Pain, Pain, Go Away

My first meal in twenty hours was at a family restaurant. Until then, I’d forgotten I was even hungry, but my appetite came back at once when I smelled the food.

I ordered a morning pancake set for both of us, then asked her while sipping coffee:

“We’ve had your father and your sister, so is your next target your mother?”

The girl slowly shook her head. She was yawning frequently, not having slept very well. Like yesterday, she was wearing my nylon jacket to hide the blood on her blouse.

“No. My mother, at least, didn’t bring me that much pain. Not that she was very kind, either. I’ll let her off for now.”

This early in the morning, customers were sparse. Most of them were office workers in suits, but at the table next to us, a college- age boy and girl were sleeping in their seats, probably having been here since late last night. The ashtray between them was loaded with cigarette butts.

What a nostalgic sight. Until a few months ago, I’d wasted precious time with Shindo at restaurants in much the same way.

What did we even talk about in all that time? I couldn’t remember anymore.

“Next, I think I’ll get payback on a former classmate,” the girl stated. “It shouldn’t require as much travel as yesterday.” “Ex-classmate? Mind if I ask their gender?”

“Female.”

“And I guess she left some kind of scar on you too?”

She swiftly stood up and sat down in the seat next to me. Pulling up her uniform skirt, she showed me her left thigh. A moment later, a seven-centimeter long, one-centimeter wide scar appeared there.

Taking off my sunglasses to look, the mere contrast of her white skin and the wound felt painful.

“Enough. Hide that already,” I told her, concerned about those around us. I’m sure she didn’t mean it, but it absolutely looked like she was just showing me her thighs.

“She inflicted it with a shard of glass after pushing me into the mud,” she explained matter-of-factly. “Naturally, it’s not the physical wound she dealt that’s a problem to me, but the emotional one. She was a clever one. She knew very well that shame was the number one way to make people give in.”

“I see,” I remarked with admiration. Much of the bullying that happened during compulsory education could be viewed as “how much shame can I induce?” Bullies knew that it was a very effective way of making people break.

When people come to loathe themselves - that’s the moment when they’re at their most fragile. People who are shamed are told they don’t have anything worth protecting, and lose the will to resist.

“…When I first entered middle school, the school’s delinquents were afraid of me,” the girl said. “At the time, my sister knew a lot of malevolent adults. My classmates thought that if they laid a hand on me, my sister would get back at them. But that

misunderstanding didn’t last long. One classmate who lived nearby spread a rumor: “Her sister hates her. I’ve seen her drag her around and beat her again and again.” That turned the tables. The delinquents who once feared me, as if to take out their pent-up anger, made me their punching bag.”

She spoke as if all this were a decade or two ago. I felt like I was being told about a past she had long since overcome.

“I put up with it thinking that the situation would change once I advanced to high school. But I was only able to go to a public high school, where many of my middle school classmates went, so nothing changed one bit. No, if anything, it got worse.”

“So,” I interrupted to cut the story there. I didn’t really want to hear her talk too long about such things, and it didn’t seem like the kind of history where talking about it would make her feel better. “You’re killing again today?”

“…Yes, naturally.” With that, she returned to her former seat and resumed eating.

“By the way,” she began again, “what happened yesterday was just a little surprising, that’s all.”

I assumed she was talking about her legs giving out. Well, there was no need to bluff in front of a irrecoverably hopeless guy like me. “It’s not like I’m scared of killing people,” she insisted, almost pouting. Maybe the bluff was directed at herself, I realized. Anxious about where her revenge would lead, she told herself that what happened yesterday was just an isolated incident.

“Actually, after yesterday’s experience, I was thinking,” I told her. “If there’s a chance of blood splatter next time too, you should probably prepare some spare clothes.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t be shy. I’ll pay for whatever clothes you want to buy. The blood isn’t coming out of that uniform, is it?”

“I said, I don’t need it,” she grumbled with irritation, shaking her head.

“Blood isn’t the only problem. After taking revenge on both your father and sister, you should consider that there might already be witnesses. And just wearing a uniform in broad daylight will make you stand out enough as it is. Even your postponement isn’t almighty; it’s hard to handle minor incidents with it, isn’t it? I want to do as much as possible to prevent any trouble.”

