The Sky Was Every Color​​
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The first rumor came with the rain.
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They rolled on top of the heavens and whistled toward the earth. A high hissing through the cane and a change in the air that went empty with the aftersound. At the well, one of the old women, damp to the elbows, said she had a cousin whose husband had heard from a soldier that the Americans ate children. “They are not men,” she said, setting her bucket down so hard the rope jumped. “Their teeth are like a dog’s. They have less honor than the Japanese. Yes they steal and kill. But the Americans, they say that they will eat your children in front of you and laugh.”
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Kiyo kept her face still, because stillness was a way of not inviting more fear into the house. She thanked the auntie for the water, for the warning, and took her boy’s hand. He was three and had a way of looking sideways at things, birdlike, as if life approached him from the corner of the eye. His name was Haru, but she called him Bean when he was soft, and Little Rooster when he was stubborn. In the bent light of late afternoon he seemed made of dust and warmth. His fingers wrapped her own like roots.
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They went home by the path that cut behind the schoolhouse and down toward the limestone the island wore like an old bone. In the flat behind the house she had a few rows of sweet potatoes she was coaxing along, a patch of bitter melon that tolerated wartime, and herbs that had seen everything and stayed. The house itself had a roof that remembered typhoons. On the porch, two shisa faced the road like dogs who were tired of warning anyone.
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Her husband had been gone a year, called north with the regiment. He had written twice. The second note, a child’s scratchings of home and nothing, maybe of prayer. Kiyo kept it folded in her sleeve. Sometimes the paper warmed to the heat of her skin and felt like a heartbeat. In the evenings, when the sky went the color of dragonfruit under the low cry of geckos, she sat with Haru between her knees and told him the old stories because stories were full of breath and naming, and breath and naming made a net you could hang in the dark and climb back out of your fear.
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But the rumors thickened, and with them came other things: boys in too big uniforms laying telephone wire along the road, trucks with canvas backs, horses whose ribs you could count, students from the girls’ school carrying stretchers like the handles of a door no one could close. There were orders posted on the wall of the school: dig trenches, prepare the caves, carry water. The officers came and bowed curtly and said, “You must move into the gama. The caves will keep you safe.” Then the officer said something else, his voice lower, as if the words might fail in open air. “When the Americans come, better you die. Do you understand?”
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The women standing in the doorway of the school said they understood. They understood in the way you understand a storm that is already here: you recognize the shape of it, the sweep, the weight, and still you are wet.
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Kiyo took Haru to the cave two days later. It was a deep slit in the white rock, the roots of banyan reaching for it like a hand. Inside, the air tasted like mud and old candles. The neighbor boy, Shinji, had already stacked baskets and jars. He was fourteen but surehanded. He drew a line on the wall with a piece of charcoal so the children would know where they were allowed to play. “From here to here,” he said, and Haru nodded solemnly and then put all of his play into that small world as if it were infinite.
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The shelling began before dawn on the day the cicadas came early, caught out by the strange heat. At first it was distant, the sound you feel in your feet before your ears know it. Then the ground learned to jump. Dust shook loose from the ceiling of the cave in a slow brown rain. Someone said, “Steel rain,” and someone else said, “Tetsu no ame,” and the words were like nicknames you gave a monster to keep it from knowing its own name.
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They lived like that for a week that had the length of a year. The little ones slept, woke, cried, and in their crying produced the rhythm by which the rest of them marked the days. The old men prayed to things that had drifted past prayer and become merely breath. Shinji learned to tie a bandage without thinking about it, learned to bring a cup of water and hold it at the right angle so that a woman could drink lying on her side without choking. Kiyo learned the inventory of a life by feel: how much salt in the jar, where a candle stub was, which corner caught the worst of the chill. Every action became small and exact. Every exactness was a kind of mercy they could still offer one another.
