The first thing I heard that morning was the bell. It was a loose iron hook tapping against the wooden wall beside my bed whenever the wind pushed hard enough through the cracks.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
My eyes opened to darkness the color of wet ash, and for a moment, I lay still beneath my thin blanket, staring at the ceiling I already knew by heart. There were rough beams, a crooked knot in the wood above my head, and a black line of mildew near the corner where the rain liked to creep in whenever storms rolled over the western hills.
The air was cold enough that my breath rose pale in front of me. But dawn had not fully arrived yet since the room still belonged to the night.
I listened to the wind outside as a chicken somewhere beyond the wall made its morning call. I pushed the blanket aside and sat up. The cold slipped under my skin and settled into the bone before the day even had a chance to begin.
My clothes were folded on the stool beside the bed. Folded was generous, really. I had just stacked them neatly the night before because there was no one else to do it for me.
All I had was a faded shirt, dark work trousers, and a thin outer coat with frayed cuffs.
I dressed in silence until I reached for the basin in the corner. The water inside was half-frozen around the edges. I broke the thin sheet of ice with two fingers, splashed my face, and nearly hissed.
It woke me the rest of the way. When I looked up, my reflection in the water was already gone. That was fine. I did not need to see my own face that early. I wasn't ugly. It was just it was painful seeing something that was called a curse.
I grabbed a yoke leaning by the door and lifted the empty buckets hanging from either side and stepped outside. Dawn was waiting as the horizon had just begun to pale into a thin line of silver pressed between the black land and the heavier black of the sky. Mist clung low over the fields beyond the village, drifting over furrows and fences like breath from something sleeping beneath the earth. Roofs rose out of it in dark shapes. Chimneys. Barns. Prayer poles with strips of white cloth tied beneath carved saints.
The village of Hoshimine looked almost gentle from a distance.
At this hour, before the smoke rose and the doors opened and the mouths began to move, it was easy to pretend the place had a soul. I stepped onto the path and started toward the well. The dirt was damp beneath my boots as frost clung to the grass. Somewhere far off, a dog barked once, then fell quiet again.
I kept my head down out of habit even though no one was awake. It was just because that was how I had learned to walk through this village. Quietly and carefully. Like I had no right to disturb the morning. The well stood near the middle of the lower lane, a ring of old stone worn smooth by years of hands and rope. By the time I reached it, the sky had turned from black to deep blue. Not day yet. But close.
I set the buckets down and fed the rope through my palms. The old pulley groaned as the bucket dropped. A few seconds later, I heard the splash and I began to pull.
My arms strained as the rope bit into my skin. Cold water dripped off the wood when the bucket rose into view, dark and shining in the half-light. I poured it carefully into one side, then lowered it again.
Again.
And Again.
By the fourth draw, my fingers were numb. By the sixth, I heard footsteps behind me. I did not turn around. I did not need to. There was a certain kind of silence that came with being watched. I had known it for as long as I could remember.
"Look," a boy's voice said. "The curse is out early."
Laughter...
There were three of them, maybe four. I recognized the voices, not that it mattered. They were boys from the village church. Some were older than me. Some were younger. But all of them were in groups.
I kept winding the rope.
"Careful," another voice said, mock whispering now. "If he touches the water too long, it'll sour..."
There was more laughter as I lifted the next bucket and poured.
My face stayed blank. I had learned if they saw anger; they fed on it. If they saw fear, they fed on that too. If I spoke, they would only imitate my voice until even that belonged more to them than to me.
So I said nothing. And then, a pebble struck my shoulder. It wasn't hard, but I flinched anyway. That made them laugh even louder.
"There it is," one of them exclaimed. "See? He twitches like a rat!"
Another stone bounced off the rim of the well and fell at my feet. Then another as it hit the side of my head. A sharp sting flashed above my ear. I closed one eye on reflex and felt warmth there for a second before the cold stole it.