“…Those are valid points,” she finally admitted. “Would you buy two or three outfits for me, then?”

“Well, I’m not gonna do it alone, I don’t know much about fashion. Sorry, but I’m gonna have to bring you along.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

She put her fork on her plate and sighed wearily.

----------

Puddles formed in the dents of the pavement, reflecting the dull blue sky and black silhouettes of trees.

Fallen maple leaves clung to the sidewalk, and from directly above,

they looked like exaggerated stars drawn in crayon by a kindergartener.

Leaves filled the gutters in the plaza as well, rustling with the ripples made by the water.

I went to the nearest department store to let the girl buy whatever clothes she liked. She wandered around reluctantly in front of the various tenants.

After much deliberation, she set foot into a youth-oriented shop with determination, but that was still far from the end of things.

Following a whole five trips around the store, she held up a calm blue jacket and a caramel-brown skirt and asked, “These aren’t weird, are they?”

“Well, I think they suit you,” I answered honestly.

She glared right at me. “Don’t lie. You’ll just agree with anything I say, won’t you?”

“I wasn’t lying. Really, I think people should just wear what they like, as long as it doesn’t cause others any trouble.”

“Well, aren’t you mister useless,” she muttered. Another entry on my growing list of nicknames.

After trying the clothes on in front of a mirror, the girl put them back where they were and began another loop around the store.

A woman clerk, dressed very provocatively and with long legs, approached and asked with a shallow smile, “Is she your sister?” She’d seen the stormy situation and mistaken us for siblings.

I felt no obligation to respond honestly, so I just answered “Yeah.”

“What a kind brother she has to take her out shopping.” “I don’t think she feels that way.”

“It’s alright. It might take some years, but she’ll notice her gratitude for her brother eventually. I was the same way.”

“Sure, let’s hope,” I said, faking a pained smile. “That aside, could you help her pick something out? I think she’s really having trouble deciding.”

“Leave it to me.”

Alas, the girl sensed the clerk approaching and quickly fled the store.

After hurrying to catch up to her, she told me with exhaustion “Forget the clothes. I don’t need them.”

“I see.” I didn’t ask the reason. Well, I could more or less guess.

It was about her family. She’d probably rarely been given the chance to buy whatever clothes she liked.

So she shrunk away when faced with the experience of doing it for the first time.

“I’m going to buy a few odd things. Please don’t come with me.” “Got it. How much money will you need?”

“I have enough to pay for it myself. Just wait in the car. I shouldn’t take that long.”

After the girl left, I returned to the shop.

“Can you choose some clothes that would fit that girl from earlier?”, I asked the clerk, who skillfully picked out some outfits.

Since I figured she might need them right away, I had the clerk take off the price tags too.

And just in case, I went to another shop and bought a blouse similar in design to the now-stained one. I considered the possibility she might be more comfortable in her uniform than casual clothes.

I returned to the car in the underground parking structure, tossed the shopping bags to the back seat, and sprawled out on the seat, whistling as I waited for the girl.

It made me seem no different from anyone else, just a regular shopper - not someone who’d come here to make preparations for murder.

I thought about what would happen when the effects of the postponement ran out. The girl would die, her acts of revenge would all return to nothingness, and instead, the reality of me running her over would return.

Naturally, I would be charged with dangerous driving causing death or injury and arrested. I didn’t know in much detail what would happen after that, but I’d probably go to a prison for traffic offenders. My term could be a couple years to a decade, maybe.

Even if I went to prison, that father of mine wouldn’t show any particular reaction, I thought to myself.

That man was like a shed skin which, by some terrible mistake, just kept moving. Not even causing death by way of drunk driving would be enough to surprise him.

I figured that unless I did something like what the girl was doing, purposefully taking someone’s life with clear intent, I’d never be

able to draw a reaction out of him.

My mom, meanwhile… I could easily imagine her using the news to boost her own confidence, saying “See, look at that! I was right to leave that man.” She was that kind of person.

