by Nisioisin
“Hmmm…” Paying no mind to my mangy yelps, Mistress Karen began walking at a brisk pace. In time, however, she stopped and tilted her head. “Koyomi, do you mind?”
“What is it?”
“Your crotch grinding into the back of my head feels gross.”
“……”
Right, I knew we shouldn’t be doing this at our age. It was a weird thing─
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Karen suggested. “Since I cut off my ponytail, it’s only fair if you cut off your thing.”
“That’s horrendous!”
This was all so frightening! The height, her inspiration! She deserved the Bram Stoker Award!
Besides, she decided to cut off her ponytail on her own, so how was that fair? Don’t make it sound like it was merely my responsibility!
“Your hair might grow back, but if I cut off my thing, it’s all over for me! In all kinds of ways.”
Maybe back when I was a vampire! No, not even then!
Pain was still pain! Just thinking about it hurt!
“I see. Anyway, Koyomi, I can handle your weight but don’t keep swaying like that or we’ll lose our balance.”
“Easy for you to say. I’m not you. How the heck am I supposed to balance myself stuck here like a giraffe?”
Giraffes have some amazing neck muscles, you know? If anyone’s ever suggested that the Loch Ness Monster might actually be a giraffe, I for one lend my support to the theory.
“Fine,” Karen conceded. “It will probably be a bit of a strain, but lean your upper body against my neck and head and shift the center of gravity forward. And then tuck your dangling legs under my armpits. That way I can hold you in place like the safety bar at an amusement park.”
“Like this?”
“Clank,” Karen added a sound effect. Instantly, not just my torso or my legs, but my entire body seemed to lock into place. It was less like a safety bar and more like a judo hold.
Like when they disable you by bending back just one thumb.
Or wait…that was aikido, wasn’t it?
Either way, I’d yet to see Karen perform one normal, straightforward karate move.
What was up with her Shocker dojo?
“There, we’re good,” she said.
“Uh, I’m not sure I am. In fact, it’s even less good? How much less good for me is this gonna get? I can’t even move my fingertips. And I’m starting to feel pins and needles. Boss-lady, are you sure you’re not cutting off my circulation?”
“Well, it’s definitely better for me. Before, your calves kept chafing me right on the tip of my breasts and it was gross… I had your crotch on my head, and you’re all up in my armpits now. Who knew carrying someone on your shoulders was so kinky?”
“Hmm… Usually, it’d be the guy carrying the girl.”
It wasn’t supposed to be a weird affair, but rather, cheerful and jaunty.
“Okay, Koyomi, let’s get going. Tee-hee.”
With that, Karen’s legs, which had stood still, began to move again. Maybe that ponytail she cut off weighed as much as I do because her pace didn’t even slow.
No, with each step she seemed to gain steam. You couldn’t blame her. Considering our destination that summer vacation morning─you definitely couldn’t blame Karen.
003
Just to be clear, let me take a moment to state that Karen and I aren’t particularly close─she and my other sister, Tsukihi, the youngest child, were born a year apart and are pretty chummy-chummy, but I’m afraid the same cannot be said about my sisters and myself.
You might even say that we didn’t get along. That there was hostility.
Karen and Tsukihi, for their part, never listened to me, while I, for my part, had it up to here with their infantilism─especially how they played at defenders of justice as the Fire Sisters. The recent encounter with Deishu Kaiki had fallen short of making them mend their ways.
Man, that Kaiki was so useless. In being a bother and nothing else, no other grownup came close.
So you see, it was rare for me and Karen to be out and about like this, just the two of us─almost as rare as it was for her to do anything at all without Tsukihi.
Which was why we tiptoed around each other when we spoke.
The fact that all the tiptoeing wound up with Karen cutting off her ponytail and me on her shoulders proved what a nuisance it was to be siblings.
It certainly wasn’t like a manga or anime. That sort of affection for your little sister is as nonexistent as a unicorn. They say incest is the purview of the upper classes, so I suppose that makes sense. We Araragis are decidedly middle class.
So why today, Monday, August fourteenth? Why were Karen and I spending time together this day?
Relax, there’s a perfectly good reason that isn’t suddenly winning the lottery and ascending to the upper classes. A respectable reason, which I suppose I’d better give if there are to be no bizarre rumors about Koyomi Araragi getting along oh-so-well with his little sister.
Begin flashback.
Earlier that morning.
“Koyomi? Is there something you’d like me to do for you?”
I forgot to mention, but I’m a high school senior. In other words, I’m studying for entrance exams, so there’s no vacationing in my summer vacation. It’s just summer.
