You ask me about Hana. I don't like to remember those times, but I know it does us good to talk. Our lives are a tangle of who came before, of the time we spent with the living before they became the dead. You tell me we have a responsibility to tell their stories, even if we only know fragments. You are always right, mon amour.

I can begin with the first time I saw her, half-blue in the twilight and the shade of a crumbling building. The sun had already dipped below the horizon, and I was acutely aware that I should have taken cover already, but the city had lied about the hour of the day. She stood boldly in front of a brick wall on the edge of a forgotten town, one street among many thousands now deserted and overgrown, and which you and I help to bring back to life.

There was a large brush clasped in her hand, poised in the air, suspended between reality and dream. The air was thick with dust and the distant rumble of unsettled winds, but she seemed to anchor us both here with her brush. How was it she was not hiding, or running? No one stood out in the open then. It was too risky. There were only the growlers and raiders lurking in the shadows, the constant threat of violence. One hid, or ran. One did not paint calligraphy on the wall of a building.

Tu t'en souviens, ma chérie. I saw you shiver. The years do not yet remove the horror from our bodies.

The wall was a rough canvas, pockmarked with bullet holes from the beginning of the wars with the dead and the living. Time and trauma had cracked its surface, the bricks chipped and discolored. There was a very faint remnant of old graffiti. It was not delicate rice paper. Hana dipped her brush into a pot of viscous black paint, making it heavy with purpose. From where I hid, behind the gnarled remnants of an old storefront, I watched her make her first stroke — a deliberate, thick bold line that cut across the brick, its texture pulling at the fine hairs of the brush. The paint bled into the cracks, forming a rugged, imperfect edge. Each stroke seemed to assert itself against the crumbling backdrop. The wall became less a symbol of a dying civilization and more something vital and alive. My belly tingled as the muscles in Hana's upper arm flexed. She was strong, and the wall was imposing, but what she wrote seemed light, a dance of brush strokes against the anchor of the wall.

Her concentration was absolute. Each line seemed a dialogue between the traditional artistry of calligraphy and the landscape of chaos and destruction we inhabited. There was the fleeting nature of the paint, the ephemerality of her brush strokes, and the enduring solidity of the brick.

'Qu'as-tu écrit?' I called across the open space. The woman who would soon be anything but a stranger turned. I recognized her, or else knew immediately she and her would mean something. She would paint characters on my skin with a soft finger, who would hold me when we needed to be quiet and make me scream when we needed release - I am sorry, my darling, but you took lovers at that time, too - for what else can one do amongst the ruins but fuck ourselves back to life? Now it is different. We have something more. She was before you, my love, who I treasure with all my heart.

Hana looked at me and shrugged. Soon we'd run - this exchange, as you remember, would bring both growlers and men, and neither should be entertained with art or defiance. Hana rarely told me what the kanji meant anyway, even later. In rare moments, she would pen characters and mime what they conveyed, or pepper them with smatterings of English words. Often, she would be silent, hiding her secrets in the strokes, and I would have to guess. Some, I committed to memory and remembered much later. Some, I learnt. You have seen me write on walls, my love, especially when I am sad.

Hana taught me that it was possible to tell the calligrapher's state of mind from the energy in the strokes. Sometimes I could see her weeping in the brushstrokes, her anger and frustration in the thick and thin lines. In those moments, the brush seemed to tremble with emotion. I often could guess what they meant as Hana painted her emotional landscape all around us on the walls and the floors of the ruined buildings. Ikari, for example. Ikari was anger. It had thick and furious strokes. Ku was suffering, both broad and violent strokes, weighty with pain. Ran was upheaval, chaos. Thick strokes again, darkness, horror.

The first day, though, we ran, making good miles before we hid together in the shadowy refuge of a silo, its interior filled with the scurrying of unseen creatures. There were rats, but they were not aku — the growlers and the men were evil, not the animals who were just trying to survive. We took turns watching. In the morning we lit a small fire and cooked a large rodent over the flames. Hana wrote 幸 in blood on the concrete floor. 'Good fortune,' she smiled.

The concrete was cold and unyielding, the red of the blood stark against the dust-gray surface. There were six strokes—some steady and thick, suggesting endurance and strength, unwavering against the concrete's rough surface, but also more assertive, grounding strokes, precise and clean, stable. There was an element of joy in the character, lightness. The strokes seemed to breathe life into the cold, unfeeling concrete, something hard to come by when the growlers brought nothing but death.

Hana pointed again. 'Good ruck,' she grinned, pointing now at me. It took a moment. Hana's English was diabolical. Her kanji spoke for her. Luck, fortune, whatever. It was good to be with someone I was not afraid of, with meat in my belly.

'Yes,' I said. Moons later, with my arms and legs entangled with Hana's, and my her paint-black hands on my breasts, her tongue inside me, I would even believe in love, with its light and gentle brushstrokes on my hot skin. Hana only wrote this character once, in the cold sand on a beach as far north as we'd go together. There was not a lot of room for love back then.

I'm sorry, have I wounded you with this talk? It was not like now, my beautiful girl. Come here. I love you. She is a ghost. Un fantôme du passé.

I am forgetting again. Let me finish this story. It means something to me. She erased the kanji for 'love' quickly, replacing it with the one for bravery and courage, crying.

The strokes were light and graceful, but Hana was not.

I could not soothe her. What was it she meant? For all our time together, I could not grasp Japanese, and Hana's mouth would not twist around my French. Between us were a handful of English words: 'run', 'eat', 'hide', 'fire'. Everything else was fear or tenderness.

'Ku,' she wrote in the sand, replacing the word for 'courage,' which itself had overwritten 'love.' 苦 was a character I understood. The nights of Hana's howls, her trembling hand at her heart, her sorrow. The sand absorbed her furious strokes, echoing the haunted nights where Hana would cry out with the cold sting of losses she could not articulate. In this moment, too, she struggled to communicate — thick strokes overpowering the thinner, more delicate ones — until finally, she tossed her writing stick into the swirling water. To love required too much courage. It was too hard. There would be too much suffering. If we were to lose each other, there would be no character for this loss.

I did not know you would replace grief with such fierce love, mon plus grand amour, how could I? This time was many years in the future. But I have it now, thank goodness. What good fortune. What good luck.

Many years after Hana's death, I was part of a work detail rebuilding a town on the outskirts of the capital city. The town was both reconstruction and ruin, the new structures climbing amidst the remnants of the old place. It was no longer silent and full of fear, but a place where we could stand and start to heal. I was about to meet you, with your two small children. Hana had become a distant memory, something from before, when the world was madness and darkness, a world we were trying hard to forget. The ink stains had long left my skin. Most of us were heavy with despair, unable to let go the burden of what we had seen and done, lost and mourned.

It was there I saw the wall, and the characters written in black. The kanji were still vivid against the brick, as if time had not dulled their message. I focused my translator screen over the words, holding it up to the narrow and broad brush strokes until the translation took shape.

希望

There was the ghost of Hana, the paint wet on her hands, her black hair floating down her bony spine where she stood on that day, writing the kanji in bold and beautiful strokes.

希望

Look forward to something better.

Hope.

🌷

This story was written in response to The Ink Wells prompt 'thick and thin'. It's the first story I've written in a very long time. Constructive criticism welcomed.

With Love,

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