The lawyer nodded from across the large polished desk. Scott sank back into the deep leather arm chair and exhaled.

"Wow."

"I'm very sorry for your loss."

"Yeah, uh, I mean, thank you."

The lawyer gave him a sympathetic smile. "Were you close?"

"Not since I was a kid. He was always traveling...with his work, I guess. I was never really sure what he did."

"Ah, there I can enlighten you. Your uncle was in the import/export business - a trader of foreign goods - mostly from the orient, I understand."

"Hmm..." Scott's eyes lost their focus. "I remember, I found this tiny statue in his jacket pocket once. He said it was a Hindu god... Anyway, it's been a few years since I've even seen him. The last time was when I was in high school. He took me out for sushi."

The lawyer cleared his throat and looked away.

"How did he die?"

"He choked...on a piece of sushi...an octopus ball, I'm told..."

Scott couldn't think of a response to that, so he simply nodded.

"There are some details that we need to go over...when you're ready."

"I'm ready."

"Are you sure?"

"We weren't really that close. Frankly, he was always sort of the oddball in the family. I mean, I'm glad to hear that he was an importer or an exporter, or whatever, because for a while I thought he might be involved with something, you know, illegal."

The lawyer smiled. "Heh, heh. Well..." He opened a drawer and withdrew a large manila envelope. "Your uncle left very specific instructions. As soon as I received word of his death, I was to contact you and give you the following items." He opened the envelope and removed a ring of keys and a CD case.

"One: this set of keys is to your uncle's house. He has willed it to you along with everything that remains within it." The lawyer lifted the set of keys and held them out. Scott took them, and with a somewhat bewildered look on his face, dropped them into his pocket. The lawyer took his pen and made a small mark on a sheet of paper.  

"Two: this CD which contains a message for you from your uncle." He slid the CD across the desk and made another mark with his pen.  

"Three..." He reached down and hoisted a large metal briefcase onto his desk. "...this briefcase. The combination is the date that your parents first met."  

Scott reached forward and pulled the briefcase into his lap. It was heavy.  

There was a knock on the door, and a young woman stepped into the room.  

"Mr. Jordan, those nuns from St. John's are back. They say they need to see you right away."  

The lawyer sighed. "Okay, I'll be right there. Scott do you mind if I just step out for a minute?"  

"Of course not. Go ahead."  

"It's probably another lawsuit. I told them if they'd just go easy on the corporal punishment, but its like telling a fish not to swim." He grabbed a sheet of paper and slid it across the desk. "Scott, while I'm gone if you could just take a look at this document? It lists the three items we just discussed. Make sure it looks correct and sign at the bottom, okay?"  

The door closed behind him, and Scott found himself alone.  

"Well, I didn't expect any of this." He glanced down at the CD case, then looked around the room until he spotted an expensive looking stereo on the book case to the right of the desk. He walked over and popped in the CD. As it began to spin, Scott picked up the briefcase and set it on the desk.  

He glanced at the combination lock. His parents had met at a St. Patrick's day parade. He rolled the combination lock until it read 0317, as the CD began to play.  

"Scott, if you're hearing this then I'm already dead." The voice was deep and scratchy and definitely his uncles. "I want you to listen to this very carefully. Things are not as they seem."  

Scott pushed the button on the briefcase and the lid popped up.  

"You are in grave danger."  

Inside the briefcase was a small stack of cash, a notebook, and a collection of shinning metal weapons.  

"I'm serious," said his uncle's voice. "Grave. Danger."  

Scott's eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He reached down with a shacking hand and picked up a long knife in a sheath.  

"You need to go the house that I left you. My lawyer should have given you the keys. Go there, lock yourself inside and start reading that notebook. It has everything you need to know. For now, don't trust anyone."  

Holding the hilt in one hand and the sheath in the other, Scott slowly pulled them apart until he was staring in shock at a ten inch sharpened blade.  

"I mean it," continued his uncle. "Don't trust anyone. Your life and the lives of others depend on it. If anyone you don't know approaches you, chances are they've come to kill you."  

"Is this knife even legal?" Scott said out loud, unable to process all that was happening.  

The door to the office opened suddenly and the lawyer entered surrounded by three nuns all talking loudly and waving wooden rulers in the air. They froze when they saw Scott holding the knife in front of the open briefcase.  

Across the room, the CD continued to play.  

"I don't care if Mother Theresa herself comes up to you asking for a donation. You take that knife, and you stick it right in her heart, and then you chop off her head for good measure."  

Scott dropped the knife in the briefcase and leapt for the stereo.  

"Now, if you need to get rid of a body, all you need to do is..."  

He slammed the eject button, grabbed the still spinning CD, and turned back to face the others. The nuns were staring at him with looks of horror on their faces.  

