Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  Her small shoulders drew inward and her face was pale. Her strawberry lips had turned pure white.

  The raven realized what she had been seeing. The black monster she fears so deeply is me! The demon she’s seeing is myself recorded in the eyes!

  What should I do? Soon the girl will have her surgery and her eyes will see again. My partner in conversation will discover that I am the black monster that terrifies her to her core.

  If only she wouldn’t have the surgery! thought the raven, although he couldn’t say it to the girl so happily awaiting the day she could see again.

  “I’m afraid of the surgery,” she said. “But I’ll get through it, just to see you.”

  Her courage bolstered by her desire to meet her mysterious caller eye to eye, she resolved to undergo the operation.

  “Tomorrow night,” she said, “I’ll have to go to a distant town for the surgery. So come again before I leave. I want to talk to you again.”

  As he heard her words, the raven put the mansion behind him.

  It’s finally come. The raven’s tiny brain was filled with thoughts of the young girl. So many times he had decided to say goodbye to her and fly to southern lands—how many he didn’t know. He wished he could just not say anything and never visit her again.

  But he wouldn’t do that. If he suddenly vanished the girl would be sad. And more than anything else, it would have been painful for the raven himself.

  Even after he learned of the girl’s upcoming surgery, the raven kept searching for presents for her as he had before.

  But it was harder than ever to obtain eyeballs. The humans were carefully guarding their eyes—some even wore specially made protective goggles.

  The humans couldn’t tell one raven from another. Many innocent black birds had been indiscriminately dispatched by human bullets. Perhaps his own parents or siblings were among the fallen.

  The recurring terrors had made the humans vigilant, and he almost never saw an opportunity to harvest eyes anymore.

  The day before the girl’s surgery was to be performed the raven flew without resting to find her an eye. He went to towns farther away than he had ever gone before.

  Soon it grew dark and then dawn came, bringing with it the day of the girl’s departure. But still he had not found a chance to collect an eye.

  When the surgery was over his presents would no longer have any meaning; still, all the raven was capable of doing for the girl was to offer her yet another eye.

  All he could do was give her an eyeball to make her happy. That was his everything. Just one more time before her surgery he wanted to make her happy. If he did that, he could die. That was his strongest wish.

  Some humans threw rocks at him and hit him, and his beak cracked. He was caught unawares, and they grabbed his wings. He narrowly escaped, but his feathers had been torn from his wings. As he was beaten by their sticks his prized talons had chipped. Still he tried hard to find an eye, but to no avail.

  He moved his ravaged wings to fly. He had to concentrate to keep from falling.

  In the end, he hadn’t been able to get her an eye. His own pair brimmed with tears as he thought about the pitiful failure he’d become.

  The sun had already set, and the girl’s departure was closer than ever. The sky grew dark and the moon started to shine its white light upon the world.

  That was when he saw it, lit by the moonlight—a corpse about to be buried in the graveyard. The raven passed over the gravedigger in the middle of his digging.

  The raven had an idea.

  From a small distance away he called out to the gravedigger in a human’s voice. “Heyyyy! There’s still dead people over here!”

  With a surprised expression, the gravedigger set down his shovel and turned to the direction of the voice. A moment later he left the corpse and walked toward the raven suspiciously.

  The raven waited for the right moment and then flew into the air from where the gravedigger couldn’t see him. He passed over the man’s head and landed upon the corpse on the ground beside the open grave.

  Using his beak, the raven removed the cloth that covered the corpse, revealing the body of a woman. The raven didn’t care how she had died. There were countless scratches upon her face and her body. Her nose and her mouth had been shaved off and one of her eyes had burst and was gone. But the other eye seemed to be in perfect shape.

  The raven pushed his beak, stained red with human blood from his wicked deeds, into the face of the corpse.

  *

  “I was worried you weren’t going to come, mister,” said the girl to the raven when he came into her room. She was fully prepared for her trip and told him she would soon be getting in the car and driving far away for her surgery. “I won’t be back for a while. But I will be back.”

  The raven placed the corpse’s eyeball on top of the round table.

  Along with the vase of flowers, a glass jar was on the table. It was filled with all of the eyes the raven had brought her. The girl apparently intended to bring the jar with her as a keepsake on the trip.

  “I’m sure the operation will be a success, miss. Good luck.”

  Cute dimples formed in the girl’s cheeks. “Thank you.”

  “I’ve brought you one last present. It’s on the table. Please put it in and watch the dream.”

  The raven’s heart felt like it would burst. But he made up his mind. As he flew out the window he would say it.

  Miss, I won’t be coming back.

  And he could never think of her again.

  The raven turned his back to the girl and poised to fly out the window.

  “Miss—” His farewell was cut short by the girl’s scream.

  At the end of her long, shrill shriek, the girl tore at her face with her fingernails, vomited, and collapsed to the floor, her arms and legs writhing. Her hair was a tangled mess. Her hands were enmeshed in her hair and she yanked it out like she couldn’t bear it any longer.

