This Starving City

• Shevaun Rutherford, Grade 11, Emmaus Christian College
• Short Story
• 2015

Excellence Award in the 'The Write Track 2015' competition

The problem with a mask, is being unable to remove it.
It’s all good and well to use it as a disguise, but a face? That’s what destroys you.
Hiroshi hadn’t taken off his mask for a long time. It was cold, clutched to skin of his face. Lately, he’d been feeling it slipping from his fingers.
The city never changed, just the people. He sat in the dirt, the mud on the road staining his clothes. He was almost glad his old ones had been stolen now. Maybe someone was looking after them.
The people walked past him as if he were a ghost. Beggars were common here.
If they knew, Hiroshi found his thoughts wandering, would they pick me up, give me a meal? Or would they spit on me and carry on with their day?
The shame was deep in his heart, weighed him down like a stone in his chest.
If the passers-by were kind, he would find three or four coins in his palm at the end of the day. It wasn’t much, since the city mostly traded by barter, but it was enough to fill his stomach during the night.
Some days he got nothing at all, and he’d lay awake in the street, trying not to think too hard about the pain of hunger before the sun came up.
That, and the market just across the roads. The stalls were hectic during the sunlight hours, but at night they seem almost empty, bowls of rice and soup, native fruits from the forest. Just out of his reach. He could rarely afford the food there and couldn’t bring himself to steal from his own people.
Hiroshi drank lots of water, trying to trick his stomach into thinking it was full. He took many trips to the bore water pump, but they often left him more exhausted than quenched. The people were always crowded around it.
The city never changed, and a small part of him feared it never would.
It was an ordinary day. He sat in the dirt, hands clutched around himself, dirt on his face and in his hair. His eyes were vacant, trying not to focus on the pain in his stomach, trying not to remember the day everything changed.
The day he confronted his father.
The day of his exile.
He still cowered from the soldiers when they came into this section of the city. His appearance had changed so much since that day, his clothes torn, his hair grown long over his face. Surely they would not recognize him, throw him from the city walls? Yet he still feared them.
But the exile was months ago. His seventeenth year had passed into his eighteenth. Shiroji would be a man now. He remembered the anger in the streets, the day the title of Lord passed down to him. The day his elderly father had finally slipped away.
The day he should have become Lord of this starving city.