunade closed her eyes for five moments, and with a shallow sigh, continued into the slightly ajar door of her house. It closed with a sad, odd thud.
Jiraiya…
VI.
Sakura dropped her bags in the corner, and proceeded to the wide, round table carved out of willow wood. A stack of books were on the table, and next to them, another stack of white paper. Beside the white paper was a smiling man, who had glasses and teeth and silver hair. He was playing with a pen, twirling it in and out of his flexible fingers, flipping it in the air and then catching it.
Sakura cleared her throat to make her presence known.
The man with teeth stopped twirling and smiled at her instead of the pen. He gestured to the seat beside him, and Sakura sat down.
"Hello Haruno. Shall we begin the lesson?"
She nodded.
"Okay," said the man. He took one book out of the stack and began turning the pages. The girl waited while he did this, sitting with her head in her palm, looking idly at the tall clock that was facing the willow table.
"Here we are. Trigonometric Circles."
Kabuto was the tutor, the man with silver hair, glasses, teeth, and a smile. He was smart as tutors were, and skilled at arithmetic and the sciences. What Sakura didn't like about him was his irritating bossiness and his monotonous voice. And the pen twirling. Of course. That was incredibly annoying. Sakura sighed as she skimmed over the list of things she had to review for today, and took a piece of paper.
She took out a pencil and began drawing Kabuto being eaten by a rosebush.
VII.
Naruto was off for the afternoon, working as a newspaper peddler as most of the street urchins did. He was humming happily, with a bunch of folded-up newspapers in his arms, and some loose change in his pocket from the first buyers. Clear blue eyes shone in the filtered light as he travelled down the cemented path with bare, dusty feet, sidestepping the clopping commuters and the canal-spitting geezers.
"Boy. Newspaper." A taxi stopped and the window rolled down. Naruto grinned and approached the buyer eagerly, pushing a newspaper into the open window. The man handed him a few coins, and the boy took them. He nodded his thanks, but the customer ignored him, and the taxi drove away.
Naruto resumed his walking, rounding the residential compound. the tall, bleak apartment buildings loomed over the sidewalk, shading it from the sullen, miserable glower of the muted sun.. The boy wiped the beading sweat from his brow, and then noticed that another shadow was blocking the sun.
He shaded his eyes, squinting.
"Sir?"
The shadow stepped forward, and Naruto was able to see the stranger's face. His eyes were round and blue also, and a few spikes of yellow hair stuck out from beneath a brown bowler hat. The stranger smiled at the young man, and it reached his eyes. For some reason, Naruto's grip on the newspapers trembled.
"Naruto," said the man, "It is time for you to go." He pushed up one of his sleeves, and flicked an arm into the air. The sky turned clear blue for one instant.
The boy stared, with his mouth wide open, and the newspapers fell to the ground. The stranger in the brown bowler hat grinned again, and this time, he resembled Naruto more than ever. He snapped his fingers twice, and the sky turned grey again. And when Yondaime looked down, to the spot where the beggar boy was, he found air, and a stack of newspapers.
Naruto was gone.