  The glass jar with all the eyeballs broke open, the eyes scattering all over the floor. The girl was surrounded by eyeballs, some rotten and squishy, others new and still elastic.

  Finally, with a cracked sound from her mouth, like the death rattle of a dying beast, the girl stopped moving.

  The raven approached the girl and pressed his ear to her chest. Her heart had stopped beating and she seemed to be dead. Her face was distorted in terror. Her black satin hair and her strawberry lips had turned a ghostly white.

  The raven hadn’t known. He hadn’t known that the corpse whose eye he took had been tortured and maimed, that the sadnesses of the world had been burned into her eyes.

  The girl had seen it all. She saw the hell the eye’s previous owner had lived and she saw the moment of the woman’s death.

  The raven kept his head pressed against the girl’s chest. For the first time he had touched her body. It had already started to grow cold.

  When the girl’s mother came into her room to announce that it was time to leave she found the body of her dead daughter, surrounded by countless eyeballs, and the carcass of a raven, its head pressed against her girl’s chest, growing cold along with her.

  The End

  Part 3

  1

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki had a dream in which he molded humans into balls.

  The dream went like this: The place was a small room, somewhere around nine feet by twelve, with a closet and a TV. Miki stood in the center of the room facing another person.

  The person’s arm was injured, with a gash a few inches long.

  Miki grasped the arm and massaged the wound. Strangely, the skin he touched was soft and moldable, like clay. The surface of the arm smoothed and the cut vanished as if it had been painted over.

  Amused, Miki looked at the person’s fingerprints. When he rubbed at the minute grooves they too smoothed, as though he’d gone over them with a putty knife.

  Feeling like a potter kneading clay, Miki removed all the bu
mps from the person.

  He tightly squeezed together the person’s fingers and what had been five were pressed into one. When he applied more force and started kneading at the flesh, the person’s body yielded under his hands and its features and limbs were smoothed out.

  The person remained conscious the whole time. It didn’t speak, but it watched him with thoughtful eyes.

  Soon the person had lost almost all its protrusions and had become a smooth, waist-high sphere. It was white and terribly round. As if to indicate it had once been a person, black hairs poked out here and there. On its even surface, a single eye remained, it alone not having been worked into the sphere.

  The eye still blinked, and it tracked Miki as he walked about.

  The person, having been completely transformed into a ball, had lost the ability to move. Even when Miki left the room, it could only watch him go with its small staring eye.

  When Miki awoke, Hitomi said, “You were sleeping again.”

  To pass the time, she had been flexing her stomach muscles to make her torso hop on the couch. The springiness of the couch helped her small body bounce. She seemed to be enjoying it.

  Miki straightened up the papers of his unfinished manuscript and looked out the window. The sky was cloudy. It might snow soon. Miki turned up the heat of the stove and used a steaming tea kettle to make coffee.

  “That coffee looks delicious,” said Hitomi. “Hey, why are you leaving the stove on? It’s not like it’s cold in here.”

  He explained to her that those whom he injured—whose injuries didn’t heal—no longer felt changes in temperature.

  “Are my injuries not healed?”

  He explained to her that her wounds were still a fresh red, just as they had been when he had severed her limbs.

  Miki stood by the window, coffee in hand, gazing out at the spot where he had buried Kaneda’s corpse. The leafless trees blocked his view of the ground, but he could see far out across the forest to where the barren trees gave way to cedar.

  On the next mountain over stood a brick building similar to his. Even its roof was the same shape, but the difference—the only difference—was its color.

  “Did you sense someone there again?” Hitomi asked.

  Four days had passed since he buried Tadashi Kaneda in the backyard.

  Miki stepped back from the window and opened the drawer of his desk. Inside was the object he’d found next to the house.

  “You’re being investigated. That’s the proof right there. It belonged to somebody; it wouldn’t have just suddenly appeared out of thin air.”

  But it’s not like I saw anyone there. I have to find out if someone is harboring suspicions of me and searching around my house.

  He looked inside the desk drawer and thought about the person the object belonged to. Is it someone I know?

  “What are you going to do? I want to see my mother. I want to go home.” She turned her head to speak to Miki. Her long hair hung down, covering her entire face. “You should turn yourself in. I’m sure the police will forgive you.”

  He explained to her that he wasn’t going to turn himself in.

  “So then,” she said in a sunken voice, “I can’t go home, can I?”

  Miki offered to tell her a story.

  “What story?”

  He brought over a few suitable books from the bookcase, including one he had written.

  “That’s The Collected Black Fairy Tales, isn’t it? You already read it to me. The story was a lot like what happened with Shinichi and Yukie.”

  She was talking about a tale called “The Human Knot.” Several people were forced atop a plate, where a giant demon crushed them on both sides with his powerful hands. That kind of story.

  After the demon crushed them, the people were all tangled together. Their arms and legs were knotted, their torsos stretched, and their necks and heels twisted into one large clump. They spent the rest of their days writhing, struggling to disentangle their jumbled limbs.

  It reminded Hitomi of what had happened to Shinichi Hisamoto and Yukie Mochinaga down in the cellar.

