Fire Flowers by Ben Byrne Read Free Book Online

you couldn’t ever let anyone see you cry. If you did, the others had to sit on you, as if you were a sack of rice. I thought that if anyone were to start crying, then someone else would follow, and soon enough, we’d all be crying our eyes out and no one would be able to stop. We might go on crying forever, I thought, until we ended up like empty cicada shells, having cried ourselves away entirely.
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    I was playing with my metal soldiers at the station one morning when Aiko bustled over. She hovered in front of me for a few minutes, humming away, until, finally, I asked her what was the matter.
    She frowned.
    â€œCan people live in holes?” she asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I said.
    Shyly, she told me that she had met a teenage girl the day before, who was living in a hole outside the station.
    â€œYou mean the slit bomb shelter?”
    There were plenty of single-person earthwork shelters scattered across the city, though none of them had been much use during the fire raids. They’d been more like miniature stoves then. You still had to be wary of exploring them, just in case there was a baked, rotten corpse stuck inside.
    â€œWhat’s she doing in there?” I asked.
    â€œShe lives in it!”
    â€œReally?”
    Aiko nodded, biting her lip
    â€œIs she nice?”
    â€œShe’s my friend.”
    Aiko explained that the girl had been sent to Tokyo from the city of Hiroshima, out on the Seto Inland Sea, in the Chugoko region of Japan. Her mother had packed her off to stay with relatives a few weeks before, but when the girl had disembarked at Tokyo Station, there’d been no one there to meet her. So she’d wandered off on her own until she found herself here at Ueno.
    The story sounded common enough. There were lost and orphaned kids all over the place now, sent to Tokyo from other towns or returning from far-flung parts of the Japanese Empire. They wandered about forlornly, clutching onto the little white urns that contained their parents’ remains.
    I didn’t know much about Hiroshima people, though. Only that the city had been very badly bombed, right before the end of the war. They’d been pretty unlucky, I thought—just a few more days and they’d have made it through.
    Aiko’s face was crumpled in sympathy and I could tell she’d taken a shine to the girl. It was hardly surprising. It couldn’t be much fun for her, hanging about with us grimy boys all the time.
    â€œCan she stay with us, big brother?” Aiko pleaded. “Please?”
    I felt a tingle of pride. No one had ever called me big brother before. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to have another girl in the gang. After all, she could always help Aiko out with the selling work.
    â€œWhy don’t you bring her over to meet us later on today,” I said. “I’ll make a decision then.”
    Aiko’s face lit up and she clapped her hands together. “Thank you, big brother!” she said. “Thank you, thank you!”
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    Tomoko. The name alone was enough to send a delicious shiver down my spine. She wore a blue canvas jacket, a battered water canteen slung over her shoulder. Her hair was cut very short, almost like a boy’s, and fell just beneath her eyes, so she blew it nervously out of the way whenever you spoke to her. Her face was quite round but she was terribly thin from her journey from Hiroshima to Tokyo. She was thirteen years old and as shy as a borrowed cat.
    That night, she slept on the floor with us in our corner of the ticket hall, Aiko-chan curled up next to her. Just as I was drifting off, something flicked against my ear. I looked up to see Shin leering over me.
    â€œWhat do you want?” I said.
    â€œI was thinking,” he said, scratching the side of his nose.
    â€œThat makes a change.”
    His thick lip trembled. “Listen,” he said. “Don’t you be so proud. You might have