Steam Valve

When you're broke in Corbita without a plan, the city makes one for you.

The banshee wail of the neighborhood pressure release valve jarred Luka from the nightmare he was having. He wiped a two palmfulls of cold sweat from his eyelids and sat up. The girl lying next to him rolled away and pulled the covers up around her shoulders. He didn't need his pocketwatch to know that it was exactly 4AM. The steam valve always released at this time.

When he had moved in here, he hated that thing. He wondered if there was a way to sabotage it, but Braid had talked him out of it. So every night, when he came home from the kitchen exhausted, he was jerked from deepest slumber by that damned thing.

Luka had met Braid while working in that kitchen. It was his first real job since running away from the village. The owner brought him in for an interview and Luka told him about where he came from, the Ena tribe on Wake Island, where he had caught, cleaned and cooked fish. The owner listened to him with a smile and then said that his head cook was an islander, too. He brought Luka back to the kitchen and handed him an apron and introduced him to a man in his late twenties who was sipping a beer and flipping a wok with about ten pounds of chicken and rice with one hand.

"Sup, man?" he asked without looking up from the stir fry. "Want a beer?"

Braid usually had a drink in hand and nobody told him anything about it. Working one-handed would slow most cooks down, but he cracked two eggs at a time with his right hand and never dropped any shells in. He could drink with one hand, serve plates with one hand and smoke a cigarette with no hands simultaneously.

He usually wore a tank top under his apron and his arms were covered with tattoos. On the left arm were tattoos associated with his old gang. He had gone back and redone the gang's shark emblem to look like a sail fish and had the words around it blacked out. On the right arm were tattoos given to him by the prison system. Here in the islands, common practice was to write someone's rap sheet permanently onto their skin in a place where people could easily see your deeds.

DRUG USER

THIEF

DRUG SELLER

MURDERER

CHILD KILLER

These were all written in bold print on his skin, DRUG USER having faded to a bluish hue and CHILD KILLER still being fairly recent. They told a story of his life, and Luka never asked anything about it. Every time he looked at the tattoos, he saw Braid tense up, and then Braid would usually ask him something about his village back home.

Luka talked about his friend Rubia and how she was on her first military training exercise, somewhere out on the mainland. He told him about Akki and all of the tests he was studying for to get into the university. He talked about Cera and how she had tried to beat him senseless when she learned that he was running away to Corbita.

He had felt bad for leaving Cera behind, and sent her a letter in the mail, wondering how long it would take it to get to Wake Island, but six months later, all he got back from her was a sheet of paper with "Piss off" written on it. He knew he would get something like that from her, but the letter would have his return address on the front and he wanted her to have it in case she wanted to run off when she was older. At least she would have a place to stay.

"What do you want to do, then?" Braid asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, your one friend is trying to get into school and the girl joined the military. What about you? Any big plans?"

"...Not really. No." Luka answered and set down his spatula on the counter for a moment "What's with the tattoos?"

For the first time, Braid cracked an egg on the side of the skillet and dropped a chunk of shell in accidentally. He paused for a second and then slammed his palm down onto the pan handle, sending the entire batch of rice sizzling through the air and onto the floor behind them. Luka froze in place and braced himself, but the punch never came.

Braid walked across the room and grabbed the broom and dust pan out of the corner and started sweeping up the rice.

He said quietly, "You're just a f*****g kid. What would you know?"

--

Luka looked out the window at the pressure release valve and then down at the shark tattooed on his left arm. He realized that Braid had known his future before it happened. When you came to Corbita without a plan, the city made one for you.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the girl in bed was still asleep. Luka picked up a small plastic bag from the bedside table and rolled a spliff of the blue leaves it contained. He smoked it while he sat on the balcony and stared out at the pale face of the moon until day broke over the rooftops of the city slums. Steam was still rolling out of the gigantic valve a few blocks over and he gazed at it until he realized that the girl was already gone.

Author's Note

Enjoy!