James stood to the left of Donald in the line of students facing Tomlin. She was not what James had expected. When he saw the flyer, and saw that she was a tenth degree black belt, he assumed she was an elderly Japanese woman. Who else could have been training for this long in such an obscure Japanese martial art?

Tomlin was short and wore the hakama and gi well. They were tight fitting around her waist and give her body a very shapely look. Her brown hair was pulled back in a tight bun. Her hair framed her oval face, showing off her large eyes and thin eyebrows. She stood at attention in front of the line in the middle. Her arms were at her sides and her hands were placed carefully on her thighs. Her barefoot feet were touching at the heel s with the front of the feet slightly separated. She stared past the students to the back wall. James turned his head and looked to where she was standing to only find the white wall.

James looked down the line and saw the others stood in a similar fashion to Tomlin and tried to follow suit. He felt strange standing in the line, not knowing what would happen next.

“Sit down,” Samuel said. The class knelt down to one knee, and they leaned back on their heels. Their hands were on their knees and they sat comfortably. James awkwardly pulled himself down until he was in the position. His feet hurt as they stretched backwards against the wooden floor. He tried to silence the pain in the back of his head.

“Chok-so!” Samuel said in a loud voice. Tomlin’s eyes closed, and the rest of the class followed. James followed suit and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the pain running through his feet and up into his ankles. The dojo had a shellacked wooden floor that did not give much. He wondered what he should be thinking about besides the pain in his ankles and feet. Perhaps he should be mentally preparing. He was not sure what he was preparing for, however. He was surrounded by people he did not know and a beautiful teacher who was too old for him and way too skilled.

“Yamen” Samuel said. James opened one eyelid and saw the rest of the class looking straight ahead again.

The class went through the rest of the bowing routine.

“Get your naginatas,” Tomlin said to the class after they bowed once more after standing. James had taken a few martial art classes as a child, and during college. He knew respect and bowing were important. It set the student’s mind in the right frame of obedience and respect. When dealing with dangerous broomsticks, James knew you had to be careful.

Tomlin came up to James. “You can sit to the side and watch the warm ups. After the class breaks up, I will take you to the side and begin your instruction.”

James sat down on the side she indicated and watched them go through various swinging and attacking exercises. Tomlin stood in the corner of the room, her naginata out and facing the class. The rest of the class stood at varying distances away from her, all the naginatas facing her in an arc. The exercises went on for fifteen minutes before they bowed out, and she left the class in Samuel’s happy hands. Tomlin came over to James.

“I did not get a chance to welcome you to properly welcome you to the class,” Tomlin said. She stood a bit close to James when she spoke. James had to resist the urge the step back a bit. She was holding two naginatas. She handed one over to James.

“I always have extras. Until you decide to buy your own, you are welcome to use one of my extras.” The naginata felt like a broomstick in his hands. It was not perfectly round but elliptical. He could feel the difference as he turned it in his hands.

The rest of the class had broken up into pairs. They were facing off with each other, the tips of their naginatas touching. There was some screaming as they finished each strike.

Tomlin walked James through the basics of walking with the naginata. Just holding it made him feel awkward. The rest of the class passed like a blur. She spent the first half of the class with him, teaching him the basics of the first feriagi sho-men strike, a swinging, over-the-head strike that came down to the middle of the opponent’s head.

During the second hour of the class, she put him off to the side and had him practice swinging exercises while she went back to supervise the rest of the class. She stopped by every so often to provide pointers. James’s arms tired quickly as he pulled the naginata over his head and stepped backwards with his leg into a slightly crouched position to finish the exercise.

“About thirty years ago, Naginata was taught by teaching these swinging exercises for six months before learning the first strike,” Tomlin told him as she stopped by. “Eventually we realized that we were boring the students to death. We lost most students, and only the truly masochistic would stay. We’ve since changed that instruction. Although, Jogo Buri is still good practice. You should expect to do it for at least half the class until you’re ready to join the rest of the class in the exercises. I figure in about a month you’ll be ready.”

James attended classes twice a week, and within the month he had joined the regular class during warm ups and the practical part. The only part he was not with the class was when they put on Bogu. He did not have any armor, and would practice hitting their armor, but would have to block their attacks.

James walked with Tomlin from her car. She had handed him the hard case containing her naginatas.

“You told me you would tell me where we’re going when we got there,” James said. Not for the first time he wondered at where they were going and why he was going with her. She had invited him after class to join her on an expedition.

Tomlin did not answer. She continued to walk, and James hurried up to keep up with her. “You sure are the mysterious one,” he said. In their months in class, he still did not have a good read on her. She seemed decent from the rest of the class. Her skill was incomparable to the rest. Even Samuel, who had been practicing for ten years, could not hold a light to her. Especially when they sparred, her moves were exact and threatening. Even after scoring the point, she never let her guard down. Her moves were exact and calculated. James sometimes wondered if she was a robot. Her moves were always exactly on target and the same. He swore if he could videotape her and overlap the tape, he would see the same moves each time with the only difference being the speed of attack. She altered the speed in the same way a pitcher altered the pitch. If the opponent always knew the angle and the speed, the attack was predictable. If either is a variable, that predictability decreases and scoring points increased.

