The Third Son Read Online Free

right up. My stomach gurgled at the thought, and in a second I had slipped off my shoes and stepped into the cool water.
    I waded through the paddy and then crouched, dipping my fingertips through the reflection of the rippled clouds and of my eyes, alert and unblinking, their slight asymmetry evoking my mother’s face. A mosquito bit the back of my neck. The water was dark with buffalo dung, with fish droppings and algae. I could sense it resting in the warm water by the bank—the fish, mistaking my light almost-touch for the swaying grass.
    Let Kazuo have his egg. I could do better on my own.
    My fingers closed ever so slowly over the fish. Its smooth body rocked back and forth in the water between my hands.
    But hunger had made me careless, and I realized the body was too smooth to be a fish. I had my hands around a snake! My heart pounded, sending a surge of warm blood through my chest and arms. My second cousin had been bitten three years ago by a water krait and had died within two hours.
    If I backed away, the snake would realize I was there. If I continued to close slowly on it, the snake would bite me. I took a breath and hurled the snake into the air. It writhed, zigzagging, black and white against the pale blue sky. And then I saw to my horror that I had accidentally thrown it almost straight up, and it fell back into the paddy at my feet.
    I jumped back and fell into the water on my bottom. As I scrambled to my feet, I felt a quick bite on my calf.
    I got out of the water and looked at my muddy leg. Try as I could, I couldn’t find the bite. I had felt it, though, I was sure. How stupid I was! And so far from home . . . It would take me at least an hour to get back.
    Another child might have run home for his mother, no matter what the distance. But I had no illusions that getting to my mother would be worth the time.
    Cousin Toru! Maybe he was at his clinic in town.
    I ran. I panted, and by the time I reached the nearest buildings I felt a cramping in my belly, different from my usual hunger pangs. I stopped, out of breath, my forehead dripping with sweat.
    The air-raid siren went off.
    My heart stopped. I saw the image of the American plane bearing down on me, the pilot aiming his gun, Yoshiko screaming. I found my legs running of their own accord through the empty streets, past the shuttered windows and the padlocked doors of corrugated steel.
    Toru, Toru. Please be there.
    His door was locked, and I stood in front of it in a panic as the sirens wailed. I pounded on the door, yelling.
    “Toru!”
    The window to the side of the door was locked, too, and I hit it with a rock. But I was not strong enough and the window only cracked slightly.
    I picked up the rock to smash at the window again. But then suddenly the door opened and Toru’s head poked out. He stared at me for a moment. He was a young man, but his eyes were gray and serious like his father’s—my father’s oldest brother.
    “Toru!” I dropped the rock. My fingers were tingling.
    His eyes flicked to the sky at the sound of distant planes. “Get in,” he said.
    I went in, and he hurried me down a set of very steep stairs into a tiny area in the basement that had been outfitted as an air-raid shelter, with water, dried foods, and piles of books. At the bottom of the stairs I crumpled as the cramping in my belly intensified.
    He bent toward me, his eyes intent.
    “I’m sorry about the window—” I began.
    “Never mind. Why did you come?”
    “I’ve been bitten by a krait.”
    “You’re sure it was a krait?”
    I nodded. “Black-and-white rings. I saw it.”
    He took a rag and wiped the mud off my leg. The faintest traces of a bite appeared on the full of my calf. He looked me in the eyes again. “Seeing okay?”
    “Yes.”
    “Breathing okay?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, we’ll have to treat you in the clinic upstairs. Lai. ”
    He helped me up the stairs again and into his examining room, which was cluttered with large boxes. He pulled