Fireflies by Ben Byrne Read Free Book Online

though none of them had been much use to anyone during the fire raids. They’d been more like miniature stoves then. You still had to be wary of going inside, just in case there was a baked, rotten corpse stuck down there.
    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.”
    â€œI see.”
    The girl had been sent to Tokyo from Hiroshima, Aiko said, in the Chugoko region, out on the Seto Inland Sea. Her mother had packed her off to stay with relatives a month or so earlier, but when the girl had disembarked at Tokyo Station, there’d been no one there to meet her. So she’d just wandered off on her own until she finally found herself here at Ueno.
    I didn’t know much about Hiroshima people, only that their city had been very badly bombed, just days before the end of the war. It had gone up with just one blast, people said. I remembered thinking how unlucky they’d been, not to have made it through.
    Aiko’s face was crumpled up in sympathy, and I could tell that she’d taken a shine to the girl. It was hardly surprising. It couldn’t have been much fun hanging around with us boys all the time.
    â€œCan she come and join us, big brother?” she asked, with a pleading look on her face. “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, I thought. She could always help out with the selling work.
    â€œWhy don’t you bring her over to meet us later on today?” I said.
    Aiko’s face lit up and she clapped her hands together.
    â€œThank you big brother!” she said. “Thank you, thank you!”
    ~ ~ ~
    Tomoko. The name itself was enough to send a delicious shiver down my spine. She wore a blue canvas jacket, a battered metal water canteen hung over her shoulder. Her hair was cut very short, almost like a boy’s, and fell just beneath her eyes, so that she blew it 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 next to us in our corner of the ticket hall. Just as I was drifting off, someone flicked my ear. I looked up to see Shin leering over me.
    â€œWhat do you want?” I said.
    â€œI was thinking,” he said, as he scratched 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 learned all the big words at your fancy school but I’m still Shin from Sengen Alley.”
    I sat up, ashamed of myself for having been rude. Perhaps he had been a bully in the old days. But all sorts of things had happened since then.
    â€œWhat’s your big idea, then?” I asked.
    He jerked his thumb toward Tomoko.
    â€œThere’s another way a girl like that could make us some money, you know.”
    I leaped to my feet and stared him down with white eyes, furious that I’d ever felt sorry for such a bastard. I held my fist under his chin until he shrank backward.
    â€œWhat does it matter?” he whined. “We wouldn’t be the only ones!”
    â€œDon’t you touch a hair on her head,” I whispered. “Don’t you even dare.”
    â€œWhat?” he said. “Want to save her for yourself, monster?”
    My clenched fist stopped a hair’s breadth away from his eye socket. Finally he shrugged and rolled away.
    â€œSuit yourself.”
    ~ ~ ~
    Tomoko didn’t say much, at first. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether she’d actually forgotten how to talk on her long journey across the Kansai plain. But then, one afternoon, she came over to us through the ticket hall, holding up