The Boy
It was an unremarkable life.
The oldest scene he could remember was a stain on an orphanage ceiling. He had never once seen his parents' faces. All that remained of them was a single sheet in the director's files, recording the simple fact that someone had left him behind.
A person with no one to lean on had to learn early how to stand alone. And so he did. The moment he came of age, he volunteered for the army. If it was something he would have to go through anyway, better to get it over with quickly.
He was discharged earlier than anyone, and with the support money from the orphanage plus what he had saved in the service, he rented a small room. Luck was with him — the old landlord was a generous man. He knocked a little off the rent, and sometimes left a container of side dishes at the door.
Days he spent loading and unloading parcels. Nights, on construction sites. Whether it wrecked him or not, he took whatever work came. Love, family — those had never been part of the calculation. Earn hard while he was young, live quietly in old age, and die. That was the only design he had.
"…It's lung cancer. Stage three."
The blueprint tore apart when he was twenty-seven. The doctor did not look up from the monitor as he went on.
"We'll start treatment right away. Someone will go over the costs with you separately. As for your current symptoms…"
Nothing after that really landed.
Stage three lung cancer.
The joke of it was that he had never once put a cigarette to his lips. Only after the diagnosis did the landscapes of his workplaces come back to him. There had been a foreman who chain-smoked inside an unventilated shipping container.
"If it's getting to you, have one yourself. This stuff's medicine. Medicine."
The demolition sites, thick with dust. Work crews that never had a single decent mask among them.
"If you'd like, we can begin the admission process immediately."
He shook his head.
He could have afforded the treatment. But once he paid for it, he couldn't begin to guess how far his savings would be gutted, or how many more years it would take to build them back after he recovered.
More than that.
He simply did not feel like living any longer.
This is enough.
He cleaned out his accounts. Every last bit of what he had saved, transferred without leaving a single coin. To a place that looked after parentless children, the way someone had once looked after him. There was no one to leave it to anyway.
A creak—
And then he ended his own life.
The last thing he saw was a water stain on the studio ceiling. By some accident of shape, it looked just like the one from the orphanage of his childhood.
So I'm going back to the beginning.
That was the thought he closed his eyes on.
And yet.
"…Waaah?"
When he opened his eyes again, he had become a boy.
From the time he was a newborn, the boy remembered everything with perfect clarity.
"Hello, baby. It's Mommy."
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a woman's face, smiling down at him. At first, he was glad. In this life, he had a parent — even if it was only one. That alone was enough.
The illusion did not last.
He knew it by instinct: there was no happiness in that smile.
"My Iseor."
When she smiled, only the corners of her mouth ever rose. Her eyes never followed. They always seemed to be looking somewhere far away. A sense of danger stirred in him of its own accord. If he stayed like this, he might lose even the family he had newly gained.
The boy moved.
"Mom!"
From the moment he could speak, he did everything he could to make her happy. It was hard, but he played at being affectionate in his own clumsy way, stayed sharp, and tried to look like a good child.
It was no use.
"You poor thing…"
"Mom…!"
After the grandmother who had looked after the two of them died before her time, the smile vanished from that pale face.
"Iseor. Let's be strong…"
Still, she was kind during the day. At least then. For a while yet.
The woman at night changed by degrees. Drink, and cigarettes, and gambling. She sank into things there was no coming back from.
"You ruined my life!!"
The mother began to see someone else overlaid on her child. His birth father. The man who had gotten her pregnant. The perpetrator the boy could not help but resemble.
A crash of glass.
At first he hid in the bathroom. If he drew his knees up on the cold floor and made himself small, at least she would not come looking for him.
"Where did you go! Where are you!"
Later he had to move into the washing machine. There were nights he bolted from the house in nothing but his underwear.
The man he had been in his previous life would have put a stop to this long ago. He would have reported it, been separated, gone into a facility.
He didn't want that.
He knew better than anyone what those places were. He knew far too well what became of a person with no one to lean on. And so he endured. He had given up on being loved, but he did not believe the self he was now could stand alone. For the time being, he needed the money she brought in.
Just until I start high school.
Once he had the frame and the strength, he could work a part-time job or anything else and feed himself. He only had to hold out until then. He clenched his teeth and studied. It was the only thing he could do.
Fortunately, the boy was rather bright.
"Iseor is such a well-mannered boy. His parents must have raised him well."
The teachers called him a model student. All he had really done was fight with everything he had not to fall asleep in class. He couldn't sleep. If he let go of consciousness even once, he wouldn't wake until evening — and then he would miss a meal.
That was how he lived.
And then, one day, it happened.
Creak, creak—
The rusty swing sang its thin, weeping cry into his ears. Early summer. The heat of the last few years had grown so much worse that his clothes clung damp against his skin, a thoroughly miserable sensation. Still better than going home. It was wiser to wait until she drank herself to sleep. Otherwise he wouldn't simply fall asleep like a normal person — he might take a beating and pass out instead.
The boy said nothing. He killed time by holding his vocabulary book up to the lights of the café across the park.
