A Wise Work Life (2)
"Ah······."
Thud.
I smacked my head against the ceiling and slumped down right there.
Every single time I walked through that door. Every time.
I closed the door behind me and shuffled, hunched and swaying, into the storeroom — no, into the back of my home.
The ceiling was so low and the space so cramped I couldn't even stand upright, and the wind whistled through gaps in the boards without mercy. And still, this was the only refuge I had.
A refuge where I didn't have to worry about someone grabbing me by the hair from behind or laying hands on my body.
"Mwaaah! Waaah!"
"Yeah, yeah. Mommy's home. Thanks for the warm welcome, you little brat······."
Screaming the moment I arrived, as if to say how much it missed me.
Then screaming again the moment I tried to leave, as if to say I wasn't allowed to go.
Useless trash that did nothing all day but whine at the top of its lungs.
I laughed hollowly and made my way toward the makeshift bed of piled-up blankets.
Judging by the pitch of the crying, it was the kind of wail that meant, I have graciously soiled myself, so you may now attend to my backside, wench.
The foul smell drifting over confirmed it beyond doubt.
So while I was out swallowing every humiliation imaginable, this one was back here happily pooping itself. Ah — come to think of it, today was the day I couldn't swallow it.
That was why I'd come home so late, too.
The pig's wife had stormed in in a fury and slapped me across the right cheek, then the left, like I was some kind of saint turning the other cheek. Apparently that hadn't been enough to satisfy her, because she kept at it until her arms gave out while I crumpled on the floor and took kick after kick.
And of course it didn't end there — I also had to refund every last coin the pig had blown on drinks that night, plus the hostess fee on top.
Naturally, I didn't have that kind of money, so the Tavern Boss covered the refund for now and chalked the whole thing onto my debt.
Watching the pig sob and beg his wife to stop hitting me the entire time she was wailing on me — the man was clearly head over heels for me.
Normally he tried to strangle me to death.
Still, thanks to all of it, I had about three days off coming to me.
If I showed up at work the very next day looking fresh after a beating like that, people would get suspicious, so I had no choice but to fake a recovery period and take the days off.
An unpaid holiday that arrived hand in hand with a mountain of new debt — but a holiday was a holiday.
The only problem was that I wouldn't get to spend a second of it resting, because I'd be glued to the monster that shrieked the instant it saw an opening.
"Well, well. What a bountiful harvest. Hm? Just looking at the color of this, you're championship material."
"Waaahhh······!"
"Ugh, I'm cleaning it right now, so quit crying. You really are a demon's child."
Baby cries had to carry some kind of special power. Nothing else could explain why just hearing them made my skull throb with irritation.
They say parents find their own baby's cries adorable. Utter nonsense, all of it.
"Damn it. Hell. Got it on my hand again."
I'd been so careful, and it ended up on my hand anyway. I never make mistakes like this. Maybe it was because I'd been drinking a little.
Well — it was already there, so I just wiped it off quickly and called it done.
"Now I have to wash this again. Life, truly······."
By the time my hands were clean, the emptiness came flooding in.
Even after dragging myself home from all that hell, the work was nowhere near done. Why on earth did I have to raise a child when I could barely keep myself fed and alive as it was?
"I'm going to die······."
Why did this world not have disposable diapers?
I always found myself pondering great philosophical questions at this hour.
It had heating, running hot water, modern plumbing and sewage systems, even flush toilets in common use — so why, why had no one in this world invented something so blindingly simple?
The basic infrastructure was all modern-era, sometimes even contemporary in quality, yet the moment you touched anything related to child-rearing, it couldn't get past the Middle Ages.
Thanks to that, I had to wash cloth diapers one by one, piece together rags into baby clothes, and layer several enormous cloths on top of each other just to rig up something like a baby carrier to haul the thing around on my back.
I had a rough idea of why the world was in such a sorry state.
Knowing how these stories went, the protagonist probably never so much as dropped a bastard brat from beginning to end.
The hero never has to raise a child, so it never has to be written on the page — and therefore the world has no reason to develop anything for childcare. Obviously.
What a load of crap. Lazy, convenience-driven worldbuilding.
"Mwaaah! Aaah!"
"Ugh. What now? What is it this time."
"Waaah! Waahh!"
"Hungry, are you? Right. You did make quite a deposit, so I suppose you'd be starving by now. Ha······."
Tiny hands reached upward, flailing wildly. My words didn't register in the slightest — those eyes were locked onto my chest and nothing else.
When I brought a finger to its mouth, the creature seized it and sucked away with astonishing vigor.
"You're only interested in my chest too, aren't you. No different from those pigs. Exactly the same······."
I cradled the monster's head, lifted it up, and bared my breast.