"My uncle...he was such kidder...ha, ha..." He scooped up the briefcase. "I've gotta go."  

*****

For me, the whole process of writing short stories and posting them is a learning experience. I like to try out different styles and different types of stories. Some of them, like "Canyon Blues," just spring out of my head in one sitting, while others, like "Oracle Bones," are something that I have to work harder at. I know that they are not perfect, but I have found that it is much easier to decide what I like in other people's stories than it is to create my own. That is part of the challenge and part of the learning experience that I am going through when I post. For example, I wanted parts of "Oracle Bones" to be tense or creepy, but creating that type of atmosphere is something that I will have to work harder at in the future. And setting up "A Betting Man" for an ending that I thought would be humorous wound up feeling a little forced as well. I think my best stories are the ones that just spilled out of me like "Sighs from the Underground" and "Sorrow, Soul, and the Good Life." There are others that have yet to make it to the blog because even though they started with a good idea, I haven't been able to find a whole story in them yet.

The other great thing about trying to write this length of story is that it has given me a whole new appreciation for the short story form. Growing up, I read lots and lots of novels, but I never really got into short stories. Consequently, novels are what I have always wanted to write the most, and the way I think about story has been more in line with the structure and length of a novel. Once I started trying to write stories for this blog, I found myself enjoying reading shorter stories a lot more. It feels like I have just discovered a whole new library of things worth reading.

She was shorter than him, and even standing on her tiptoes her playfully spiked black hair came up only as far as his chin. She started to walk past him, then let herself fall against him when the train rocked again. He didn't move to catch her, so she placed a hand against his chest to stop her fall.
"Sumimasen - I'm sorry," she said, turning her face up to his to watch for signs of life behind his eyes.
"It's okay," he said, pointing his eyes at hers. His face hardened into a slight frown with almost no effort. She watched him, looking at the shape of her - the surface - but not seeing past it. Then she righted herself and walked away down the subway car.

When he left the subway, she followed him to his apartment. Two minutes after he had gone in, she rang the doorbell. When he answered it, he saw only what she wanted him to see: an eager looking young man in kaki slacks and a dress shirt.
"Good evening sir. I'm with Discount Music Dot Com. We're offering any three music CDs free to people willing to answer a few survey questions for us. Would you be interested in helping us out?"
The man blinked, but showed no other reaction.
"I don't really listen to music. You'll have to try someone else," he said and closed the door.
She walked away across the street then turned back to regard his apartment. She scratched her ear absently as she considered the problem. Then she dropped to all fours, and where there had been a young Asian woman a moment before there was now a fox that raced off along the sidewalk.

Another day over, the man thought as he walked home the following evening. Most of the people he worked with were excited to be heading home at the end of the day, but he just couldn't bring himself to care. As he walked, he thought about work. It was hard not to. There were always things left unfinished - things that he needed to remember for tomorrow. None of it is urgent, he thought, and as he did so he felt an emptiness opening up in his middle, like a bottomless void inside of him.

For some reason he found himself thinking of the question that the man at his door had asked him yesterday. He could remember a time when he had listened to music constantly, but over the last ten years he had listened less and less until now he couldn't even remember what the last song he had heard was. He didn't really miss it, though. It was just an appetite that he no longer had.

He was halfway between the subway exit and his apartment when he felt someone bump up against his back. He turned and saw a fox eying him from a few feet away with a black wallet clutched in its mouth. He stared in confusion, and then patted his now empty pocket.

The fox trotted past him. He tried to grab it, but it darted just out of his reach. He tried again, lunging toward it, but it took off down a side street at a fast walk. He started after it, wanting to run but worried that if he ran the fox would run too, and then he would never catch it.

Ahead of him, the fox darted across the street and into a parking lot. The man followed, jogging between the vehicles and straining to keep the fox in sight.

But then something odd happened. When the man looked up from the pavement he found that he could see nothing but cars - endless cars parked in each direction. He turned around slowly, rubbed his eyes with his hands, and looked again, but nothing changed. Vehicles of all shapes and sizes were parked 360 degrees to the horizon.

He reached out and touched one. It felt solid and a little hot still from the afternoon sun.

Then he heard something - a pounding noise like a drum. He turned his head to the side and listened. A moment later, he heard it again. It was two beats and then a pause.

It wasn't one durm - it was a whole group of drums playing together. He couldn't figure out which direction it was coming from.

Something small and hard hit him just above his right ear. His head stung, and he held one hand against it as he looked down at the marble-sized rock by his feet.

From his right side he heard a roar as loud and feral as the roars of the gorillas he had seen on TV. He turned and saw something twice the height of a man standing between a van and an old compact. It's body was wrapped in tiger skins; its arms and head were covered in thick dark red hair, and two short straight horns stood up from its forehead. It roared again, showing him a mouthful of sharp teeth and a purple tongue, and hurled something through the air towards him.