Even so, the hour to go in always came. Eleven at night. He would have slept outside if he could, but if he didn't show his face at home in the morning, there were days he couldn't even make it to school. If she hit him for not setting out breakfast, he wouldn't be going anywhere that day.
A thin scrape of metal. The boy stood in front of the house and pulled the wire he had left tucked in the window frame. The window opened by the width of a finger. He looked through the gap.
Someone was lying on the kitchen floor.
Good.
She was asleep. He opened the front door with care.
"I'm home…"
There was no answer. His mother lay sprawled asleep on the kitchen floor, empty bottles and glasses scattered in a mess beside her. He wanted to move her to her room, but if he woke her doing it, that would be the end. He only gathered the bottles to one side and pulled a thin blanket over her shoulders.
A soft rustle. His fingertips brushed her. He paused, then stood.
I might actually get some sleep.
The clock already read half past eleven. He would have to be up at five-thirty. If he put the rice on before she woke, he could avoid a pointless beating. He closed his door and lay down.
But the boy could not sleep.
A shatter of glass.
He was on his feet before he knew he had moved.
"Gh— uh…"
The kitchen floor. His mother was writhing on it, a woman swaying as she tried to push herself up. Something dark and red was running from her fingertips, from her forehead. She must have struck the table in her sleep, and a bottle had gone down with the blow. On any other night he would have cleared them away himself. Tonight he had let it go.
"Mom…?"
A single word, slipped out under a held breath. That was the mistake.
"You…!"
Bloodshot eyes locked on the boy. The same old hatred. He knew his fate at once. He was going to be beaten unconscious again tonight.
There was one thing he had not expected.
A wet, punching thrust—
"Ghk…!"
The sensation of something driving between flesh and muscle. What came down on the boy who had been waiting for an open hand was a blade of pain. Only then did he see it: the shard of broken glass in his mother's blood-slicked fist.
"Mo…m…!"
"Why did you come back again! Just leave me alone, leave me alone already!!"
Her eyes were no longer seeing the boy at all. A hand steeped in liquor and madness drove the shard in again and again. The boy reacted on instinct.
A crash—
The kick sent the woman stumbling; she caught on a chair and went down. The side table went with her, and the glass top that had covered it hit the floor and broke into even more pieces.
"Hah… hah…"
The house was a wreck. The boy had no time to take it in. He clutched his arm, but the blood would not stop. His head felt hollow, the whole thing distant, as if it were happening to someone else. That it was only his arm was the one mercy. It was not a wound that would kill him on the spot. But there was a real danger of bleeding out. He needed an ambulance, and he needed it now.
I don't want to hurt.
The boy walked. A life he had once let go of himself. Even so, he did not want the pain.
But the mother would not let her child go.
"I'll kill you…"
A hand scraping the floor, pushing her up again. The tenacity of someone who seemed mad — no. Of someone who had already gone mad. It was aimed at him.
The boy set his head straight. There was no talking to her in that state. He had to get out. He had to call a hospital. He had to survive.
He had perhaps five steps left to the doorknob when it happened.
"Khhrk—!"
The sound from behind turned his head.
A thick, rolling gurgle…!
The boy saw it. Pouring down over his mother's back — no. Burrowing into her back. A dark crimson mass.
"Oegh… khhogh…"
Sounds that did not belong to a human being spilled from her dry lips. Her legs kicked and thrashed in every direction. Her wasted body had lifted off the floor. A wet packing sound, a heavy gluck — and in that state she convulsed in fine, rapid shudders, taking in something her body could not possibly hold.
A crack. A snap.
Sounds that should never come from a human body filled the kitchen. Some grotesque thing like a clot of blood was forcing itself without end into that wasted frame.
The boy had sunk to the floor. He stared up at it, empty.
Run.
Reason screamed it. His body would not move.
"Mo…m…?"
The instant the boy's voice came out, his mother's body folded. Backward. Farther than any living person could have survived. Her whole frame bulged as if a great insect were crawling beneath the skin, and those bloodshot eyes had long since rolled white.
And as the boy watched, the writhing ebbed.
Silence.
A soft shift of weight.
In that suffocating quiet, it rose slowly to its feet. The movement was awkward, creaking. Drip. Drip. Blood still falling to the floor.
Something wearing his mother's hide. It stood with its back to him, head tipped toward the ceiling. But the boy knew. He knew it was looking at him.
At the nape of the woman's neck, in a seam that still hung slightly open, something shone red.
An eye.
A small, precise click. It turned. Bare feet came down on broken glass. The footprints that followed were mixed with blood. It did not change expression. It did not seem to feel pain at all.
A wet tread. Another.
The woman coming toward him with that soaked sound. A familiar face. A familiar shape. But it was not his mother.
"…St-stay away…"
That was all that came out of the boy's mouth. He could not even scream. Every sense in his body felt pinned. And then a heavy shadow fell over him, bringing the red light with it.
In the center of each black iris sat a pupil of another color entirely.
A wet, viscid sound.
Scarlet eyes.
"Hah—!"
The boy woke. But he had not escaped the nightmare.
Did you sleep well.
"…!!"
A dark hospital room, with no one in it. And the eyes from the dream, looking down at him.