The Gate That Should Not Open
The rain started as a whisper against the dojo's windows and by the time practice ended, it had grown into something with teeth. Hiro Tanaka stood at the entrance, lacing up his sneakers with fingers that still trembled from the mat, and watched the water sheet down in gray curtains under the streetlights.
He hadn't wanted to look up when Sensei Watanabe called the match. He'd wanted to disappear into the wooden floorboards, to become part of the grain and the polish and nothing more. But there was no disappearing in judo, not really—just throws and holds and the particular indignity of your back hitting the mat while twenty of your classmates watched in silence.
Kenji had thrown him four times. Four. Each one a little harder than the last, like his rival was testing how much force it took before Hiro simply stopped getting up. The final throw had knocked the wind clean out of him, and he'd lain there staring at the ceiling beams, counting them instead of thinking about the burning in his chest, the burning that had nothing to do with his lungs.
"You're overthinking again, Tanaka," Sensei Watanabe had said afterward, not unkindly, but not gently either. "Judo isn't chess. It's…