“Oh” Arwin screwed up his face in disgust and spat out the mouthful of apple he was nursing “that is...that is just foul”. He stopped walking just long enough to throw the mealy apple into the gutter, snorting up spit and mucus in hopes of clearing his mouth of it’s disgusting texture. The autumn weather may have been pleasantly mild, with the sun just beginning to set, but this time of year meant you’d be hard pressed to find a quality apple for a decent price. He spat another loogie into the gutter, his mood souring at the thought of his empty wallet and his empty stomach. The spirit festival was coming up and Arwin needed money, both for himself and for his siblings. They’d be honouring his late father and they’d need some supplies to do that if they wanted to do it properly.

“Good thing my luck’s better than my finances” he muttered to himself, pausing to tap the side of the local well. It wasn’t the source of his luck, but he didn’t have a coin to toss in, and he figured at least acknowledging the damn thing might help keep the jobs coming in. Especially if the jobs were as low stakes as tonight’s. Arwin smiled as he saw the building he was meant to be meeting his class at looming ahead. The place was one of the many buildings that had been abandoned after the war. It’s foundation had been damaged and no one had any interest in fixing it; the old inhabitants had unfortunately passed during the invasion and people had been quite keen on moving on. So now the building was used for all kinds of ‘unscrupulous’ things. From drug trafficking to, say, teaching a group of women how to go about killing.

Arwin made sure to kick his smile up a notch or two as he shouldered his way past a boarded up window on the first floor. Despite the building’s outside appearance, the inside was actually quite cozy. The far wall had a few chunks knocked out of it, and the floor had some alarming holes in it, but otherwise, it was, for all intents and purposes, just a sparsely furnished studio. There was a single couch around which the ten women he was supposed to be teaching crowded, obviously having just stopped a rather lively conversation. They stared at him expectantly, and so, he decided to adopt a straightforward approach. He wasn’t too skilled a teacher, but he had helped raise his siblings and in his experience, people who were expecting to be led tended to do better when their leader was certain of himself and what he knew.

“Good evening ladies. I know we agreed on sun-down and I had hoped to be the first here but it seems you’ve beaten me to the punch.” he adopted his most assured smile and tried to appear as eager as possible. That seemed to go over well with the women. He got a chorus of reassurances and more than a few motherly compliments about how punctual he was. Arwin smiled and made his way over to the kitchen. Well, the term ‘kitchen’ was something of an inside joke, really it was a series of homemade shelves and a makeshift stove that one could use to cook or verify the authenticity of narcotics on. He gathered what he needed and returned to the larger room, where the women had stood up from the couch and had arranged themselves throughout the room in three smaller groups. They once again fell into silence as Arwin entered the room, which suited his intentions just fine.

“Okay ladies” Arwin spoke while he sorted out the supplies head brought back. The chalk was the first thing he needed. He walked from one end of the room to the other, doing an odd sort of crouch-shuffle so he could drag the chalk across the floor as he did so. Chatter picked up as he moved, the class’ curiosity piqued by whatever it was he was up to. When he was done, he huffed and straightened “Let’s get serious, shall we?” he spoke as if it was a question. It wasn’t.

“The person who organized this class has some...unfortunate beliefs about women. They, uh, believe that women don’t have it in them to kill” Arwin let that drop and settle. He needed to get to the meat and potatoes of this job before he got into specifics like HOW one might kill.

“Well, I know I couldn’t. So, are they wrong?” The way the woman asked made Arwin think the question was rhetorical. The response it prompted from the rest of the class convinced him. To Arwin’s chagrin, most of the opinions being voiced seemed to be aligned with the woman’s. He waited for the commotion to die down before he answered. “They are. They are wrong” he let that hang for a moment and felt a pang of self-satisfaction as it seemed to have caught most of the class off-guard “Killing isn’t easy. Physically or mentally. Preparing yourself for it is even harder than actually doing it. Self-loathing hits and then the guilt starts eating you up. It’s...rough.”

No one responded to that. Not that Arwin could blame them. The atmosphere was rather heavy now. Unfortunately, given that he was the one that was supposed to be teaching them, he decided that being uncertain and uncomfortable weren’t good enough reasons to stop. “I lost my father during the invasion six years ago” Arwin took a moment to let that sink in, wincing as he did. It was as if somehow, by vocalizing that, he’d hurt himself “It was...painful isn’t the right word. It was world changing. This...hole, opened up in me. This immense hole that I could draw from. Kind of like a well, but for..all the bad shit I’d ever thought of doing” One of the women made a motherly sound, though, this time, there was an edge of sadness to it “I always thought I couldn’t kill until I started taking things out of that well”.

Arwin looked up from his feet, he hadn’t even realized that he’d been looking down at them until that very moment “Everyone here has lost someone or something to that war. Children, fathers, husbands, wives, mothers” Arwin pointed at each of the groups of women as he named off relationships “homes, businesses, even things they thought they might never lose, like hope.” As he spoke he walked until he was standing in the middle of the room, along the chalk line he’d drawn to divide the room. “I know some of you have done what I’ve been doing these last few months; trying to cover that hole up with, like, some sort of emotional tarp. Not burying it, per-se, but keeping it tucked away and hidden, just in case you need it again” he saw a few nods of recognition, but he saw a lot more looks of consternation. People didn’t like to talk about things like this. Arwin chose to ignore those looks. “But I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to draw from that dark place. It’s okay to use what those bad memories have left you. The only reason I’m alive today is because I learned to do that. So, if you think, really and truly believe, that even with what might be in that dark place inside of you, you still can’t kill, feel free to stand on that side of the line” Arwin pointed towards the left side of the room.

“But if you never again want to go through something like what made that dark hole inside of you in the first place. If you want to learn how to draw what might become necessary from that dark hole, step over this line." He paused to let some of the women who had been clinging to the far wall, but with an odd light he couldn't quite place just yet, shuffle over. He smiled at that. "If you want to be the type of person who can keep yourself and the ones you love safe”.



“Right, lets get started with some basic killing blows, shall we?”










N/A







WORD COUNT: 1454



TOTAL WC: 1454



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