Give me a break, I sighed. Just what had I been born for? In twenty- two years of life, I’d never once felt a proper feeling of being “alive.”

With no particular goals, nothing to live for, no happiness, I lived just because I didn’t want to die. And this is what came of it.

“…I should’ve given up early and cut my life short like Shindo, shouldn’t I.”

The words that had crossed my mind countless times, I now let out and voiced aloud.

No, I didn’t think that the world wasn’t a place worth living in. But my life, at least, didn’t seem worth living.

----------

We arrived at our destination, an amusement center, at around 2 PM.

It was a composite facility with bowling, billiards, darts, a batting center, arcade games, token games, and a number of food and drink shops all in one place.

My head was dazed by the noise, like five hundred alarm clocks going off at once. Just a few months of seclusion had completely erased my tolerance for this kind of chaos.

According to the girl, her next target had dropped out of high school and now worked at an Italian restaurant here.

But I had to wonder, how did she obtain that information? I didn’t scrutinize her methods, but no doubt she had spent a lot of time looking into things.

The restaurant had glass walls, so you could easily see what was going on inside. Sitting at a perfectly-positioned bench, I tried to guess which of the workers was the girl’s target.

The girl came up to me after she was done changing. I’d told her to do so, because wandering around in a uniform in a crowded place like this could get her taken away by the police.

“That shop clerk made some good choices,” I remarked at her outfit. A pin dot one-piece and a moss-green cardigan with boots. “You look really mature in that outfit. Like you could go to college.” Ignoring my praise, the girl requested, “Let me borrow those sunglasses.”

“These?”, I asked, pointing at them. “Sure, but I think they’ll draw more attention.”

“I don’t care. As long as she doesn’t know who I really am, that’s enough.”

The girl put on the round, shady-looking shades and sat next to me, staring fiercely into the restaurant.

“There she is. That’s her.”

The person she pointed at - well, just like yesterday - didn’t strike me at a glance as someone who’d harm others. She was a relatively

pretty girl you could find anywhere.

The distance between her eyes seemed just a tiny bit too small, but when they were closed, you could very well say they were perfectly-spaced.

Her dark-brown dyed hair was cut short, which gave her character when put alongside her more feminine thick lips and small nose. She was lively in her speaking and movements. A cheerful girl who young and old alike could adore. That was my first impression of her.

But certainly, not all bad people had obviously bad appearances.

“So she’ll be the next victim of your revenge.”

“Yes. I’m going to kill her today,” the girl carelessly remarked. “Another scissors-to-the-gut while saying hi?”

She folded her arms and thought. “No, those methods would stand out too much here. We’ll wait until her shift is over. There’s a worker’s entrance in the back, so as soon as we see her getting ready to get off work, we’ll head back there to meet her.”

“No objections. And I’m just waiting in the shadows again?” “Indeed. If she tries to run, please catch her at any cost.” “Got it.”

We didn’t know when the woman’s shift ended, so we stayed on the bench and kept a lookout.

The girl got two scoops of ice cream, and I stuffed my cheeks with fish and chips, listening to the sound of pins falling at the not-too- distant bowling alley. Young boys and girls were having a blast all around us.

The fish fry tasted like it had been fried in waste oil, and the

potatoes weren’t heated very well, so I didn’t eat much of either, washing it down with soda.

At some point, the girl had begun to focus not on the restaurant, but on a claw machine on the side of the path.

Behind the glass was a pile of stuffed toys - all the same creature, one which resembled the child of a bear and a monkey. Just as I turned back toward the girl, we met eyes.

“…Go get me one of those,” she requested. “It seems it’s still going to be a while.”

“I’ll keep watch, so you can go get it,” I replied, handing her my wallet. “I’ll call for you if I see her do anything.”

“I wouldn’t be able to get it if you gave me a year. You have to do it.”

“Nah, I’m really bad at crane games too. Never won a prize from one since the day I was born.”

“Just go.”

She shoved the wallet at me and hit me on the back.

I broke up a thousand-yen bill at a change machine and stood before the claw. After identifying a stuffed bear-monkey that was close to the opening and seemed relatively easy to push in, I concealed my embarrassment and inserted a coin.

