Act I
Emergence
When I was 12, my sister cut off my pinkie with a meat cleaver.
All
in all, it had been a great summer until today. The timing made sense though. Dad said that if you left a group of soldiers in a room with
a cup of water long enough, eventually one of them would drown. For us, the slow descent into
ennui-induced madness was undercut by our inherent laziness, so it took a bit
longer.
School
had ended weeks ago. Immediately
upon closeout of the school year, Marlin and I began a gradual but deliberate
migration from our shared upstairs bedroom down to the living room. Initially, our long, sleepless nights
were filled with the vast collection of movies our parents had collected over
the years.
Between
the two of us, we had learned that it was far easier to bring down blankets and
pillows than to move back up to bed every morning when we finally succumbed to
exhaustion sometime in the early hours of the morning. As the days passed, a small fortress
consisting of dirty clothes, sheets, couch cushions, throw pillows, and other
household accretions built itself around us. We encouraged its growth by doing our best to reinforce it as
it expanded.
Now
that all the schools were out, kids and college students had more time to spend
their money, so dad kept his comic book shop open at strange hours to
accommodate everyone. Mom picked
up extra shifts at the hospital, most of them at night. Our little brother was either at the
shop with dad or spent his time with friends. When a parent came to us after a long day or night of work,
they’d join us in our home inside a home, watch a movie, and then move on to
sleep.
Pleasant
boredom was punctuated by loving distraction with the unexpected discovery of
all things Kurosawa. Near the
bottom of the stack of movies, of which we’d gone through almost all, we found
one called Seven Samurai. Marlin fell in love with Toshiro
Mifune. I fell in love with
Toshiro Mifune’s mustache. Both of
us fell in love with sword fighting.
From
Currents of Youth to Zoku Sugata Sanshiro, we spent countless
hours watching, re-watching, and reenacting every one of his movies. Our obsession grew with our fort. Together, with our mock battles and
lack of showers, the living room became a living nightmare of body odor and
filth.
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