by Chris Ward

He sells on autopilot and smiles as he sees the first tourist make his first offering to a young bird, still with an abundance of grey feathers on its underbelly. Get them young, Mr Matsumoto thinks. The old ones are past breeding age now.

He makes his third sale of the trip, less than five hundred metres into the seventeen kilometre journey, and wonders if anyone will notice the small incisions in the tops of the chip bags, the lack of any air resistance if you squeeze the bag, the way some of the chips are a little damp. He doubts it. People will notice if they have to eat it, but if they’re just giving the food away to animals they don’t care at all. Perhaps just as well, because while what he’s doing isn’t particularly illegal, it won’t make him many friends, especially among corn chips suppliers.

For his last journey, he’s prepared a special meal for the gulls, as a bit of a send off present. Last night he cut a small incision in the top of each bag, and into each he poured a little bit of water which contained ground up rat poison. He shook it all around, getting it all over the corn chips, then packed them back into the box.

A gull is about the same size as a rat, and the average bird gets several chips per journey. While he can’t be sure, he thinks he can take down maybe three hundred birds. Enough, perhaps, for the bastards to remember him by.

Mr Matsumoto is a little more vocal than usual in his attempts to sell the chips, as the boat reaches the outer edge of its journey and begins to arc around and back in towards the town. He’s sold about half of the fifty bags he prepared, and he even gives a couple away free to some excited kids, along with a few words of encouragement. ‘Pinch the very end, hold them up straight, put your arm out as far as you can. Don’t worry, they won’t peck you.’

He knows Mr Nishimura will dock his pay if he finds out, even at this late stage of his career, but Mr Matsumoto doesn’t really care. All he wants is to see the dockside water awash with floating corpses, see the alarmed stares of the tourists, the pointing fingers. He can’t wait to shuffle away up the dock for the last time, a population decimated in his wake.

The ferry begins to slow down as it approaches the dock for the last time in Mr Matsumoto’s long service. The tourists have backed off as the gulls fell away, but he still has four packets left, so he takes them out, rips them open and heaves the contents over the side. What the hell. He even smiles at someone watching him. ‘Some might still be hungry,’ he says with a warm smile, and the tourist cocks his head and grins, you kind, kind man.

He makes his way to the gate and throws the securing rope to Mr Yoshida, the dockman, to wrap around the bollard. Mr Matsumoto then winds it in and ties it for the last time. As the boat comes to a full stop, he opens the gate, pulls the ramp across and watches as the people climb off. Another good day’s work done.

As the last tourist gets off, he goes to the back of the boat, and retrieves his miso soup. It has gone cold, but as he looks over the side and notices a dead bird floating in the water, his heart feels warm. He wishes he were able to paddle around the bay and count them all.

He takes another big swig of the soup as he gets off the boat, and finds to his surprise that there’s something unusual in it. It usually contains a little tofu and some seaweed, but there is something soft and squishy in it, something that shouldn’t be there. He looks down into it, and sees a piece of corn chip floating on the surface.

With a sinking feeling in his stomach he prods a chopstick into the cup and stirs the soup around, picking out the pieces of corn chip. He counts five, six in all, as he drops them one after another on to the deck. He sighs, looks back at the ferry, sees a couple of lost gulls still circling it, and smiles. It looks like he’s underestimated them. He should have realised that, after a lifetime of eating the same corn chips every day, some of the older birds might have recognised a change in the taste. It looks like they were more intelligent than he’d thought.

With a wry smile, he lifts the cup of soup to his mouth and drains it. Then, with an air of resignation, he tosses the cup over the side of the dock. As he ambles slowly back towards the village, the glow of the setting sun backing the taller hotels and restaurants that line the shore, he wonders just how much rat poison it might take to kill a man.

*** THE END ***