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Sometimes, between the runs of thunder from the ships offshore, there was a noise that was not explosion but motion, a mechanical grinding that seemed too big for the air. It was the sound of men who had built engines in the quiet before the war and now those engines had found their purpose. The officers came again and told them to move farther south, toward Mabuni, because the lines were changing, because the front was a serpent that they were always already standing on. “When the enemy comes,” the officer said, and this time he did not hide his voice, “you must not be taken. They will do things to you. To the children. They will peel the skin from your face and wear it. They will pry your teeth out and make necklaces. Better to go to the sea. Better to jump. Do you understand?”
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The mothers looked down at their hands. Each understood more than they wished.
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They moved at night, a small caravan of villagers strung along the hillside with kitchen pots tied to their packs by rope, which made a music of metal that matched the distant guns. Haru walked when he could. Kiyo lifted him to her hip when he slowed and cried, then he rode on her shoulders like a low draped pelt, asking questions that were not questions: “Where does the road go?” “Why does the sky yell?” Kiyo answered each, it was another way to knot the net she kept throwing over the void. “The road goes to the bananas,” she said. “The big booms are the gods bowling. The light out on the water is the sun trying to find us with a lantern.”
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They came to Mabuni at noon and the land opened like a sigh where the cliffs rose up white and abrupt, cut clean into the blue. From there you could see the sea and also, impossibly, beyond the sea: the line where the horizon meant something. On clear days before the war, Kiyo had come here to hang laundry because the wind did the work for you, and once, as a girl, she had held hands with a boy from the next village and laughed into the updraft. Now the air was full of something else—heat, metal, the smell of a battery cooking, salt and the black breath of things that once lived.
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They sheltered in a smaller cave near the cliff, dug by time high under the limestone lip. The mouth of it watched the sea not with peace but with a waiting that had announced itself for months and was finally about to arrive. There were other families there, faces Kiyo had known since she was small. The Ito grandmother who scolded the neighbor’s chickens and knew how to lay a curse. Quiet Nae with her baby girl tied across her chest, the baby’s head like a coconut under a scarf. Young men who could not quite keep their voices from slipping higher when the shells hit closer, older men who had grown smaller in the war and now fit into their own shadows as if shadows were racks where you hung old clothes.
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Shinji came when he could, carrying a sack of hard bread he’d been given by a soldier, bread that had the stink of the soldier’s cigarettes when she bit it. He told Kiyo what he had seen: the beach to the north with its craft like metal insects, the way the ships spoke to the land in flashes, the way the ground answered by coughing itself into the sky. He told her that some of the girls from the school, the Himeyuri, had been taken to the front with their white bandanas on and their hands like small birds, and how the officer had stood, a point of blackness against the chalk, and lectured them on honor so sternly that it felt like a eulogy they were listening to for themselves.
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“What do they look like?” Kiyo asked, not sure which they she meant.
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Shinji shrugged. “Like men. Like boys,” he said finally. “But the rumor is their eyes have no whites. And they never sleep.”
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“Nothing sleeps anymore,” Kiyo said. She reached for Haru and pulled him into her lap. He was quiet, watchful. He had the boy’s habit of finding the fold in a cloth and worrying it between his fingertips as if it were a rosary. He twist pulled the edge of her skirt until it gave grip and he buried his face in her lap. It was a thing that was hers, and hers was safe, and the world outside the lay of her dress was a world that had opened too wide and horrible through which the lurid rumor of war became flesh.
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They went to the lip of the cliff at the hour when the light goes tender, because everyone went, and because there was a belief you could learn the shape of your future by taking its measure with your own eyes. They stood with their feet where the earth ended and watched men move across water in a hundred points, then a thousand, then so many that counting was a kind of surrender. The ships on the horizon flashed like distant storms, and the shells came and shelled again, throwing their long thunder into the folds of the hills. Smoke unrolled like a prayer that had not learned its words.
