Laughter is the Worst Medicine, Part 8

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

I wish Mama was here, Ichiro thought. He asked some of the breeze kami around them to eat all the sound so passersby wouldn’t hear them, and others to show the two of them eating chicken. It wasn’t polite to look through illusions, so only the very rude would do so.

“I wanted it to be different here, but it’s not. Still that horrible sound, still not our Kitsune. I miss Mama and Daddy. I miss everyone. We’re going to Crossroads, but everything is still the same today!” she sobbed into Ichiro’s chest.

“I miss them, too.” He stroked her hair…like Mama used to when I was little. She did the same thing for Gin. Sometimes we were both in her lap.

They sat that way for a time, holding each other with the chickens pressed between them. When they were done crying, they ate their chicken. Ichiro stopped thinking about the breeze kami, and they wandered off. Gin sucked some of the juice that had seeped into her kimono. Ichiro left her to it. Concentrating on the kami through his tears and worry for Gin took a lot out of him.

Someone coughed on the street and Ichiro jerked his head toward the sound. In that moment he heard the coughing that ultimately killed everyone. It didn’t disrupt his day like the laughter did to Gin, but when he heard someone cough or clear their throat, he briefly remembered his parents choking. Or his grandparents. Or the little baby…Ichiro closed his eyes to block out the images.

They thanked the chicken stand owners for the chicken one more time, threw their bones in the chicken stand’s waste bucket, and entered the bath house.

“Where are you two from?” The same woman working the counter asked them.

“Big Fork,” Ichiro answered.

She frowned. “Why are you here? That’s right next to those hot springs everyone raves about. Gotta be better than a bath house in the middle of all these humans,” she said.

“We had to leave,” Ichiro said.

She looked the pair of them over closely for a time. “Are you in some kind of trouble? This is a quiet neighborhood and we don’t want problems.”

“No, nothing like that,” Ichiro attempted to give her a winsome smile, but he was too tired to pull it off.

“I’m going to call the guards if you don’t start talking, kid. Maybe even the onmyoji.” Both Ichiro and Gin saw she meant it.

Ichiro looked at his sister and sighed. She’s never going to listen to me again. “Big Fork is dead. Every single person but us. We were in the hot spring when it, whatever it was, happened.”

“There was a horrible laugh. Ichiro couldn’t hear it because he was under the falls,” Gin said. The sound of laughter filled the air. Even though it warbled as though it came from under water, it was very sinister and the woman cringed. Passersby hurried past the sound, or quickly begged breeze kami to eat the sound before it reached their ears.

“And then everyone was dead,” Ichiro concluded. No, I don’t want to remember again. He looked at Gin and saw grim determination.

“And today we’re going to Crossroads, because it happened there, too. That weird onmyoji asked us to come along,” Gin finished.

She looked at them again for a long time. “Crossroads is dead? That’s why raime prices went up. The merchants said they hadn’t gotten as much as they normally did.” She didn’t know any one there if she’s concerned about fabric, Ichiro thought.

“You say an onmyoji asked you?” She asked suspiciously. “Which one?”

“Lord Taira,” Ichiro answered.

“This one?” The breeze kami showed a picture of Taira in his yellow robe. Ichiro and Gin nodded.

She relaxed. “He’s alright for a human. Good luck. I’m sorry about Big Fork,” she added kindly. Then she handed Ichiro the old stained kimono. “The price of raime is going sky high, so take this. You’re helping.”

“Thank you,” Ichiro told her.

Despite the rough start, Ichiro and Gin had a very nice bath. None of the bathers had heard Gin’s laughter. Ichiro worried about how his sister would react so close to strange Kitsune. But he didn't hear any screams or crying from the women's side of the bathhouse. He soaked and joked with the men and relaxed in a way he hadn’t in a long time. In typical Kitsune fashion, they told stories with both words and pictures. All around the tub, breeze and water kami showed snippets of conversations.

Gin was surprised to only scrub herself once. Despite her rough treatment yesterday in jail, then working in the kitchen last night, she wasn’t filthy. She sat in the tub by a girl her age. But unlike the awful human girls who got Gin in trouble, Cho was very nice.

They talked and giggled for awhile. Cho liked boys and showed Gin all the cute ones, and those to avoid. She told Gin all the gossip in K-Town. Gin missed her friends terribly as she talked with Cho. But Cho was so welcoming she smiled despite her sadness.

Gin didn’t want to tell her new friend about Big Fork, since she’d just told someone else. Talking about it upset her. Instead she said, "My brother and I just got jobs from one of those ‘important’ humans in town. We have to go out of town for a few days, but then we'll be back. Then my brother is getting us a place in Kitsune Town!”

“What’s the important human look like?” Cho’s face lit up in fascination.

Gin talked to the water kami swirling around them. Lord Taira frowned at them, then pinched his nose. He made the motion Gin remembered when he told her kimono to restitch itself. He vanished back into the water when faint laughter started.

Cho’s eyes went wide and she gasped. “That’s on onmyoji! You’re working with an onmyoji!” She cried loudly. All the ladies in the tub looked at the two of them. “Look, she’s working with a yellow robe!” Cho mumbled to a breeze kami and Lord Taira hovered in the air.

All the women looked at the image and at Gin. She was frozen under the weight of so many stares. The lady up front wasn’t upset, but they are. I need to get out of here.

Picture by Daphne Zaras - http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/headlines/dszpics.htmlOriginally uploaded at en.wikipedia; description page is/was here., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2130165