"Enough," a girl's voice said from somewhere farther up the lane.
The boys ignored her.
"Maybe if we drive him out," one said, "the fields'll stop rotting."
"That one patch rotted because your father's lazy," the girl snapped back.
There was a pause. And then a scoff.
I risked a glance sideways and saw them near the prayer post. There were three boys, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old, bundled in wool and patched cloaks. Their faces were red from the morning cold. One held a handful of stones as another had his hands shoved into his sleeves, grinning like this was all a game.
Behind them, an old woman stood by her doorway with a basket under her arm. She saw me looking and she turned her face away first. That was how most of them did it. The cruel ones were easy to understand. They said what they thought. They wanted me to hear it.
But it was the others who made the village what it was. The ones who watched. The ones who sighed. And the ones who did nothing and called it propriety.
I went back to the rope, and the water was heavier now. Or maybe my arms were simply tired.
"Don't bleed in the well," one of the boys called. "Wouldn't want dead water."
His friends laughed again and a wet sound followed. Something cold splashed across the back of my coat. I froze. For a second, I just stood there with water running down my shoulder blades and soaking into the cloth.
One of them had dipped a wooden ladle into the bucket near the trough and thrown it at me. It ran down my neck in freezing streams. My fingers tightened around the rope so hard they hurt. Behind me was another sharp burst of laughter.
"Look at him!"
"So fucking disgusting!"
"No wonder his mother died!"
That last one was uncalled for. Some words do not become easier to hear no matter how many times they are used. I lowered the bucket back into the well more carefully than I needed to. If I moved too fast, I might turn around. If I turned around, I might say something. If I said something, it would only grow uglier.
The pulley creaked and the bucket descended. From the upper lane came the long, low ringing of the Church bell.
Once. Twice. Three times.
There was a morning service. Its sound rolled across the village rooftops and out over the fields, deep enough to make the air seem to tremble.
The boys grew quieter. Everyone did, when the bell rang. Even mockery had to bow its head for a moment when the Church spoke for their god.
I used that moment to finish filling the buckets. When I lifted the yoke across my shoulders, the weight settled into me all at once. Water swayed on either side. The wood pressed hard against the back of my neck.
I started down the lane toward the barns. One of the boys stuck out a foot as I passed. I saw it at the last second and shifted just enough not to fall, though one bucket sloshed over and splashed my leg.
He clicked his tongue.
"Shame."
Yet, I kept walking. That disappointed them more than any insult I could have returned.
The barns were on the eastern edge of the village, near the fields I worked most mornings before sunrise. The chief owned the largest stretch of land, of course, but the smaller households all kept strips of grain or root beds too, and somehow my hands had become useful to nearly everyone despite their insistence that my existence itself was filth.
People will call you cursed with one breath and hand you a shovel with the next. The barn doors groaned when I opened them. Inside, warmth greeted me first. Not much. Just enough to feel different from the morning air. Then came the familiar smells of hay, dirt, animal musk, and old wood.
A cow shifted in her stall and snorted softly as I stepped inside.
"There," I murmured. "I'm here."
My voice sounded strange after so much silence.
I set the buckets down, filled the troughs, checked the feed sacks, and started the chores the way I always did. Water first. Then grain. Then the latch on the far stall that always loosened during the night. Then sweeping the old straw away from the entrance so the floor would not stay damp.
It was simple work. And it was the only kind I liked.
Animals did not ask where I had come from. They did not lower their voices when I walked by. They did not make signs against bad fortune when my shadow crossed theirs. A cow either trusted you or didn't. A horse either kicked or didn't. Chickens were stupid, but honest.
There was comfort in that. I had just finished hauling feed to the back pens when another voice reached me from outside the barn.
"You. Boy."
I looked up to see Old Genji standing in the doorway, wrapped in a thick gray shawl, with his beard stained yellow near the chin from pipe smoke. He did not step fully inside. People rarely did when I was alone somewhere. As if standing too close to me might invite agreement with my existence.
