Illustration by Max Currie
After an hour down a narrow, winding road, Kent was back in the center of town. The morning was damp and cold, and the umbrella did little to protect him from the rain. His clothes were soaked, his shoes sopped, and water ran from his wet hair inside his shirt. His glasses fogged over and he feared the sad umbrella would lose its battle with the wind. Rivers rushed by him in the gutters, so many streams of water and debris that he gave up avoiding them.
The sky grew brighter as Kent followed a river tributary through a small park. Old men and women in polyester athletic suits shuffled along a tarmac path; dogs trailed on leashes. He was eager to get back to the hotel and clean up, look presentable for whoever he was supposed to meet, especially if the documentary crew was with them. Then there he was: Ozman, weathered and torn on the side of an abandoned building in an old poster advertising Airship Japan. Kent stopped and bent, his hands on his knees as he struggled to breathe. That face through a fish-eye lens, trademark mohawk rising in the sky like a shark fin, his eyes bugged, his mouth in a scream, his pierced tongue lapped over his bottom lip. A short samurai sword—a chisa katana used in ritual suicide—ran in one ear and out the other.
christopher bundy 