Chicken, a Wet Mop, and a Flashlight
In a state of perfect blankness, I watched magical girl anime and stuffed myself full of chicken.
Even with two of us tearing into a whole bird, our elementary-school stomachs couldn't finish the job. Half of it was left behind.
The leftovers went to the mascots before they could go cold.
"Buuurp."
The glorious marriage of greasy fried chicken and soda erupted from deep inside me as a refreshing belch. Taking that cool rumble as their signal, Siyeon's sea-snake-looking mascot and the little bear both sidled up to the chicken box.
The whole reason I always ordered boneless was so these two could eat without hassle.
They looked like they could survive on air alone, yet here they were coveting human food. Bizarre little creatures, the lot of them.
"I'll take the fried."
"Whoa… you left this much…."
World first: stuffed animals that chow down on fried chicken.
Looked at broadly, you could even call them residual waste processors, right?
Pretty practical, actually.
No electricity. No batteries required.
I was staring fixedly at the little bear's back when Siyeon's mascot turned and locked eyes with me. Following that gaze, the little bear—who had been frantically shoveling chicken into his mouth—spun around and spoke.
"Awe you hungwy?"
"Nah. Just thinking you'd sell like hotcakes as a residual waste disposer."
"Just like that?!"
I figured they'd become an instant hit item for housewives. No food waste, plus a conversation partner—what more could you want?
Once the two of them finished cleaning up every last scrap, I neatly folded the grease-soaked chicken box and poured the pickled radish brine down the sink.
With a body like this, pulling an all-nighter was impossible.
"Haaaaawn."
I hadn't even finished the chicken that long ago, yet a crushing wave of drowsiness rolled over me and forced out a huge yawn.
On the bottom bunk of the bunk bed, Siyeon was already asleep, breathing softly with the Sea Snake Mascot clutched like a pillow. I watched her for a moment, then climbed the ladder toward the top bunk.
The little bear had already sprawled out dead center on someone else's mattress. I casually grabbed him in one hand and flung him over the outer edge of the ladder.
"Guek!"
What kind of animal crawls into a person's bed….
I finished climbing and sank into the soft mattress.
I'd only closed my eyes for a few dozen minutes.
The night that had felt like it might last forever shattered to the sound of my phone's default alarm. I swiped the X to dismiss it, shut my eyes again, and let out a short sigh.
"Ah."
The involuntary sound slipped out while I was still wriggling under the covers. Its meaning was so obvious it needed no explanation.
…I don't wanna go to school.
"Hwaaam."
Siyeon's yawn marked the start of our walk to elementary school.
Back to square one. How many more years was I going to have to wake up this early?
At school I sat down, hung my bag on the side of the desk, and settled in. Magical girl backstory said I had no mom or dad, and of course my last name just had to be Kim. Thanks to the utterly unreasonable rule of alphabetical seating, I was stuck in a front-row seat I couldn't even comfortably flop onto—right up against the teacher's desk.
My luck is absolute trash.
Loaded with complaints, I face-planted on my desk the second I arrived and tried to stockpile even a little freedom before class started.
No parents anyway—couldn't I just change my entire last name? The world-building is already paper-thin. Couldn't they just let something like that slide?
"Hey! Kim Mari! Where's the kimbap?!"
"It's Kim Mari~ It's Kim Mari~"
Ugh, you little bastards.
Elementary school daily life: teasing people about their names. They never got tired of the same joke every single day.
The boy elementary students in my class were harder to deal with than monsters. If something pissed me off, I could just beat a monster until the stress left. These brats? I couldn't exactly do that, which made them infinitely more annoying. If I pounded them and their parents showed up, the hassle would only multiply.
This part really didn't need to be realistic.
"Haaawn."
I muttered that complaint under my breath and just yawned, whether they called me Kimmal-i or fried shrimp or whatever else.
Apparently even magical-girl world-building correction had its limits. Back in kindergarten, I'd once beaten the crap out of a kid for name-calling and gotten thoroughly wrecked by his nightmare of a mother.
I still remembered that conversation vividly. Completely oblivious that she hadn't raised her own kid properly, she'd demanded I bring my parents. When I shot back, "Why are you looking for something I don't have?" her meltdown button got slammed and the whole kindergarten nearly flipped over from the screaming. I'd even thrown in, "Kids like you are why no-kids zones exist."
Looking back, that wasn't something a child that age should have been saying. At the time I'd only just started figuring out how to act my age, so maybe it was inevitable, but…
It was a little much.