If only she’d come with me so I could at least look kind of cool, I sighed. A gloomy college boy trying his darnedest to win a teddy bear in the middle of a weekday was just tragic.

After blowing 1,500 yen, I asked a passing clerk to adjust the

positions for me, and then spent 800 more yen to finally get the toy in the hole.

It was the first prize I’d ever won from a crane game in my life. Returning to the bench, I handed the bag to the girl, who brusquely accepted it, and afterward, occasionally stuck her hand in the bag to ascertain the bear’s fuzziness.

The woman’s shift ended after about 6 PM.

The girl stood up, told me “Let’s hurry,” and left the area. I followed right behind.

It was a moonless night, ideal for revenge. The parking lot by the back entrance wasn’t well-lit, either, so there was little need to even hide behind anything.

After being in a bustling place for so long, my ears were still trying to recover, and I felt dizzy on my feet. The cold autumn wind blew at my neck. Feeling chilly, I put on the jacket I was carrying under my arm.

The girl pulled out a leather case from her bag and took out the dressmaking scissors she had used the other day.

With their dark black handles, uneven to make it a better fit for a person’s hand, and their silver blades glinting in the darkness, my knowledge of yesterday’s incident made me unable to see them as anything other than an implement for hurting people.

Getting another look at them, I felt they had an eerie shape. The holes of the two handles looked like eyes warped with anger.

The woman wasn’t showing up. As I began to wonder if we were a

step too late, the back entrance opened.

Having taken off her work uniform and put on a trenchcoat and a wine-red skirt, she looked instantly older than she had while working.

Since she’d bullied the girl at school, I supposed she must have been about seventeen or eighteen as well, but she looked about my age, or a little younger.

She looked at the shivering girl standing before her dubiously. “Do you remember who I am?”, the girl asked.

The woman carefully studied her face.

“Hm, sorry, it’s on the tip of my tongue…” She put her finger on her lips in thought.

The girl’s expression sharpened. It seemed to jog the woman’s memory.

“Ahh, wow. If it isn’t you…”

Her cheeks slackened to make a smile.

I knew several people who smiled like that. People who considered beating others down their greatest joy.

They were inordinately good at telling if someone would counter their attacks or not, and thoroughly tormented targets they decided they could easily beat up.

This was the smile of a person who did such things to boost their own confidence.

The woman studied the girl from head to toe. There would be differences between the girl she remembered and the girl now, and she was trying to determine them so she could use them to her

advantage.

She’d already made up her mind on how she felt like treating her.

“So you’re still alive?”, the woman said.

I considered what that meant. Was it “You’ll never have a single good thing worth living for, but you’re still alive?”, or “I put you through all that hell, and you’re still alive?”

“No. I’m already dead,” said the girl, shaking her head. “And I’m taking you with me.”

She didn’t give the woman time to respond. A moment later, she’d stabbed the scissors into her thigh.

The woman gave a metallic scream and collapsed to the ground. The girl looked down on her scornfully as she writhed in pain. The sleeves of her caramel-colored trenchcoat turned red.

But I didn’t move a muscle as I watched. Today, I was mentally prepared for it.

The woman took a deep breath to try and call for help, but before she could get a word out, the girl kicked her loafers into her nose. As she held her face and made a muffled scream, the girl took out a tool shaped like a nail file and began rubbing it along the blades. She was sharpening them.

After five passes on each blade, she discarded the file and lifted the woman up by her hair. The woman watched in horror, and the girl thrust the blades of the open scissors right in front of both eyes.

The moving blade for her left, the still blade for her right. The woman stopped completely.

It was a chilling night. It wasn’t yet winter, but my breaths came out white. 𝗳𝘳𝐞e𝙬𝙚𝚋𝗻𝚘𝚟𝗲l.𝑐𝑜ｍ

“Do you have something to say to me?”, the girl inquired.

The woman, face covered in blood from her nose, repeatedly tried to call for help, but could hardly form proper words.

The girl treated her like a child whose words she didn’t quite catch. “What was that? “I’m so sorry?””