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Around her, people were talking and not talking. A woman sang something low and old. A man laughed for too long at nothing. A small boy said, over and over, “They are coming, they are coming,” until it became a lullaby. An officer told them again with a voice that had studied itself into certainty what was required. “They will take you,” he said, “and you will wish for death. There is honor in choosing your own fate.” He looked at the small boy and believed it true.
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Kiyo stared at the sea and saw only its fact: how it took the light the way the cave took sound, a devouring that had its own peace. “Little Rooster,” she said, and he made a small answering noise into the fabric. “When you grow,” she told him, not even sure there would be a growing, “we will plant sugarcane. It scratches, but it forgives. We can make the black sugar and sell it and send you away. We will borrow Uncle Takeshi’s sanshin and play the same three songs until they become seven. We will—”
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There was a sound behind her, a confusion, then a sudden, thin scream that cut itself off like a ribbon and the gust that followed it. The first family had gone over. The sound their bodies made on the wind was the sound of accident. For a moment no one moved, as if all of history had held its breath and included them in the habit.
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Nae stood beside Kiyo, her baby asleep against her chest on her own heartbeat. “If we wait,” Nae whispered, as if they were in a temple. “If we wait, maybe—”
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“Maybe,” Kiyo said, and the word was an island itself, a thing you could see and point to and then choose whether to swim for it.
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Another shell landed somewhere too close. The cliffside jerked under their feet and dust came down like a blessing that had been reversed. The officer said what he had to say again, voice raised against the sea as if the sea were a crowd heckling him. Families moved or didn’t. Some walked toward the lip with the calm of people crossing a street. One woman held a comb in her hand as if she had thought, at the last, to tidy her hair for God. A boy refused to go and then went when his father put his arms around him and pulled him into the motion with a tenderness that made Kiyo look away.
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Kiyo sat down. The ground was warm. She pulled Haru fully into her lap, and he crawled eagerly, because her lap was a story he still remembered even with the world widened. He buried his eyes and poletwisted her skirt to hide his face and smell anything but the acrid aftersmoke from the artillery, and she placed her palm over the back of his head and closed her fingers as if she could keep all of him inside the bowl of her hand. The world was very loud, then very quiet, then loud again. In the quiet, she could hear the sea’s breath on the rocks below, a metronome indifferent to triumph and disaster. In the loud, she could not hear her own thoughts and so the thoughts stopped being terrible. The rumor and the heartbeat of this war, the promise of nothing and the doorway to infinity just there at the edge of the cave mouth.
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Out there, in the smear of smoke, she saw them—men in boats, men whose helmets glinted when the sun found gaps in the cloud. They were not as tall as rumor. Their teeth were the same size as other teeth. One man lifted his hand and scratched his neck. Another sat back as if his lower back hurt and he was surprised to find his own body in the middle of such an event. They were bringing with them the machines that had taught the island new words: LST, DUKW, flamethrower. They were bringing their own fears and their own small loves in their pockets—a picture of a girl, a letter folded and refolded until the paper grew greasy in the joints.
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Kiyo looked at them and felt a great blankness open where hatred should have been. It was not love. It was not forgiveness. It was a notknowing, and the notknowing felt honest. She had been instructed in certainty for months: certainty of the enemy’s cruelty, certainty of her own duty, certainty of the shape of the good death. And yet here were men scratching their necks, and a sky that had every color in it when the shelling walked its bright feet across the air, and her son on her knee making a small wet cave of the cloth.
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“Bean,” she whispered. “Look.” He did not lift his face. She did not make him.
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Shinji came at a crouch, skidding the last step. He had a cut across his cheek that looked like a new line drawn on him by a careless god. “They are landing farther north,” he said, breathless.
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“I can see,” Kiyo said.
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“They say—” Shinji swallowed, as if the words themselves were hard bread. “They say some Americans gave candy to a child.”