"The north fence post has loosened," he said. "Fix it before noon."
His small eyes traveled briefly to the cut above my ear, then to the damp patch still darkening the back of my coat.
He knew. Of course he knew. Everyone always knew. His mouth tightened, though whether from pity or annoyance I could not tell.
"Do not drip blood on the grain," he said at last, and turned away.
The doorway emptied. I stared after him for a moment, then looked down at my hands.
For some reason, that was the moment I almost laughed. Not because it was funny. Because sometimes cruelty became so ordinary it crossed into absurdity.
Do not drip blood on the grain.
Hah! As if that had ever been the problem! I finished in the barn and carried the broom outside.
Daylight had begun to gather for real now. The edges of the world sharpened. Smoke rose from chimneys in thin gray lines. More doors opened. More villagers stepped onto the lanes, wrapped in wool and habit and the quiet certainty that their lives were clean because mine was not.
I swept the barn entrance. Hauled feed. Refastened the loose post with numb fingers while frost melted into the soil around my boots. By the time I returned to the lane, the village was awake. And so, of course, was its hatred.
Two women passed by with baskets and lowered their voices as they neared me, though not enough it seems.
"Poor thing," one murmured.
"Poor?" the other replied. "His mother was the poor thing."
They did not stop walking. Near the mill, a man spat into the dirt after I passed. At the drying racks, a child stared until his mother yanked him back by the arm and told him not to look too long. I kept moving. If you kept moving, the day eventually changed shape.
I carried a sack of turnips from one shed to another and nearly collided with a girl no older than ten coming around the corner with a basin in her arms. She gasped and jerked back so hard water sloshed over the rim onto my sleeves.
She stared at me, horrified. Not because she had drenched me, though I don't mind. It was because she had even touched me at all and thought I would make her pay or somthing.
"I-I'm sorry," she stammered, and then, even softer, "I didn't mean—"
Her mother was there in an instant and snatched the girl back and glared at me as if I had planned it.
"Watch where you stand, curse," she snapped.
I bowed my head automatically.
"Sorry."
The woman pulled her daughter away without another word. Water dripped from my sleeve to the dirt. I stood there a second longer than I should have, then I adjusted the sack on my shoulder and kept walking.
People always ask, in stories at least, how much cruelty a person can endure before they break.
I think that is the wrong question. Most of the time, it is quieter than that. Most of the time, a person simply gets used to shrinking. You learn where not to stand. How not to look too long. How to speak in a way that takes up less space. How to apologize for things you did not do. And how to thank people for insults spoken in gentler tones.
You become smaller and smaller until the world has no reason to notice you anymore.
That was how I lived in Hoshimine Village. Well, "lived" is an overstatement. I just existed.
I looked up. The sun was finally rising over the eastern hills. Gold spilled slowly over the village in thin bands, catching on windows, eaves, fence wire, the white strips tied to the prayer posts. For one strange moment, everything looked beautiful. The mud. The smoke. The worn wooden homes. Even the Church tower in the distance glowed a holy color. It was beautiful enough that a stranger might have called it peaceful.
He would have been wrong. Still, I watched the light for a second because no matter what this village called me, morning still came and I still existed. Somewhere in all that ordinary light, there had to be proof that I had been born into the same world as everyone else.
I shifted the sack again and started toward the next chore waiting for me.
Before the lane bent out toward the Village Chief's fields, I stopped. The wind moved softly through the grass beyond the houses. My sleeves were still damp. My shoulder still ached where the stone had hit. A thin line of dried blood tugged lightly near my ear.
I closed my eyes.
Then opened them again.
Right...
My name is Haruto.
I was born in this village the same morning my mother died. Ever since, the people here have called me a curse. A taboo. Something that had forsaken this world. Are they wrong? Who knows...
But this is my story. And dawn, for better or worse, has only just begun.