For everyone else, mid-August is the Obon holiday season, but sadly, as an exam taker, that passed me by, too. Actually, in the first place, our family doesn’t pay much attention to old native customs.
Oshino would be furious if he knew.
So would Hanekawa, probably─then again, in her case, she’d scold me just as much if I used the holidays as an excuse not to study.
Well, getting scolded by Hanekawa only put a spring in my step, so she could go right ahead. I wish she’d get pissed off, her shoulders shaking, and her breasts, naturally, shaking as well.
Okay.
I’d woken up early once again and was working on my usual morning drills before breakfast when Karen suddenly (and without knocking) threw open the door and burst into my room.
My sister.
Karen Araragi.
The perpetually jersey-clad middle schooler.
“Not a thing…” I replied.
By the way, “throw open the door” doesn’t entirely capture the reality of what she did. If this were a mystery that hinged on narrative devices, critics would call me out on it. In truth, like investigators rushing the culprit’s hideout in a police drama, she didn’t just throw the door open but kicked it open.
That was Karen’s standard interaction with doors.
In her cultural milieu, they were always opened with the back of one’s foot, whether it was a sliding Japanese one or a hinged Western one─
No… If it were a cultural thing, then Tsukihi and I, raised in the same milieu, would behave in the same manner, so scratch that.
“Whaaat? There must be something,” Karen complained, approaching my desk (I didn’t bother turning around) and throwing herself at me.
When I say she threw herself at me, I don’t intend that as a figure of speech like “my legs are dead” or “his eyes popped out” or “walk through fire.” I mean it literally. She approached me from behind and wrapped her arms around my neck like a scarf. She was glued to my back without a hint of hesitation. In that sense, she hadn’t so much thrown herself at me, as on me.
Snap.
The No. 2 pencil in my right hand broke in half. My writing implement, pentagonal in shape to bring luck to the exam taker─what an ill omen.
I’m repeating myself here (as much as I’d rather not, given the shame and mortification), but my sister, Karen Araragi, is significantly taller than the average third-year middle school girl─and worse, is still growing. Taller today than yesterday, and taller still tomorrow than today, her height continues to increase.
Sure, she could measure as many feet and inches as she liked. That, in itself, was no skin off my back─the problem here was th
e lamentable fact that she was consequentially taller than me.
People of a certain size can’t help intimidating the rest of us whether they mean to or not. On top of that, Karen did martial arts. She was a second-degree black belt.
In other words, having installed karate techniques on the hardware she’d been blessed with, namely her body, she possessed the fighting capabilities to easily take on some wild animals.
In fact, I had witnessed her putting her fist through a stucco wall like it was tofu. Afterward her arm had gotten stuck, and to free herself she’d bust down even more of the wall.
It was insane, a bonus round in an old-school fighting game.
Anyway, if you’re wondering what the point is, I just thought you should know what kind of a grizzly-bear sister had thrown herself at, or rather, on me. Can you imagine my horror? I don’t think you can, but I still wanted to put it into words.
“Come on, Koyomi, I want to help. Believe it or not, your sister is someone you can rely on. I’m your faithful little sister, you know? Your devoted little sister? Anything you want, just say the word and I’ll do it. I am at your service, o-kay?”
“Nothing. There’s absolutely nothing. What in the hell could I possibly want from my sister so early in the day? There is nothing I need, and there’s nothing you can do. In the fifteen years since you were born, you haven’t been of any help whatsoever to me, woman.”
If anything, she could leave me be. I was busy memorizing vocabulary at the moment. With that implicit message, I brushed her arms from around my neck.
If she had a mind to, that is to say, if she lost it for a moment and squeezed those arms tighter, soon I’d be tilting my head, and not in the sense of feeling perplexed, but in the way of bidding this earthly plane a swift adieu. I didn’t want her hanging off me any longer than necessary.
A bout against a legendary vampire. Mortal feline combat. The crab, the snail, the monkey, and the snake. And the bee.
After all those tribulations, it would be a shame if Koyomi Araragi, the battle-hardened veteran, were done in by his little sister’s sleeper choke.
That aside, having my sister hanging all over me doesn’t float my boat.
I was simply creeped out.
“Can’t you see I’m trying to focus on my studies? I haven’t the time to mess around with a lower life form, you amoeba. If you’re bored why don’t you go for a run? Feel free to never come…back…”
Assuming that all this nonsense was just her way of killing time, probably because her schedule didn’t match up with Tsukihi’s, I turned around, finally, to chase Karen away─and was left speechless by what I saw.