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Kiyo almost laughed then, a small animal sound that escaped from the place she had been keeping all the air. She looked at the officer, who was watching the cliff’s edge now with a face that had been trained into the proper grief. She looked at Nae, who had sunk to her knees with her child and was whispering, not prayers but instructions to the baby for a life the baby might not have. “When you see the red hibiscus, you must smell it, even if you are late. If there is a dog with one ear, you must pet it, even if someone tells you not to. If a song crawls into your head, you must sing it.”
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Another family went. A hat tumbled, a useless, ordinary thing. Kiyo tried to imagine the exact second when foot left ground, when air replaced earth, when decision became physics. She could not make the moment hold still. It was always becoming itself, escaping the name she wanted to give it.
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The bombardment flared again. For an instant, the sky was every color—coral and milk and violent white, bruised purple and the green of bottles, the orange of dried peelings, the blue of a toy she had once given Haru because it made him laugh. The color was a language, and it said: you are very small and also astonishingly valuable and I do not know how to hold both truths at once. The sky is every color, and every rumor a truth.
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“Bean,” she said, “Do you want to jump?” The question came from a place in her that had grown philosophical and savage from the diet of fear. If she asked it, perhaps the world would answer for her. Perhaps the sky would bend and put a finger on one choice.
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Haru shook his head into her skirt without pulling his face up. It was the same shake he gave to papaya when the seeds looked like fish eyes. A small, decisive no.
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She looked back up and out the cavemouth. At the terrible and beautiful truth across the sky. “Then we will not,” Kiyo said. Haru burrowed deeper and covered his ears against the raging pulse of the overpressure.
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The words were small and obscene in such a landscape. They seemed like laying a flower on the engine of a tank. But once she had said them, they existed. They hung in the hot air like a chord that needed a second note. Nae looked at her, and in Nae’s look Kiyo saw the map of all the ways these next minutes could go. She took Nae’s free hand and braided their fingers, hand to hand to child, a chain of wanting that felt stronger than instruction.
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Behind them, the officer barked something about duty, about the emperor, about shame. The words slid off the skin of the day. Shinji ducked his head, listening to something else, the way children can hear a distant bell through a crowd. He said, “There,” and Kiyo heard it too: a new sound among the mechanical sounds, a voice filtered by distance into pure human syllable. She couldn’t tell what language it was. It did not matter. It was the sound of someone calling to someone. It was not the cry of a monster.
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“Come,” Kiyo said to Nae. To Shinji, because he had become hers in the slow way of small communities where everyone is cousin whether by blood or by road, she said, “You will go in front.”
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Shinji nodded and took a step that was also an oath. They did not go toward the lip. They went sideways, along the cliff face, to the goat path that only women and children and goats remembered. It was a ribbon of dirt with spiteful ideas about where to end. At the first bend, Kiyo turned, because some attachments were rituals and rituals honored the dead and the living. She bowed toward the sea—not toward the ships or the men or the guns, but toward water, which had always held them all without taking sides.
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They went down.
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The path tested them. In places it was only suggestion. In places it was desire disguised as stone. Kiyo put her feet where the old goats would have put theirs, where the rock had worn smooth like knuckles. Haru clung, light now in the way scared children sometimes are, their bodies remembering how to become small to fit inside being carried. Nae breathed in a twocount, one for her and one for the baby, the sound regular as the sea. Shinji’s shoulders were tight with purpose.
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Halfway down, there was a shelf where the wind changed and the heat eased and for one moment the world was not trying to tell them anything. They stopped. Kiyo let her arms fall, and Haru slid to his feet and looked at her with a face that had the solemnity of temple and naptime. She put her hand on his cheek and felt him real, as real as bread, as real as the knot in her skirt, as real as the ache in her shoulders. “When we get to the bottom,” she said, “we will find water. I will wash your face. You will not like it. And after you do not like it, you will laugh.”
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He considered this, then nodded, because it sounded like a true thing: the sequence of dislike and laughter, the way one followed the other with the inevitability of tide.