She pulled the scissors back, and just as the woman felt relieved to have the blades away from her eyes, stabbed the scissors hard into her neck.

Her target wasn’t the throat, but the artery. As she extracted the blade, blood flooded out. Not just pouring, but overflowing.

The woman frantically brought her hands to the wound as if she could try and stop the blood from leaving her, but some seconds later, she closed her eyes and ceased breathing in that same position.

“…I got my clothes dirty again,” said the girl stained with fresh blood, turning to face me. “I was getting fond of these ones.”

“We can just buy new ones again,” I told her.

----------

I figured as much from how pale she was, but after changing into her usual uniform and returning to the building, she sped off toward the bathroom beside the restaurant and didn’t come out for

a while.

I heard retching from inside. Sure enough, she was throwing up.

Considering her lack of hesitation in killing people, her reactions afterward were phenomenally normal.

Unlike a cold-blooded serial killer, she had an innate disgust for violence. It must have been so, or else she wouldn’t be throwing up and having her legs go weak after her murders.

It must have taken some extreme resentment to turn someone like that to murder.

And then there was me. How could I remain so calm after witnessing a murder? Was I the more deranged one for feeling nothing about being with a murderer?

Well, even if it were so, what did it matter now.

I waited for the girl on a torn-up sofa in the dim hall. She finally returned after three cigarettes’ worth of time. Her gait was heavy, and her eyes were bloodshot.

She must have barfed up everything she ate today. Especially thanks to her white clothes, she really looked like she’d lost all color, like a ghost.

“You look terrible,” I told her jokingly.

She replied with lifeless eyes, “I always have.” “Not so,” I denied.

Strictly speaking, we should have gotten out of there immediately. We’d hid it in some bushes, but it was only a matter of time before

the woman’s corpse was found, and the girl’s bag contained the murder weapon and her bloody clothes.

My clothes had some hard-to-see blood stains on them too, so we’d be finished if any kind of inspection was done on us.

Despite this, these words came out of my mouth.

“Hey, why don’t we call it for the revenge today, do something else instead? You seem really exhausted.”

The girl swept the long hair out of her eyes and stared me in the eye.

“…For example?”

I’d expected her to immediately reject the idea, but that reply sounded surprisingly on-board with it. She was just that worn out. This should score some good points with her, I thought.

“Let’s go bowling,” I suggested.

“Bowling?” Her gaze turned toward the bowling lanes opposite us, and her eyes widened. “You don’t mean, here, right this moment?” “Right. We’ll keep the murder weapon and stay at the crime scene to bowl. Everyone expects a murderer to return to the scene of the crime, but no one expects them to stay at the scene of the crime and go bowling.”

Are you being serious right now?, she asked with her eyes. Very serious, I responded in turn.

“Not a bad suggestion, right?” “…No. Not bad at all.”

It was a moment in which our poor tastes coincided. Stay at the

crime scene and have some fun. No better way to desecrate the dead.

After doing the formalities at the reception desk, we received bowling shoes that couldn’t have a more ugly design and went to our lane.

As I thought, the girl seemed to have no experience with the game of bowling, and even trembled at the weight of the eight-pound ball.

I went first, intending to show her how it was done. I aimed to knock down no more than seven pins, and sure enough, hit exactly seven. I wanted to keep the first strike for her.

Turning around, I told her “It’s your turn.”

Carefully inserting her fingers into the ball and glaring at the pins, she threw with impressive form and knocked down eight pins. She had a pretty good arm, and good focus.

By the fourth frame, she was picking up spares, and by the seventh, she got a strike.

It was a nostalgic feeling. For a brief time, inspired by The Big Lebowski, Shindo had frequented a bowling alley absurdly often. Ultimately, the best score he managed was around a 220.

I sat on the sidelines and watched, sometimes playing a game with him. Whenever I did, his precise advice helped me play well enough to get up to 180 sometimes. As someone who never got fired up about any one thing for long, I thought that was pretty good.

To stimulate her competitive spirit, I aimed for a score that just

barely beat out the girl. For someone hard to please like her, I thought that would be more effective than losing on purpose.

Sure enough, once the game was over, she was dissatisfied in a good way.

