Hayden Ishikawa

A cigarette in the dark.

An unseasonably cool breeze carried the smoke away.
The little pleasures she could still indulge in didn’t seem to matter much these days.
The little breaths she could stop and take had to be filled with something.
Never stop moving, never idle.

|| 🥹

Home was the smell of the heat wafting up from the asphalt, the scent of the city carried on a cool breeze that broke through the endless maze of streets, the arguments of dogs that lived across the street from each other, the honking, the shouting.

She was back in it all. Her home. Her Gotham.

There were times when she missed her home, her Gotham, the cozy little box that barely counted as an apartment.

As her boots met American soil for the first time in what felt like a decade, today did not count among those precious few times.

She was home on business, not pleasure.

— The message was as mysterious as the method of its delivery. Vaguely signed, unmarked, all a gamble by the sender who dealt their players a date, a time, a request.

“February 8th. 2100. Corner of Fifth and Elm, old cannery building, upstairs in the office.

From a friend.”

And that was that.

One o’clock PM.

Three-fifteen PM.

Four o-five PM.

Three letters arrived at three mailboxes, doors, or mail slots.
Through hell or high water these letters would find their destinations, even to those without proper addresses.

Inside the plain envelope was a typed—not handwritten—note.
—

@vortexofmistral.bsky.social

@hidewithin.bsky.social

@atitanbound.bsky.social

The chase never ends.

Nighttime was when she moved, only under the silent comfort of stars. By day she slept wherever sleep found her; a roach-infested hostel that only accepted cash, an abandoned apartment complex, the trunk of a junkyard car.

Was it better to face her fate than live like this?

Home.
Gotham.

She ached for that awful place, the awful place she loved.

She wished more than anything to see her sister again, to see the tiny collection of trusted friends she had somehow managed to hold onto.

Crawling, crawling, crawling back to the world.

A frightened prey animal poking her head out of her burrow, expecting the jaws of the predators that followed her to snap around her neck.

But none came.
Perhaps it was a short run of luck, perhaps they grew tired of the chase.

Was it over?

Night was when thoughts of home came to her, thoughts of the people and places she had left behind.
The taste of a good burger haunted her when she ate the scraps she could get ahold of.
Her warm bed seemed like a fantasy when looking up into the sky with no roof to obscure it.

The hard drive had been sitting in a forgotten corner, a light coating of dust coloring the scuffed black casing. The thing had been something of a Pandora’s box, a wealth of data that could say anything and reveal nothing.