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“Mother,” Shinji said softly, using the word not to name blood but to name the thing she was in that second for all of them. He pointed. Along the shingle below, men in strange uniforms moved like careful crabs. One of them waded out, hands high, turned his palms to show them empty. He was young and had a nose that had been broken and healed in the way noses do in places where men lose their tempers and then apologize.
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“Stay,” Kiyo said to Nae, and went down the last stretch with her hands up, fingers spread as if showing the sky she had nothing hidden. The man stopped when she stopped. He said something in a language that liked its vowels. He took something from his pocket, slow as winter, and held it out. It was a square wrapped in paper. Candy, the rumor had said. Candy, Shinji had said, and because he had said it, it belonged to the inventory of the day.
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Kiyo did not take it. She bent, touched the water, put her wet fingers to her lips, to Haru’s forehead. She said to the man in her language, which he did not understand, “We are not jumping.”
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He said something back in his, which she did not understand, and yet she knew the shape of it. It was the shape of a man saying, “Good.”
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Nae came then, and Shinji, and the baby woke and made a face like a blossom opening against its own will. The man pointed up the beach, down the beach, toward a place where other civilians were gathered, forming into a collection that might become a line. The ships out on the water fired again, because history was still happening and had not heard of their small decision. The sky flared and turned again into the colors of bruised fruit and pearls and flame. Smoke went up like incense for gods who could not be bothered to come. The island breathed.
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Kiyo turned back once more toward the cliff. People still stood there, silhouettes against air. Some would go. Some would not. Each had been told a story of what honor required. Each had remade that story in the privacy of their bones. Kiyo did not judge them. She bowed again, this time to the ones she could not save, this time to the choices that are made when no choices are allowed.
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She took Haru’s hand. His fingers were sticky now with the sea, with her sweat, with candy the American finally pressed into his palm and he had taken because it was sweet and therefore real in a way ideology is not. He looked at the paper as if it were a map. He looked at the soldier’s face the way he looked at goats: curious, wary, open to being surprised.
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“Bean,” she said, as they walked toward the others. “There will be more noise. There will be men who do not understand you. You will see things you do not want to. But—” She stopped, considered, corrected herself. “And. And you will see a dog with one ear. And you will smell hibiscus and be late. And you will sing the song that crawls into your head.”
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Above, the cliff held the record of what had happened and what had not. The shisa back home faced the road for a home that was not yet a home. The caves held their cool. The sea unrolled. The sky, fickle and faithful, practiced its language of colors for whoever looked up.
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Kiyo did not look up now. She looked at the boy’s small hand in hers, at the soldier’s boots making the same indentations in the same sand as hers, at the line of civilians becoming a fact. She walked, and with each step she translated rumor back into human. She walked, and the story she would tell him someday began to form, not about devils and monsters, not about candy and charity, but about a day when a woman sat on the edge of a world and chose, with hands and feet and a breath that shook, not to leave it.
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They moved past driftwood and a broken crate that still smelled like pineapple in a way that mocked the day. They moved toward a fence the Americans had halfbuilt out of rope and good intentions. They moved until moving became the only prayer that made sense.
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Behind them, the island’s heart kept beating, hard and terrible and alive. Ahead of them, the color bled from the sky into ordinary blue. On Kiyo’s tongue, salt and smoke, bread and fear. In her hand, her boy’s hand, light as it had ever been, heavy as it would ever be.
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When they reached the rope where a man with a red cross on his arm stood, he lifted it for them as if opening a gate to a garden. Kiyo nodded once. The man nodded back, the smallest bow, and somewhere in the exchange there was the faint, stubborn beginning of something that did not yet have a name.
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They stepped through.
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​​By J. L. Tyrrell.
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J. L. Tyrrell is a U.S. Army veteran and writer living in St. Louis. His work traces the borderlands of faith and trauma, where the American landscape becomes a map of memory and redemption.
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IG: @j.l.tyrrell
SubStack: whatthelightleaves