As he raced between the parked vehicles he could hear great, lumbering footsteps following behind him punctuated by angry growls. Fear flooded through him in a rush that started in his stomach and spread out through his limbs. His head hurt, and his heart began to pound. It had been so long since he had felt anything this intense that he wondered for a moment if he was going to have a heart attack, but their was none of the sharp pain in his left arm and chest that he had read about.

Suddenly a woman appeared in the space between two cars on his left. She was dressed like the pictures he had seen of Japanese geisha, her dark hair folded atop her head and her slender body wrapped in a blue and green kimono.

He was running too fast and she had appeared too suddenly for him to stop. He flew past her, turning his head to the left and seeing the calm, curious expression on her face as she watched him run by.

From behind them he heard the beast roar again, and the woman screamed in fear. He skidded to a halt and turned to look back. The woman was just standing there, frozen while the huge thing charged towards her.

It's going to kill her, he thought. Another feeling rose up from his gut. This time it was a burning that spread like a shock wave through his body, and with it came a realization. He didn't have to think about it - for the first time in a decade he was clear of doubts. Good and evil - right and wrong - he might never be faced with a choice this simple again in his life, but in this moment he knew what he should do.

He leapt back the way that he had come, racing toward them. Around him the drums started up again, faster than they had played before.

Ahead of him the thing had almost reached the kneeling woman. It had a thick iron club in its right hand that it lifted up high over its head.

He was almost to them now. He poured on speed that he didn't know he had, tucking his head down.

He passed the screaming woman and leapt the last few feet, trying to throw his body into the charging thing, knowing that it wouldn't stop it, but hoping that it might slow it long enough for the woman to come to her senses and run-

He fell out of the parking lot and onto the street from where he had entered. The drums had gone silent. He looked up. The woman, the huge beast, and the endless cars were all gone. He stood, once again staring around him in disbelief. His heart was still pounding, and his shirt was sticky with sweat. The woman - had he saved her? Was it real?

A car came around the corner, and he was forced to move. He hurried across the street and away from the parking lot.

Just get home, he told himself. Get home first, then think. He started walking towards his apartment.

He stopped and listened. This time, he could hear a direction. Across the street, drifting out of the mouth of that store - that's where it was coming from.

He jogged across the street, drawing a harsh look from a driver. He could feel his blood pumping again. He burst through the doorway-

-and stopped. The inside of the store was small and a little dark. There was a counter on the left near the door and the rest was taken up with waist-high shelves full of CDs. A young man in his early twenties was staring at him from where he sat on the edge of the counter.

He cocked his head to the side to listen. The drumming was playing through the speakers of the music store.

"Man, it's your lucky day," the clerk said, smiling. He reached one hand down under the counter and pulled out a wallet.

"Loose something?" the clerk asked. He opened the wallet and set it on the counter. The man stared down at his driver's license.

"A lady brought it in here about five minutes ago. She said she thought you might stop by looking for it. I'd never seen your picture before, though, so I didn't think it very likely."

"She was probably about, uh... Actually, I'm not sure how old she was, but she was about this high, and I'm pretty sure she was Japanese."

"She asked me if I had any CDs by the band that you hear playing. It's a Japanese group that plays the Taiko drums. I didn't think we had it, but she sent me back to check anyway. Turns out we had one that I'd never noticed. That's why I'm playing it right now." The clerk pointed to a CD case on the counter next to a hand-written sign that read "now playing." The man picked it up and studied it. There was a picture on the cover of a fox dressed like a woman in a kimono standing between two statues outside of a temple. He stared hard at the statues. They were twice a man's size with a mouthful of sharp teeth and two small horns sticking up from their foreheads.

"The fox woman is called a Kitsune," said the clerk. "They're some kind of Japanese mythical trickster. The lady was telling me about them. She said that in Japan, the Kitsune would use illusion to play tricks on people."

He thought about that. Had he just been taught a lesson? If so, he wasn't sure what it was supposed to be.

"Those are Oni, Japanese demons that punished the dead in hell. They used to put statues of them up as guardians outside the temple gates." The clerk peered down at the CD cover.

"They look pretty fierce. I'm not sure what I'd do if I saw one. Of course, I guess you'd have to be dead for that to happen."

"Of course! You can buy anything in the store. If you like world music, we've got some really good Celtic stuff, and we just got in some new Brazilian dance music."

The man took his purchase and walked slowly back out onto the street. He blinked a little in the light, took in a big lungful of air, and started walking towards his apartment, humming under his breath.

The girl watched him leave the record shop. There was a swing in his step now, and she could see his eyes looking all around him as he walked, taking in everything as if it were new. It made her want to laugh with pleasure.

And where she had stood a moment ago, there was only a fox that darted down an alley and was gone.