by Nisioisin
Won’t do a thing.
Oshino seemed to intend that as neither ridicule nor sarcasm.
“The omoshi-kani robs you of your weight, your thinking, your presence. But it’s not like our little vampire Shinobu or that lust-besotted cat. Missy hoped for it, so it in fact dispensed. A barter─the god was always there. Missy actually hadn’t lost a thing. In spite of that…”
In spite of that.
Regardless of that.
Because of that.
Hitagi Senjogahara─wanted it returned.
She wanted it returned.
Her thinking of her mother, after the fact.
The memory and the torment.
I don’t know what that means, and I doubt I ever will, and just as Oshino pointed out, it’s neither here nor there and won’t bring her mother or her family back, and it will only steep Senjogahara in tormented thoughts, but─
It’s not like anything is going to change, but.
“It’s not like nothing is going to change,” Senjogahara said at the end.
To me, her eyes red and swollen from crying.
“And this definitely wasn’t pointless. Because I’ve made a very dear friend, at least.”
“Who would that be?”
“I’m talking about you.”
I’d reflexively played dumb, but Senjogahara’s response was neither bashful nor roundabout, but forward─and proud.
“Thank you, Araragi. I’m very grateful for what you’ve done. I apologize for everything until now. I hope you don’t find this brazen of me, but I’d be very happy if we could continue to be friends.”
How careless of me─
This surprise attack by Senjogahara seeped deep into my heart, deep.
Our promise to go eat crabs, though?
It’s going to have to wait until winter.
008
The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.
The next day, when I was roused from bed as usual by my little sisters Karen and Tsukihi, my body felt horribly sluggish. It was an ordeal just forcing myself to sit up, then stand. My joints ached heavily like when you have a high fever. Since there hadn’t been any tussle or brawl unlike my time or Hanekawa’s, it couldn’t be muscle pain, but at any rate, every step hurt. Walking down the stairs, too, I was afraid I might tumble down them if I didn’t pay attention. My mind was clear, and it wasn’t flu season, either, so what was going on?
I thought for a bit before an improbable thought crossed my mind.
I made a detour to the bathroom on my way to the kitchen.
In it is a scale.
I got on.
I weigh fifty-five kilograms, by the way.
The scale read a hundred.
“…Hey, hey.”
So it’s true.
The gods surely are an undiscerning bunch.
001
I encountered Mayoi Hachikuji on May fourteenth, a Sunday. This day was Mother’s Day across Japan. Whether you love your mother or not, whether you get along with your mother or not, the day is Mother’s Day for every Japanese person alike. I want to say that Mother’s Day originated in America. In that sense, it may be best to consider it a kind of event, like Japan does Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and the like. But in any case, of all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, this day, May fourteenth, was the one where more carnations were sold than any other, and when coupons promising the delivery of back rubs, chores, and so on were trading hands in homes across the country. Well, I don’t really know if those kinds of customs are still being observed, but I am sure that May fourteenth was indeed Mother’s Day this year.
And it was on that day.
That day, at nine in the morning.
I was sitting on a bench in an unfamiliar park. I was staring up into the sky like an idiot at an idiotically blue sky, nothing to do as I sat on a bench in an unfamiliar park. I was more than unfamiliar with it, I’d never even heard of it. But it was a park.
Namishiro Park, a sign at its entrance stated.
Well, maybe it did. The way it’s written I barely have any idea how it’s supposed to be read, whether those characters say “Namishiro Park,” “Rohaku Park,” or something else entirely different. Maybe there’s some reason behind its name, but of course I don’t know it. It’s not as if that’s any kind of issue, of course. Not knowing the park’s name doesn’t affect me at all. I didn’t go to the park with any sort of firm goal in mind, but was riding my mountain bike in whatever direction my feelings and legs took me until I found myself arriving at the park. That’s all, and nothing more.
I didn’t go to visit the park, I arrived there.
Though of course, the difference was meaningless to anyone other than myself.
I’d put my bike in the parking area near the entrance.
There were two objects in the lot that had been so abandoned and so exposed to the elements that you couldn’t tell whether they were supposed to be bicycles or clumps of rust, and then there was my mountain bike. Other than that, it was completely empty. It was one of those moments when I really felt the futility of riding around the asphalt streets on a mountain bike, but it was also a futility I felt at all times, whether I was doing something like that or not.
It was a fairly big park.