  “Tell me a different one. There, that paperback. No, the one in your right hand.”

  The book she wanted read to her was a collection of old science fiction short stories. She rested on the couch and listened to Miki read the title story.

  It didn’t take very long to finish.

  “That ended a bit sad.” Hitomi’s face had paled in shock. It hadn’t been a happy ending.

  She asked him, “If you were the hero of that story, what would you have done?”

  The conditions of the question were basically as follows:

  Conditions:

  *You are piloting a small spaceship.

  *You are bringing cargo to another planet. The cargo is blood serum, and if you don’t deliver it quickly, a great many people will die.

  *In order to carry the most cargo, the ship has only the minimum amount of fuel necessary. In other words, just enough to accelerate and to brake for landing.

  *If there’s a stowaway on board, you’ll have to eject her into space, because her weight will add to the spaceship’s fuel consumption and there won’t be enough fuel to brake. You can’t eject the stowaway’s weight in supplies and you can’t remove mass from the spaceship itself.

  Question:

  If the stowaway is a young, pretty girl, do you have to throw her into space?

  “You can’t turn back, either. There are a lot of people waiting on that planet for those supplies. If you don’t throw the girl off the ship, there won’t be enough fuel left to slow down and land properly. Just like that story. Is there any way to save the little girl?”

  Hitomi closed her eyes and thought.

  Miki also considered the problem for a little while, then explained that he could save the girl, depending on the circumstances.

  Hitomi’s face brightened and she said excitedly, “Could you really? Can you save both the girl and those people waiting for the blood serum?”

  He explained that if the ship had the right equipment and the right controls, and if the girl’s weight and the pilot’s weight were just right, they could be saved.

  First, he’d need something with which to cut off the girl’s limbs. It could be anything as long as it could cut through bone.

  “The ship doesn’t have an axe or anything like that,” said Hitomi.

  Remove the girl’s limbs and make her as light as possible. Throw the severed parts into space. Use the fact that the stowaway is a child to your advantage. The best case would be if the stowaway were diminutive and light and you, the pilot, were stout and heavy.

  Cut parts off your own body equal to the weight of the head and torso of the girl, throw them into space too, and you’ll have it. The weight of the entire spacecraft will be reduced to the planned weight capable of landing on the planet with the minimum amount of fuel.

  “But if you cut off parts of your own body,” Hitomi said, “you won’t be able to pilot the ship—even if you only have to get rid of your legs to match the girl’s weight, you couldn’t step on the brakes.” Still, her face showed approval of his answer. “But there’s one more thing you’re forgetting. You couldn’t do it that way because you don’t have any anesthetics. If you cut off her arms and legs, she might die of shock. And you might not be able to pilot the ship through your own pain. So don’t go around thinking every girl out there can have her limbs cut off and be all nonchalant about it.”

  She looked at her body and added, “Except for me.”

  *

  Miki picked up Hitomi, who had fallen asleep, and took her down to the cellar. The room was dark and humid. Condensation formed on the brick walls and reflected the lightbulb’s dim light.

  In a corner of the cellar hung several dozen fishing lines, and stuck on the hooks at the end of the lines were pieces of red meat—the rest of Kaneda Tadashi’s organs. Soon they too would begin to rot.

  When Miki laid Hitomi down in h
er bed, she wriggled the sack that held her body and whispered in her sleep, “Mother . . .”

  He turned his back to her and went to leave.

  Just then, from behind one of the shelves, came Shinichi’s voice:

  “Has she ever told you about her family?”

  There were several racks of shelving in the cellar and Shinichi and Yukie always kept their body hidden somewhere in the shadows behind them.

  Miki went to the pair and was faced with Shinichi’s head. He couldn’t see Yukie’s head because it was hidden in the shadows, but Yukie seemed to be asleep.

  “She talks to us across the shelves,” said Shinichi, “about her past. Like the time she went camping with her family. Or how she always placed first in the long-distance races in gym class. Or how, whenever she went on a picnic, her mother always ended up packing these sausages she hated in her bento box.”

  Hitomi often spoke of her past. She seemed to miss her everyday life from when she still had her arms and legs—the mornings she would comb her messy bed-hair by herself, holding a cup in her hands and drinking the milk within, playing footsie with her friends under the school desks.

  When Hitomi talked about her memories she worked her nonexistent limbs, mimicking the movements.

  Hitomi, sitting on the couch, had once said to Miki, “Guess what I’m doing.” She was looking right in front of her. Her left shoulder moved busily up and down inside her sack.

  “Do you give up? I’m making an omelette, of course!”

  She flicked the frying pan she held in her nonexistent left hand and Miki had understood she was trying to flip the omelette.

  “Hitomi grew up loved,” said Shinichi. “Have you ever loved anyone?”

  Miki said he didn’t know.

  “You talked to me before. About how you had a close friend when you were a kid. Maybe you loved her?”

  Miki tilted his head.

  Shinichi’s face looked lonely and he whispered, “My heart aches. When I think of her, I don’t know what to do. I’m helpless and I feel like I just want to die.”