A Port of Call by Ryu Ando

In Otaru, Hokkaido, I once met an Ainu man standing in the rain.

He told me all un-received radio waves collect in some far corner of the universe.

“Crackle and hiss and loss,” he said. “It is a graveyard of information. A bone yard of fidelity.”

I lamented the loss, but he only laughed at me.

“You misunderstand,” he said as sea spray and low clouds muffled us like cathode-ray static. “It is beautiful to see chaos spiral and reason unravel.”

kamuy ekupe kamuy orowano.

As I walked around under Otaru’s fragile gas lamps all I saw was that unlit corner unfolding in silence before me. I stood on the wharf and could see it there, floating on the private tides of grief, just beyond my grasp, peering at me from behind the slippery curtains of freezing rain:

infinite, dark lotus.

And I remember nothing more of my time there except for the idiot North wind spiraling over us and carrying with it the unwelcome laughter of cold transformation as worlds froze over.

© 2013 Ryu Ando

Ryu Ando currently lives in Los Angeles, California. He lived much of his life in Omiya, Saitama prefecture, Japan and that impacts the fiction he writes. When the persistent sunshine gets to him he sometimes pines for the land of noisy pachinko ball-bearings and restaurants that stink of tobacco. He writes primarily speculative, science, and so-called “odd” fiction.

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