While I say that, it might have only felt that way because of how few objects there were to play with inside. It only looked wide open. Swings on one edge of the park, and a tiny little sandbox, but that was it. No seesaw, no jungle gym, not even a slide. Perhaps parks should have inspired in my high-school-senior self a greater sense of nostalgia, but I can’t deny I was feeling quite the opposite of that.
Or maybe that’s how things were. This was what you got when you gave thought to how dangerous playground structures were and how to keep children safe, and it came to look this way after all the old playthings had been removed. My opinion of the place wouldn’t have changed even if that were the case, and I’d personally think the swings were the most dangerous of all, but putting that aside, part of me keenly felt what a miracle it was that I was still of sound body.
I’d done a lot of reckless things as a child, after all.
It wasn’t nostalgia I felt as I thought these things.
Then again.
You could say that my body was no longer of sound health as of about a month and a half before May fourteenth─but I guess whatever wounded sentiment lay in my heart had yet to fully process the fact. Honestly, it wasn’t the kind of thing you could sort out in a couple of months. An entire lifetime might not be enough.
But, I thought.
Even without the missing play structures, the park was such a lonely place. I mean, I was completely alone there. Even though it was a Sunday, that greatest of days. The lack of things to play on meant the place felt larger, so grab a ball and a bat and play some baseball, I thought. Or maybe, I wondered, elementary schoolers these days no longer defaulted to baseball, then soccer, when they wanted to go have fun. They probably played video games all day at home─or they were busy going to cram school? Either that, or all the kids in the area were faithful little sons and daughters who spent the entire day celebrating Mother’s Day.
But even then, being all alone in a park on Sunday almost made it feel like I was the only person left on Earth─well, that would be an exaggeration, but it did feel that the park belonged to me. Like I never had to go home again. Because it was all me, I was all alone…or not? There was one other person after all. I wasn’t all alone. A large open space separated my bench from someone at a metal sign at the edge of the park─a lone grade schooler who was looking at a residential map of the area. The child’s back was facing me, so I had no idea what he or she was like, but the large backpack the kid carried was notable. My heart warmed for a moment like I’d found a new buddy, but the grade schooler spent a while looking at the map, then ran off, as if remembering something. And then I was alone.
By myself. Again.
&n
bsp; I thought.
─You know, Koyomi.
That’s when I randomly thought─of my little sister’s words to me.
The casual words she tossed at my back as I left home on my mountain bike.
─You know, Koyomi, that’s why─
Ah.
Dammit, I thought, as I switched from my earlier position of staring at the sky to gazing straight at the ground, head in my hands.
I felt a wave of depression rolling over me.
I’d been quite calm as I looked up into the sky, but now, of all times, I found myself hating how petty I was. I suppose the feeling was what you’d call self-loathing─while I was not normally the type to be bothered by that sort of thing, in fact, it was rare I had any thoughts at all I’d describe as bothering me, I would on rare occasions, on event days like this one, the fourteenth of May, fall into such a state. Special circumstances, unique setups. I was horribly susceptible to them. They made me lose my composure. They made me restless.
Oh, there’s nothing better than a weekday.
Can’t it be tomorrow already?
And it was in this odd state─that my episode involving a snail began. Or if you look at it the other way around, the episode probably wouldn’t have so much as started if I hadn’t been in such a state.
002
“My goodness, look at what we have here. I thought someone had dumped a dead dog on a park bench, but it was just you, Araragi.”
I raised my head, as I thought I heard a greeting so novel it may have been used for the first time in human history, and saw my classmate Hitagi Senjogahara standing there.
This goes without saying, but she was not in her school uniform, as it was Sunday. I began wondering how I should reply to suddenly being called a dead dog, but her standing there in casual clothes, wearing her straight hair up in a ponytail instead of down as she does in school, was such a fresh sight that I couldn’t stop myself from swallowing the words that had made it all the way up to my throat.
Wow…
It’s not as if she was showing off that much skin, but her outfit seemed to draw attention to her chest in an inexplicable way─not to mention the culottes she wore, which would have been unthinkably short were it part of her school uniform. It wasn’t even a proper skirt, but her black stockings only made her legs that much more seductive.
“What’s the matter? It’s a greeting, that’s all. A joke. I wish you wouldn’t look like such a wet blanket, Araragi. Are you sure you have anything resembling a sense of humor?”
“Ah, n-no, it’s…”
“Or can it be that your innocent little heart is smelted by my charming appearance, and that you’re experiencing a moment of bliss?”
“………”
She was so spot-on, or at least close enough to being right that I couldn’t come up with a good retort despite her odd word choice.
