![]() ![]() One where people prized strength and manual skill over the knowledge found in scrolls or the fanciful tales of long dead poets. ![]() He was an academic and a scientist in a small fishing village. He might have lost the knack of it after so long in disuse, he mused, of touching with affection and being touched kindly in return.īut there was no one in the village that he felt particularly connected with outside his necessary duties as a healer. Somewhere in between rushing back for his parent’s funerals and his hectic first years working solo as the doctor for his hometown, he had grown accustomed to living his life alone. His grandparents passed away one cold spring while he was still a youth, and his parents had followed many years later while he was away apprenticing under a physician in distant Kyoto. His own fate had twisted from sweet to bitter both slowly and all at once. He had always made sure to keep his reading voice as gentle and soft as he could as he read those stories. The tales that featured moonlit romance and bittersweet turns of fate, though slower, he had loved just as well for the way his mother would sigh and rest her chin on his head as he read. The tales of wondrous beasts and adventure he had loved for the way he could startle his grandparents out of their dozing with outrageous voices and for the way he could make his mother gasp with his enthusiastic sound effects. His favorite stories had always been fairy tales. His father would return late from his rounds visiting patients and kiss the top of Adashino’s head, ruffling his hair and let out a booming laugh when he invariably complained with childish pique that he would lose his place. Grandfather and Grandmother would drift in eventually to settle around the fire with them, intermittently chuckling at the well-loved tales and dozing peacefully. When the chores were done and the sun was nearly set, his mother would pull him onto her lap and help him read aloud from his books in the lantern light. And he couldn’t help but turn his thoughts back to nights he had known before.Įvenings, back when he was a young boy, had actually been his favorite time. On good days, he even felt like he could believe it.īut when the summer nights stretched long like tonight and the silver moonlight on the bay felt like a blade to his heart, he found he didn’t have any energy left in him to pretend. Most days, he could tell himself it was enough, this impersonal, sterile touch. He strove to be gentle yet decisive as he wielded poultice, bandage or needle, encouraging confidence in his skills long before his patient would begin to feel the effects of his healing. Every brush of his fingers, every press of his palm he bestowed with deliberate consideration. There could be no healing without trust, and Adashino knew he built trust most naturally through his gentle ministrations to the sick and injured. Touch was as essential as willow bark in his physician’s tools of the trade. It was something he gave to others nearly every day since he had first started working as the doctor for his small fishing village. It’s not as if he was completely bereft of human contact, he reasoned sharply with himself, trying to shake off his deepening gloom. And certainly not on a night like tonight, when he could hear the distant boom of waves on the coast echoing clearly in the silence, the sound intermingling with the shimmering burr of cicadas in the hot summer air to turn his heart weak and wanton. Not after a day like today, when he had come home bone-achingly weary from patient house calls that had kept him on his feet since dawn. He shouldn’t have drunk so much, he admitted to himself with a regretful grimace. He sighed and leaned his head against the rough wood handrail beside him, feeling incredibly maudlin. He sat slouched on the steps of his porch, his house dark and empty behind him, watching the sky deepen into an indigo dusk over the bay far below, sipping his sake cold. How strange, Adashino thought to himself, that the lack of something as simple as touch could feel so acutely painful. ![]()
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