“One more,” she requested. “Let’s play one more game.”

After finishing three games, her pale face had regained a much healthier color.

It seemed the corpse never got found while we were there. Or maybe without my knowing it, the girl had postponed its discovery. Either way, we were able to pass the time peacefully. After bowling, we had a somewhat fancy meal at the restaurant where the woman she’d murdered worked.

----------

We didn’t go back to the apartment that day.

The girl told me her next revenge target was a six-hour drive away. I suggested just taking the bullet train in that case, but she instantly denied it, expressing her hatred for crowds.

If it meant not having to take public transportation, she’d rather sit in the hard seat of a busted-up car for half a day with the man who’d killed her.

She didn’t seem to have fully recovered from the shock from killing her classmate. No thanks to her lack of sleep last night either, she was unsteady on her feet as we left the amusement center.

Myself, I’d lived doing nothing but sleep for months now, so I was running on empty, and couldn’t keep my eyelids more than half-

open after just 20 minutes of driving.

A honking car horn made me realize I’d passed out - I carelessly fell asleep while waiting at a light.

I hurried to hit the accelerator and heard the engine racing. Irritated, I put the car in drive and hit the pedal again.

As I shot the girl a glance to blame her for not waking me up, I realized she’d nodded off in just the same way.

Maybe all her exhaustion was catching up to her at once, as she was still sleeping soundly through the horn and the following speed-up.

It’s dangerous to keep driving like this, I thought. I considered stopping the car somewhere to take a rest, but sleeping in the car like two nights ago wouldn’t help our exhaustion much.

It would be better to find a hotel somewhere and get some proper rest there.

I imagined the girl bemoaning this, saying “There’s no time. Do you think we can afford to rest?”, but it was better than causing a boring accident by nodding off while driving.

It seemed like the girl couldn’t use her postponement willy-nilly. For instance, if while she were sleeping soundly, I veered out of my lane and had a head-on collision with a large truck, would she be able to postpone that?

If our death was instant, with no time for her life to flash before her eyes, or for her soul to scream “I can’t bear for this to happen,” would that make it impossible to postpone?

In fact, maybe she couldn’t answer that herself. From the

explanations she gave me, she didn’t seem to fully grasp everything about her ability.

I decided we were better safe than sorry. I drove to a business hotel along the highway, and leaving the girl in the car, asked the front desk if there were any rooms available. I was told there was just one room open, with twin beds.

That was perfect. If it had been a double-size bed, I would have had to sleep on the floor.

As I was filling out information on the form, it occurred to me I didn’t know the girl’s name or where she lived. I couldn’t exactly go ask her now, so I used a fake name.

“Chizuru Yugami.” Making her out to be my sister who lived in the same apartment seemed like it might be beneficial later. The clerk at the clothes store had mistaken us for siblings too, so it wasn’t the most implausible lie.

I returned to the car. Shaking the girl awake, I told her “We’ll take a rest here before your next act of revenge,” and she came along without complaint.

Though she wouldn’t say it, she must have preferred to sleep on a soft bed than the hard car seat.

In front of the automatic doors, I turned back and asked, “It’s a single room for two. Is that okay? There were no other rooms available.”

She didn’t reply, but I decided to take that as meaning “I don’t really mind.”

----------

The interior was plain, so it was a business hotel, all right. In the ivory-colored room, there was a square table between the beds with a phone on it, above which hung a cheap-looking oil painting.

In front of the side-by-side beds was a writing desk, with objects like a pot and TV placed on it as if there was no other suitable place for them.

After making sure the door was locked, the girl took the dressmaking scissors covered in dried blood out of her bag and started to wash them in the bathroom sink.

Diligently getting all the stains off, she removed the water droplets with a towel. Then she sat down on the side of one of the beds and lovingly sharpened the blades with a file. Her tool to ensure the success of her objective.

Why scissors? Moving the ceramic ashtray from the writing desk to the bedside table, I lit up a cigarette and pondered. I felt there were far more dangerous weapons one could use.

Did she not have money to buy a knife? Was it because they didn’t look dangerous? Or because they were easy to carry? Were they just lying around at home? Were they the easiest thing for her to use? Were these scissors significant to her?