I genuinely hadn't known my parents were actually dead. In hindsight it had been a magnificent verbal brawl between someone who never existed and someone who was gone.
Anyway, I took that lesson to heart and lived without causing problems. Of course, if I were ever certain the other kid's parents wouldn't show up, there was no shortage of faces I wanted to mount and rearrange on the spot. But name-teasing? The adult inside me could endure that much.
Unfortunately, the pure malice of little children sometimes shattered even the steel will of the adult within.
After school, cleaning time. According to assigned numbers, we picked up brooms and dustpans or mops and got to work. Running away just left your number on the chalkboard.
I was squatting, picking up the big trash, when a prepared mop entered the classroom. Slap. Someone had wrung it out so poorly it was still sopping, and it dragged a wet trail across the floor.
"Yahoo—!"
For whatever reason, the little brats found this thrilling and zoomed between the desks. Enthusiasm meant we'd finish faster, so that was fine by me. Or so I thought, while I was looking at my phone…
Slap. A dull impact, and wetness bloomed across the crown of my head.
"Ah."
Some kid, carried away by momentum, had hoisted the mop high overhead, failed to control the weight, and traced a perfect arc straight onto my skull. The already-soaking mop, now loaded with sandy grit and dust, showered debris down through my hair.
…??
For a second, the thread of reason vanished from my head. Even so, my brain still understood perfectly well.
Yeah. They're kids. Mistakes happen.
But was this fist going to forgive him?
My body, which had not accepted the situation, began drawing a clean trajectory with its fist. In that instant, the missing thread of reason snapped back into place and reconnected with my brain, barking the order: avoid the one-touch double-jaw surgery and redirect the orbit away from the face.
"Ack!"
Thankfully the fist landed on the right side of his chest. I left the classroom first, still figuring out what to do with a head caked in garbage.
The moment I entered the bathroom—nowhere near clean by any normal standard—I barely managed to rinse the sandy trash out of my scalp. The long hair I'd left alone because cutting it short was a hassle was now a living nightmare.
I did it.
Regret arrived fashionably late. I could only hope that kid's mother wasn't a complete concept-free lunatic. My chest felt tight and bitter. On the way home I'd buy a piece of candy and suck on it.
Siyeon, who was in a different class, had been waiting for me at the front gate until cleaning finished. Of course she asked why my hair was wet, and I explained what had happened during cleaning so she'd understand.
"So… you hit him?"
"Yep."
I answered casually and stuck a strawberry lollipop from the nearby stationery shop into my mouth. Water under the bridge. A man doesn't waste regret on trivial past events.
…Wait. Right now, was I allowed a little regret?
Hearing my nonchalant reply, Siyeon's face turned troubled.
"Then what do we do…."
"By the time I came to my senses, the fist was already flying."
I looked down at my tightly clenched right hand, lifted only one corner of my mouth, and smiled the smile of someone who simply couldn't help it.
Siyeon's expression shifted from troubled to something closer to pure disgust. She muttered a hollow scolding at a creature that was never going to improve.
"You shouldn't say that like you're proud of it…."
Ah. The candy was sweet. Strawberry really was the best.
"Mari, you're not listening, are you?"
"Of course not."
"Haa…."
I was amazing—I'd made an elementary schooler sigh.
Once we got back to the apartment, nothing was different from usual. Other elementary kids got packed off to academies or taekwondo, but that story didn't apply to us.
We were high-class personnel who had to defeat monsters, after all. Even high-class personnel got days off. A day without monsters was a holiday.
"No monsters today, huh."
Siyeon's murmur drifted up while I lay on the bunk bed with my legs crossed.
"Words become seeds. Don't say stuff like that."
I scolded her with a proverb for spitting out something so ominous. Chewing on the remaining stick of the lollipop, I offered silent thanks for a day free of monsters.
…At least until that night.
"Lady Mari, Lady Mari."
"Ah… you little fucking bastard."
The goddamn little bear's voice, paired with a light so bright it felt like the sun itself was parked in front of my face. This deranged bear cub had shone a flashlight straight into my eyes.
Even the most bottom-tier trash didn't shine flashlights into people's eyes. And yet this fucking bear cub had gone and done it.
"A monster has appear—cluck?!"
My fingers closed around his throat and twisted his words into a strangled squawk. There was no way I could hold back the chokehold this time.
"Monster my ass, you fucking bastard—you wanna go rafting with Charon on the River Styx?"