“Isn’t that such a wonderful word, ‘smelt’? They say it has the same roots as the word ‘melt,’ but it’s so much more intense. I mean, you can melt just about anything, but smelting places itself a notch above, and people have high hopes for it as an emotive next-gen term. ‘That maid smelted my heart!’ or ‘I smelt for cat ears!’ and that sort of thing.”
“…I was surprised by how different you look compared to the last time I saw you wearing something other than your uniform. That’s all.”
“Oh, I guess you’re right. Probably because I was trying to wear more mature clothes then.”
“Really? Huh.”
“Although I did buy this entire outfit only yesterday. You could call it a way of celebrating my full recovery for the time being.”
“Your full recovery…”
Hitagi Senjogahara.
A girl in my class.
She had a problem until very recently. And until that very recent point in time─she’d had this problem her entire high school life.
For over two years.
Constantly.
This problem kept her from making friends, from coming in contact with anyone─it practically kept her locked inside a cage and forced her to spend a tortuous life as a high schooler─but fortunately, her problem was resolved, more or less, around last Monday. I ended up witnessing this resolution─and that was the first time I’d had a proper conversation with her, despite the two of us sharing a classroom our first, second, and now third and final years of high school. You could say it was the moment when a bond was formed between me and her, who until that point I’d seen as nothing more than a silent, delicate, illness-prone student who got good grades.
Her problem was resolved.
Resolved.
It of course wasn’t so simple when you looked at it from her point of view, as the party who had dealt with the problem for a few years─how could it be? So she ended up taking time off from school until yesterday, a Saturday. She was apparently busy going to the hospital so they could investigate the issue, or run detailed tests on her, or whatever.
Then, yesterday came.
And she was freed─from all of that.
Apparently.
At long last.
Or conversely, after all.
Or inversely, for once.
“I suppose you could say that, but it’s not as if the root of the problem has been fixed,” she said. “I don’t know yet if I should be honestly happy or not.”
“Oh. The root of the problem.”
That was the kind of problem she was dealing with.
Then again, most phenomena in the world we classify as “problems” are like that─the nature of most problems is that they’re closed and finished matters from the beginning. What’s important is the kind of interpretation you stick on to them.
It held true for Senjogahara.
And for me as well.
“It’s fine. I’m the only one who has to worry about it,” she said.
“Huh. Well, I guess you’re right.”
That’s how it was.
For the both of us.
“I am right,” she agreed. “I’m absolutely right. And I’m happy I at least have the intelligence needed to be capable of worry.”
“…I wish you wouldn’t make it sound like there’s some unfortunate soul you know who doesn’t even have the intelligence required to worry about something.”
“You’re an idiot, Araragi.”
“And now you said it flat-out!”
She was completely ignoring the context, too.
The way that played out, it felt like she just wanted to call me stupid…
It’d been nearly a week since we last met, but she hadn’t changed a bit.
I’d wondered if she was going to be a little less rough around the edges, but…
“I’m glad, though,” Senjogahara said with a faint smile. “I’d planned on today being a test run, but my hope all along was for you to be the very first person who saw these clothes.”
“…Huh?”
“Because I can wear whatever I want now that my problem’s been solved. I can pick from anything, from everything out there to wear, with no restrictions at all.”
“Ah…true.”
She hadn’t been able to wear whatever she wanted.
That had been one of Senjogahara’s problems.
She was at the age when girls wanted to start dressing fashionably.
“I guess I, uh, feel very fortunate, or very honored to be the first person you wanted to show them to.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to show you, Araragi. I said I wanted you to see them. There’s a world of difference between the two.”
“Hunh…”
She said that, but on Monday, aside from her “mature clothes,” she’d showed me much more… Still, I couldn’t deny that her clothes, with all of the emphasis they placed on her chest, did quite a lot to attract my eyes. I didn’t know what to call it, maybe good fashion sense, but it felt like a powerful magnetic force had captured me and wasn’t letting go. She’d once passed herself off as always b
eing ill, but now she seemed to be the complete opposite, almost positive. The outline of her upper body was easier to make out now that she had her hair up. Especially the area around her chest─hold on, I’m using the word “chest” a lot, aren’t I… She wasn’t showing that much skin…in fact, in her long sleeves and stockings, she wasn’t showing much at all considering it was mid-May, but something about her was just exotic. What was it, how could I explain? Could it be that between experiencing Hitagi Senjogahara’s case on Monday and class president Tsubasa Hanekawa’s case over Golden Week, I now had the ability to find the sight of a fully dressed woman more erotic than one in the nude or in her underwear?