At the hard, greedy pull of its mouth, a soft gasp escaped me before I could stop it.
It had barely been a week, and its sucking strength seemed to have grown enormously. Its head felt heavier in my arms, too.
Did babies really grow this fast?
Watching the thing suck away in absolute silence — as if it hadn't been screaming its throat bloody just moments ago — pulled a sigh out of me.
"How are you this sturdy, anyway······."
They said newborns died instantly if you looked away for even a moment.
They suffocated lying on their stomachs because they couldn't roll themselves back over. They choked to death on their own spit. They rolled off something on their own, cracked their heads, and died of brain bleeds.
And yet this one? I left it alone nearly the entire day, and it showed not the faintest sign of dying. Just today, I'd been too busy to feed it for over half a day, and it still had the energy to wail its lungs out······
"Would it kill you to just die?"
I stared down at the monster as it nuzzled mindlessly into my chest, suckling away. The hard little horns near its temples were still there.
A fragile thing like this — I could kill it just by giving its neck a light twist. No, I wouldn't even need that. Cover its nose and mouth, and it would die easily enough.
"No. Maybe I should be the one to die······."
If I did, I could simply follow it into death.
Who knew — maybe dying really was the way back to my original body, in my original world.
"Can't do it. I can't do it······."
Because I didn't have the courage. I couldn't do it — kill it and then die myself — because I lacked the courage for that.
There was no other reason I was still alive. I lived because I could not die.
This was just the same, only in reverse: raising it because I could not kill it.
And so, I was still shamefully, stubbornly alive.
"God, she's so damn annoying."
"······."
It was a lazy afternoon in the staff room. The fox-eared woman was dabbing powder puff against her cheek when the curse slipped out of her mouth. Her gaze was fixed on the mirror — at the silver-haired girl sitting blankly in the reflection behind her.
"Who on earth kills time in the staff room when they have nothing to do?"
"Right? Back in my day I couldn't have dreamed of it."
"Ugh, I want to just kill her. Does she have zero sense at all?"
"······."
Only when the barbed remarks started flying from every corner did the girl finally realize they were talking about her, and she scrambled to her feet. She shuffled out through the door, and the woman clicked her tongue after her.
Which cracked her makeup clean down the middle — meaning she'd have to start over from scratch. Just one more delight to add to the pile.
"God, the stress. Can't I really just beat her half to death? No — forget beating. I just want to put one cigarette burn on that smug cheek."
"She signed a contract with the boss, remember? One year. If we wreck her face, we're the ones getting cut."
"A contract? A contract? She works at a bar, for god's sake. Look at her, acting all high and mighty······"
Insufferable woman.
To the hostesses of the tavern, Yulia was a thorn in the side and a source of endless irritation.
One day she'd just tumbled in out of nowhere, and without lifting a single finger she'd stolen every customer request, every regular's favor, for herself.
She never sold her body, yet she wagged her tail at the customers day and night, so the men who wanted to move on to the second round ended up drowning in booze with Yulia until dawn instead.
If she had an ounce of decency, she wouldn't pull such shameless stunts.
Worse still, through whatever twist of fate, Yulia wore no makeup and seemed to put no effort into her hair whatsoever — and yet her features were always as crisp and defined as if painted in heavy colors, her hair perpetually shimmering. As if it were some passive skill.
But that was all there was to her.
A woman with nothing going for her beyond a somewhat decent face. It was a genuine mystery why a woman who wouldn't even take customers to the second round was so popular.
She even pulled the occasional catastrophe, like smacking a customer across the face······
Any normal woman who made a mistake like that would have her throat wrung on the spot or end up buried somewhere, never allowed to work again.
Once, I'd casually asked a regular about it, and he'd said that even her temper was part of her charm.
Men really were incomprehensible creatures.
"Hey, unnie? Did you know?"
"What?"
"That Yulia lives in that little storeroom we used to use as a closet. Well — she kept vanishing every break time, so I followed her once, and wouldn't you know it, she was sneaking in and out of that storeroom."
"Keeping a puppy or something?"
"Not a puppy. I could hear a baby crying, faint, from inside."
"She's raising a child?"
"······."
When the other woman nodded silently, the fox-eared woman let a faint smile curl across her lips.
"Haah. The absolute nerve of that woman······"
That look she always wore, the one that said I know nothing, I'm innocent, I'm just a naive little thing.
And all while she'd gone and borne a child. What magnificent acting.
It was obvious at a glance — she'd played around like the cheap tramp she was, slipped up, and popped out a kid with no idea who the father was. Then she'd stashed the baby in the storeroom and raised it in secret.
And now, the secret was out.
Chuckling softly to herself over the happy dilemma of what to do with this information, the woman smiled.