Even with her distance, James could not help but want to be near Tomlin. He noticed that others in the class felt the same way. When she came around to offer pointers, many jealous looks were exchanged. Everyone wanted her helping them, and it was not always just to improve their skills. To be watched by her, to be part of her small circle of influence was an incredibly freeing experience. James could not properly describe this feeling. He just knew he wanted more of it.

When she had invited him for an evening trip, he had immediately accepted. She had told him it pertained to Naginata and would be quite eye opening.

It was late evening, past eleven o’clock by James’s watch. It had warmed up after the previous day’s cold and rain spell. A slight fog hovered over the concrete from the change in weather. Tomlin had parked the car in a deserted parking lot surrounded by broken day fences. The parking lot had seen better days and the ground was bumpy and large cracks made walking treacherous. The parking lines had long since faded, and grass grew out from the cracks. It looked like the parking lot had not been used in some time. There were large curved lamps picketed along the parking lot. Every third lamp was blown out. Surprisingly, there were still some that still worked. James would have thought that for such a broken down parking lot, the electricity would have been the first thing they turned off.

Along the north side of the parking lot, half of what was once a bright red brick building still stood. The wall facing the parking lot was covered in graffiti. The front of the building could be seen from where they parked their car. There were two gaping openings on the second floor, what might have been large windows or porches before the house had been taken over. The front door was boarded up with a steel plate, and all of the first floor windows were bricked up with cinder blocks overflowing with badly spread cement. A large for-sale sign was attached to the middle of the building, giving the house a humorously face look, the gaping holes the eyes, the sign the nose, and the bricked-up windows, the teeth. As the angle became more extreme, the face looked less humorous and more foreboding.

“Are you sure this is safe?” James asked as they moved away from the car. The parking lot was wide open, and the lights ended well before the fenced areas, leaving the areas beyond the fence in darkness. Anything could hide out there.

“That’s why I brought the big knife,” Tomlin said. James took a second look at her and saw that she was smiling. “Stop worrying so much,” she continued. “I brought you here so you could stop worrying about things like this. Anxiety does not become you.”

It was amazing how much Tomlin saw in people. Except to instruct them, she never engaged in small talk during class. She always arrived right at the start of class and no earlier. While the students stood around stretching and gossiping, she was not there. Once she came into the dojo, she unloaded her armor and began class. After class was done, she packed up as swiftly as she unpacked, and left with barely a goodbye. After six months in the class, James knew nothing about her except that she was extremely skilled with the Naginata. He had seen her fight two opponents on either side of her. This was a skill that there was no training or kata for. If anything, it was a skill that was probably not needed since naginatas were used in combat a hundred years before.

“I’m sorry,” James said. “It’s just rather strange to come all the way to this part of town with your stuff in the middle of the night and not ask questions. I’ll try to keep my mouth shut.” Tomlin did not turn or respond. She continued to walk toward the middle of the parking lot. James had to jog a bit to keep up with her fast walk. She was shorter than him, but somehow her legs moved quicker and covered more ground. Even as she sped up, she never lost the graceful loping that defined her in class and out of it.

She stopped near the middle of the parking lot. James stopped a few feet behind her. There were no lights working where she stopped. She had stopped in the middle of a large darkened circle over uneven ground. She began to stretch as she did before she began class. She was wearing light black sweats. The bottoms were wider than normal jogging pants and fell down over the strappy sandals she wore. She had a tight fitting black top with long sleeves and a wide turtleneck.

“Join me,” she said. Although the circle was dark, James’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness and took in the light from outside the circle to give everything a gray appearance.

“Where do you want the naginatas?”

“Between us is fine.” James put down the case and flipped open the two latches that held the case closed. He stood up and started stretching.

“So we’re going to practice in a darkened parking lot in the middle of the night?”

“Well, a bit more than that,” Tomlin said. She continued to stretch without elaborating. James was a bit unsettled about the circumstances. Why they had to come out to the middle of nowhere for their training was curious. And why she even took him aside for special training was another curiosity. He did not think he was good enough to warrant such attention. He saw how smoothly the others in class performed. He was nowhere near their league. When he began, he thought his clumsiness would never end. As he practiced through the months, he began to understand not just how clumsy he was, but to understand how the moves should be performed. He was not at the point that he could almost understand how terrible he was. He was certain that there would be a few more steps in the terribleness pyramid before he arrived at the next level of understanding. James thought often about Socrates’s famous quote: I accept that I know nothing. That way I know one more truth than everyone around me.

Word count: 2,309.

Words remaining: 44,703 (5,297).