Sammy Tsunami and the Shadow Arrow

AuthorHouse

Chapter One

The woman's clenched fist hammered the wooden door to no end—and hard enough that the hinges almost came undone. When she got no response, she tried again, but this time around she made sure it was much, much louder. Although she had a slender and waifish figure that barely filled out the silk rose red dress that she wore, she was anything but frail.

On the sixth knock the second time around, the bolt finally gave in and broke, leaving the door slightly ajar. Through the narrow opening, she saw her son still bundled up in his sleeping bag on the dingy kitchen floor fast asleep.

"Sammy Tsunami!" she yelled out loud at the top of her raspy voice. "Your school bus is about to leave! And you know what that means!"

Sammy Tsunami didn't like himself much that he wished that he was someone else. In the looks department, he was just plain weird-looking that he shuddered at the sight of his own reflection in the mirror.

His hair was sapphire blue and fiery shaped, which did not blend well at all with his exotic features and subtle tan complexion. For some reason that defied explanation, his locks always stood up and stayed wildly disheveled, no matter how hard and how much he tried to comb it and tame it. As if being cursed with a neon-colored flaming mane was bad enough for his self-esteem, he only had one set of clothes to wear to school—and at home—each and every day.

For his top, he always had on a raggedy jet black sweater that was two sizes too large, with sleeves too long that they swallowed up his hands if he didn't have the good sense to roll them up. Printed on its front were six large yellow diamonds-three on top and three below—that glowed eerily in the dark. This baggy upper garment of his fitted himself quite nicely, although he didn't quite agree, fattening him up and throwing off any suspicions that he was really pitifully undernourished underneath all that Egyptian cotton.

His pants were likewise black, but not because they were dyed that way. They used to be some other lighter color but had, over the years, irreversibly darkened into the perfect shade of soot as a result of accumulating a lot of dirt and grime. There was a time when his worn out pair of jeans was too big for him. They used to sag all over his feet that he used to trip all over them every time he walked. Nowadays, they were too short for his long, endless legs and too tight that they literally choked his poor waist. And Sammy Tsunami, in all fairness, only had an itty, bitty waist because he was too scrawny and lean that his bones actually showed through his light auburn skin.

Lucky for him though, he had a pair of reliable navy blue running boots that were high enough to compensate for the lack of clothing covering his shins. Although they bore lots of wear and tear on them from their many years of reliable and dependable service, they were sturdy and had remained quite fashionable. They had several straps and buckles which made them complicated to wear. Notwithstanding this though, they were comfortable on his feet, which was a small blessing for him, especially given how stringently tight his pants were.

While Sammy hated the way he looked, he absolutely despised his two dark secrets which he kept to himself under heavy personal guard. The first one had something to do with the red scarf that was always wrapped around his neck. He has had it on for the longest time and never once took it off. He never ever dared to do so. His mother, India, who is his only surviving family, has made it her cross to bear to constantly remind him, day in and day out, to never even attempt to remove it—

Otherwise, his head would fall off!

As to how Sammy came to be cursed in this way, there is a story behind it which India herself has told the boy from time to time so that he could appreciate how fortunate he was that he was still alive to this day. The long and short end of the tale is that an evil alchemystic once tried chopping the boy's head off on a block when he was still a baby, but instead of lopping it clean off, the executioner's blade had shattered, leaving only a long, deep, gaping wound on the neck itself that could never heal.

To keep the gash from severing his head from his pencil thin torso, it has become his burden to wear, for the rest of his days, a red scarf made from a special fabric to keep the bleeding in check. As elegant as this solution was to his strange predicament, Sammy himself didn't enjoy wearing it all the time, most especially in the spring and summer time. More than the rest of his odd apparel, it was the red scarf that attracted the most attention because of its sheer crimson screaming bloodiness.

While he wasn't an ungrateful lout and did appreciate the fact that he was still breathing today and not a corpse, Sammy didn't like the awful, money-challenged life that he was living. If he was given the chance to magically transform himself into someone else—someone better off right here and right now—he would snap up the opportunity, just like that, without entertaining any second thoughts whatsoever. What really mattered to him more than anything else was escaping the crippling poverty that he and his mother were mired in. Unless a miracle happened and soon, there was no future, not even a glimmer of hope, to speak of in his case. He was just going to be another dead boy who starved to death.

The sad, awful truth was that the Tsunamis lived in a small, run-down cabin somewhere in the middle of what many believe to be a haunted forest. They had made their home here ever since they were evicted from their apartment by their landlord. India, the sole breadwinner of the family, had lost her job as a grocery clerk when the supermarket that she had worked in decided to use robots instead of people anymore. Unable to find work elsewhere and unable to pay the rent, the fortunes of the Tsunamis quickly worsened and worsened, until they ultimately ended up poorer than they had ever been. They became so dirt poor that they had to eventually move out of the city and into the wilderness, far beyond the outskirts of town.

This change was particularly difficult for Sammy, who still had to go to school in the city every day. He was eleven, and just about ready to start middle school this year in the sixth grade. His school was twenty-five miles away—a long ways from where he lived. The nearest pick up point for the school bus was a three mile walk across the darkest part of the forest, where the shadows were thickest and heaviest and gloomiest.

Not that going through them was a problem for him. All Sammy needed was time, and that meant rising up earlier than the rest so that he could catch his bus. The problem was, time was no friend of his—and whenever it pressed down on him, it pressed hard.

Unfortunately, today was one of those days when the clock demanded a lot from Sammy. It was the very first day of middle school, and he had been sleeping in late—really late. To get him to peel his eyes open and snap out of his extended slumber, his mother had to resort to something a little more drastic than just screaming her lungs out into his ear to spirit him back from his sojourn in dream country.

Grabbing a pail from a corner, filled to the rim with stagnant water and all sorts of leafy vegetation, she emptied its soggy contents on to...