I pictured a scene. After being abused by her father and sister one wintery night, she’s locked up in a distant shed, shivering and crying.

But after a few minutes, she gets up and wipes her tears, then searches through the darkness for a tool to open the outside lock. She’s familiar with how to turn sadness into anger, giving her some lonely courage.

Crying about it won’t do anything. No one is going to help her.

Pulling open the drawer of a toolbox by one of the edges, a pain suddenly shoots up her finger. She pulls her hand back reflexively, but then fearfully reaches to grab the thing that cut her, and looks at it in the moonlight pouring through an opening.

Rusty dressmaking scissors.

Why would there be scissors here? Wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, she could understand. Was anything that looked remotely similar just lumped together?

She puts her fingers in the rings. With some effort, she finally pulls the blades apart.

Paying no mind to the blood running from her finger to her wrist, she falls in love with the scissors. Looking at their sharp points, she feels courage welling up from within her.

Her eyes growing accustomed to the dark, she becomes able to vaguely tell the contents of the drawer. She resumes searching the toolbox from top to bottom, despite the drawers’ resistance to opening.

Quickly, she finds what she’s after. Taking the file, she skillfully begins to do away with the rust on the scissors.

She has all the time in the world.

An ill-omened scratching sound echoes through the shed in the dead of night.

Someday, she vows. Someday I’ll use these to put an end to them.

It was all no more than my own conjecture. But those scissors made me naturally curious.

The girl came back from the shower wearing clean nightwear. The plain white one-piece-style gown didn’t seem like pajamas to me, more like a nurse’s gown or something.

She finished sharpening the scissors, and as she held them up to her eyes to examine them closely, I asked her, “Can I take a look at those?”

“…Why?”

Good question. If I just said I was curious, I knew she’d immediately turn me down. I searched for more effective words.

Right as she was about to put them back in their leather case, I had it.

“I just thought they were pretty.”

Apparently that was an acceptable response. She warily handed them to me. Maybe she was pleased about her favorite tool being complimented.

Sitting down across from her, I held them up to my eyes the same way she’d been doing. I thought the blades were polished so clean as to be mirrors, but surprisingly, it wasn’t so.

The important thing was that the points could pierce through flesh; diverting attention to any other areas would just diminish the force

of the blades.

Only the minimum amount of rust had been removed - of course, I then remembered it was only in my theoretical story that they’d been rusty.

“Very sharp,” I remarked to myself.

When you hold a tool, you can’t keep yourself from picturing yourself using it. Staring at these scissors specialized for murder, I was suddenly hit with the urge to stab someone with them.

These sharp blades could easily cut into flesh just as easily as a ripe piece of fruit.

I imagined it. I wanted to stab a person with these scissors; so, who should I stab?

The candidate that immediately came to mind was, of course, the girl sitting restlessly on the bed across from me, staring at the scissors now out of her hands.

Like the teddy bear, the scissors seemed to help give her a sense of security. She might not have realized it until just now when she was relieved of them, and though shaken by her helplessness, was trying to act like she was fine. That’s how it seemed.

Without her weapon, the girl was now almost powerless. I thought about what would happen if I stabbed her right here.

If I stabbed her right in the chest, showing nicely through the unbuttoned parts of the gown she was wearing.

Or if I stabbed her throat, that made a comfortable voice like a glass harp.

Or if I stabbed her soft belly with hardly any fat and shook it around

inside.

It seemed the girl’s scissors had given me the same urge to kill.

I put my index finger in one of the holes and spun the scissors around.

She hurriedly reached out and said “Please give them back,” but I didn’t stop spinning. I enjoyed my sadistic fantasies.

If she says the same thing two more times, I’ll hand them back, I decided - by which time the girl’s eyes had already changed color. Clouded, I should say.

It was a familiar expression. The one she wore while confronting her revenge targets.

I felt a hard impact. My vision flashed, and I fell back onto the bed. I felt pain like my forehead had split.

From the smell of ash on my head, I realized she’d hit me with the ashtray.