I had no words. I became acutely aware of humanity’s state of mind before we acquired language. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d never have guessed that lacking the means to describe something in plain sight could inflict so much stress on an organism’s psyche.
But if I must─
If I must, for the honor of the primate order, somehow put into words the uncanny sight─
“Let’s see…”
Karen Araragi, my sister, was wearing a skirt.
……
So what, you might argue.
To convey if only a fifth of my shock, I might have put that in italics, like so: My sister was wearing a skirt.
But I’d even forgotten to italicize it. Italicization had been lost to me.
Like I said earlier, Karen always wore a jersey. To rephrase, she wore nothing else. Jerseys were her combat fatigues, or like the robes of a saint. Yet she had doffed the cloth and donned a skirt.
Her all-too-long legs were receiving undue emphasis.
A similar phenomenon was manifest, not just for her lower body, but from her waist up.
She wasn’t wearing a sports top or a windbreaker. Not even a running dress.
Instead, she was attired in an entirely unsportsmanlike stole and sleeveless turtleneck.
Such long arms! So slender a neck!
And, and…
Who was this pretty girl?!
Napoleon I supposedly said, “The clothes make the man.” If so, the Karen Araragi standing before me, in this room, in this house, was and was no longer Karen Araragi.
Well.
She was a middle school girl, after all.
It wasn’t completely unheard of for her to wear the school-designated skirt and blouse (as for the likelihood, imagine glancing up at the sky and happening to spot a cascade of shooting stars, and you wouldn’t be far off), but that was just her uniform.
If I took that into account, though, it was comprehensible. She was bending the rules, but she must have her reasons, and I could be magnanimous and let it slide.
Yet her current outfit looked bare to a degree that was unthinkable for school clothes.
It flaunted the edicts of nature.
She could…wear something other than a jersey?!
That was like Kiryl equipping the Zenithian Armor!
I gulped, hard. This took beating the summer heat to a new level.
They were probably Tsukihi’s clothes. Her outfit looked like something you’d see on the pages of a fashion magazine, stylish and coordinated. Tsukihi, for her part, went for traditional Japanese clothing so hard that she joined her school’s tea ceremony club just so she could wear kimonos, but she wasn’t as much of a fanatic as Karen (in other words, didn’t attach as much meaning to the way she dressed) and had plenty of ordinary clothes as well.
Still, Karen and Tsukihi possessed very different body types.
The turtleneck showed off Karen’s contours as clearly as a form-fitting T-shirt, while the creased skirt, probably not designed to be very long in the first place, transformed into an extreme miniskirt.
She wasn’t wearing stockings or even socks, and her long, bare legs jutting out from the hem of the skirt were enough to fill me with terror.
Terror.
A host of traumatic incidents came back to me. This and that and…
Hey, all of it happened in the past few months!
Seriously, how many brushes with death have I had in that time?!
But forget about my trauma… Right now, we’re talking about Karen.
“Karen… If you’re being bullied, you should have told me! Why didn’t you come to me sooner, before things went so far?!”
“Nah, I’m not being bullied,” Karen denied after I leapt irate from my swivel chair and grabbed and shook her by the shoulders, which she, with a tired look, let me do. “If anyone is bullying me, honestly, it’s you.”
“Urk.”
“I can laugh about it now, but back in grade school, some of the heartless things you said made me want to kill myself.”
“Urrk.”
Deep.
Why was she confessing this to me now? Did I really say anything that mean?
“It’s what inspired me to become a defender of justice─so you see, my hatred of evil actually stems from you.”
“You don’t say.” What a thing to be responsible for, don’t place that on me… “B-But, Karen, there’s no way you’d dress like that unless somebody threatened you! Ah, you poor thing… Someone forced you to wear those silly clothes instead of your usual jersey and posted the pics on your school’s secret student forum…”
Everything went black, and I cradled my head.
Unbelievable. Not even noticing that my sister was dealing with terrible stuff, I’d been studying for my sorry exams. Wrapped up in percentiles and the cult of academic merit, I’d lost sight of what matters most…
My conscience lashed at me like waves upon the shore. If I didn’t get ahold of myself, I might go on some rampage. The only thing keeping me sane was my anger.
Anger at myself, and also against the world.
“Don’t worry, Karen! I’ll fix this somehow! I’m your brother, leave it to me! Just tell me the address and phone number of whoever’s been bullying you, and the name of the homeroom teacher who turned a blind eye! I’ll make them
pay for what they’ve done!”
“Sometimes you’re hotter than fire, big brother.”
I’m crushing on you, Karen added with a smile.
It was a gentle smile.