I sensed her taking the scissors from my left hand. I was worried their blades would be pointed at me in a moment, but luckily, that wasn’t the case.

I lied down in pain for a while, then got up and wiped the ash off my shirt.

I touched my forehead to check its condition and found a bit of blood on my fingers, but thought nothing of it, having seen enough blood to bore me in the past two days.

I was more unhappy about getting it on my hands. Sniffing them, they smelled like rusted iron.

I picked up the ashtray from the floor and put it back on the table.

The girl sat on her bed, facing away from me.

I’d awakened from a kind of intoxication. I couldn’t believe myself. I tried to remain calm, but with all the events of the past few days, I felt like I was steadily losing my mind.

I figured I’d made her angry. But when I touched the girl’s shoulder to apologize for my horseplay, her body tightened in fear.

As she turned around, tears ran down her cheeks.

She was more fragile than I’d been thinking. Me holding the scissors with that creepy smile must have reminded her of her bullies.

Once she could tell I wasn’t going to attack her back, the girl lowered her head and mumbled.

“…Please don’t do anything like that again.” “I’m sorry,” I said.

----------

As I took a hot shower, my ashtray-whacked forehead throbbed in pain. Washing my hair, the shampoo seeped into my wound.

It had been a long time since I’d gotten a wound worth calling a wound. When was the last time I got an injury at all? Turning the shower off, I searched my memories.

Right, three years ago - I walked around all day wearing unfitting shoes, and my big toenail came off; I think that was the last time.

But I was surprised by what happened back there. What if she hadn’t hit me with the ashtray? For whatever reason, the idea “I’ll

kill her” came very naturally to my mind. It felt like my duty, even.

I believed myself to be gentle and entirely non-violent, but maybe I was concealing more violent tendencies than the average person, and they simply never had much opportunity to surface.

As I changed into pajamas and dried my hair, my phone vibrated in the pocket of my removed jeans. I didn’t need to check who it was. Sitting on the bathtub, I answered it.

“I was thinking you might be wanting a call from me sooner or later,” the art student explained.

“Hate to admit it, but you’re right,” I confessed. “I was really suffering.”

“Listen, I’m calling you from a public phone right now,” she said dubiously. “It’s a phone booth on the street corner. But there are lots of spider webs above my head, and it’s really grossing me out.” “You’ll call me from your cellphone when we’re right next to each other, but you’ll call me from a public phone when I’m far away?” “I went walking on my own and it started to rain. This booth was the first thing I noticed when I went looking for shelter. You don’t get many chances to use a public phone these days, right? But I didn’t have a ten-yen coin, so I put in a hundred. So let’s talk for a while, okay? …Hey, did you just say you were “far away”?”

“Yeah.” I thought I probably didn’t need to explain myself, but I went on. “I’m staying at a hotel, about a five-hour drive from home.”

“Hmm. I can’t really call you mister shut-in anymore, can I?”, she said with concern. “How about the girl? Going well?”

“Nope, I made her cry. She hit me with an ashtray. I’m bleeding from the forehead.”

The art student cackled. “Did you try to do something lewd?” “Even if I were that kind of person, you’d sooner be my victim than her.”

“Oh, I dunno. You seem to like those gloomy girls.”

We continued chatting idly for the duration of the 100-yen call. Once it cut off, I finished drying my hair and left the bathroom.

The crying killer was sleeping with her back to my bed. Her long and damp black hair splayed out across the pillow and sheets. Her shoulders calmly rose and fell.

I wish she’d have a nightmare and jump awake, I thought. Then as she trembled, I could make some tactful remark like “Should I buy you a drink?”, or “Maybe the air conditioning is too cold. I’ll turn it up a little,” earning me some points with her.

Then my crime would be atoned for by a tiny bit.

I thought about how if I turned on the TV, I might hear about today’s murder, but I saw no point in checking.

I pulled the ceramic ashtray with my blood on it closer, took a cigarette from the desk, and lit it with an oil lighter. Taking in a lot of smoke, I held it for about ten seconds before releasing.

Touching the wound on my forehead triggered a burning pain, but it comforted me how it served as proof of my existence.