YOBANASHI DECEIVE 1

“…Hmm. Kinda hurts a lot, actually.”

My face instinctively twitched at the stinging pain.

I brought a hand to my right cheek, the source of the discomfort, only to feel a burning sensation run from my cold fingertips to the center point of my head.

I was punched sometime around eleven in the morning.

Several hours had passed since then, but the pain showed no sign of fading away. In fact, my cheek was warmer than ever and starting to swell up.

“Man, what a pain this is.”

There should be a cold compress of some sort in the fridge. It came with the cake my mom had brought.

That would probably help keep the swelling down a bit.

If this left a bruise, that would be some serious trouble.

Last time, the women around the neighborhood pelted me with questions like, “Why are you hurt?” and “Who hit you?” It was pure hell, really.

If a bunch of weird strangers showed up at our front door this time, too, I didn’t know what I’d do.

Why can’t they just mind their own business? Why do they just have to stick their necks into every stupid little thing that happens around here?

Besides, to me, this really wasn’t a big deal at all.

Compared to the pain of worrying about things, it was practically a breeze.

I let out a soft sigh, attempting to get my brain out of the doldrums, and leaned back on the bench I was sitting on.

The boiling heat of the day was starting to let up, and at this hour of the late afternoon, the park was starting to empty out.

The blue sky above me showed no indication of transforming into dusk, but the sun was masked by a thin sheet of cloud cover, its fiery anger several measures lower than previously.

The children who occupied the slide and ran around the sandbox a few times earlier were nowhere to be seen.

Now, except for a girl feverishly twirling around on one of the horizontal bars, things were easing back across the landscape.

Like I would’ve expected.

I took a glance at the park’s solar-powered clock. It was beating out the first few seconds of the five o’clock hour, and the echoing of the sirens that accompanied this moment in time had just about faded into obscurity.

It was a signal for children to return home, one invented by God knows who for God knows what reason, but the ones in the park faithfully followed the order.

Grown-ups have a knack for picking up on children who break the rules. Thinking along those lines, I marveled at how the children, holding hands as they crossed the street, showed remarkable intelligence in their decision.

The world we live in is built up out of millions of those little rules. Rules that were all created by the grown-ups.

Attempting to rebel against that was akin to suicide.

Even if children like us, unable to take care of ourselves, began to cry and resist the grown-ups, it would change absolutely nothing in this world.

And for someone like me, enjoying my own world, just letting the day float by with barely a passing thought, nothing seemed ready to change at all.

…Or maybe not.

There was one thing. The pain that seared into my left cheek yesterday had moved to my right cheek today.

It seemed inconsequential enough, but maybe it was worthy of being called “change.” It was still stupid, either way.

Even I thought I was being needlessly cranky about this. Maybe I thought it was some kind of earth-shattering discovery.

But I was friendless, usually at home alone drowning myself in all kinds of low-class media.

I had a level of knowledge one step above the children of my generation. With that in mind, it was nothing that unusual.

Either way, I joined the children today, as I always did, letting my immature thoughts convince me to protect the “rules” laid out by my mother.

My mingling with the children in this park all day was one of those rules.

In the morning, my mother would come home from work, put me in the bath, cook me some food, then take me to this park, like always.

I would while away the day here until evening, when it was time for my mother to head to work. If she needed me to buy anything, I’d do it. Then I’d clean my room and go to bed.

Living up to that hodgepodge of rules was both my duty and my everything.

Thinking over them, they were all ridiculously simple rules to keep. But I never quite seemed to get the hang of them all, and that’d always anger my mother.

She was angry at me yesterday over forgetting to buy the toilet paper, for example. Today, I broke a cup, which made her fly into another rage.

Whenever she was angry, she would always start punching at me. I’m sure it made her hands hurt as much as it did my cheeks.

The worst of it always came afterward, when I’d have to look at my mother’s face as she apologized to me, crying.

But the more I tried to get everything right during the day, the more I wound up swinging and missing.

Even when I tried to make my mother happy, the results were always the exact opposite of what I intended. It was uncanny.

Come to think of it, a bit ago, when the TV remote in the living room broke, my mother fumed and tossed it into the trash, calling it a “defective piece of crap.”

That was when I learned what “defective” meant. Someone who couldn’t stick to the rules. Something that was no use to anyone.

The scene made the “defective” remote feel remarkably similar to…myself.

The only thing I could do for my mother—so tired from work already—was make her (a) erupt, and (b) cry. There was nothing nondefective about me.

So why didn’t my mother ever throw me away?

Shouldn’t she be able to throw away a failure like me, just like the defective remote, and replace me with something new?

I don’t get it.

Why was I incapable of anything but causing my mother grief every day?

If all I cause her is grief, why was “I” even born?

Why, in the first place, did my mother even bother to…?

Thinking over it, I was caught unawares by something deep in the pit of my stomach contracting painfully.

The physical pain didn’t make the tears flow any longer, but now, despite all my requests not to, that feeling made them start to pool deep from behind my lashes.

Oh, crap. I can’t cry here. Better think about something else.

If I let someone see me, she might say something again.

I’d be a pain to my mother again. We might not be able to be with each other any longer. What if that happened…?

That would be terrible. I’d never be able to stand it. I couldn’t even imagine a world without my mother.

One more hour.

I just needed to sit here, quietly, for another hour until my mother woke up and headed out for work.

Then I’d buy a cup to replace the one I broke, go back home, and just play it cool.

As long as I follow those “rules,” I can get through today without saddening my mother any further.

Then I’m sure tomorrow will…

…Will turn out how, exactly?

The question, along with a small “Gehh” that was ejected from afar at the same time, brought me back to reality.

My eyes darted around, only to find the girl spinning away at the iron bar was now sprawled out on the ground.

I stared at her. She showed no sign of trying to get up, her arms spread wide as she stared at the heavens.

What happened to her? How’d she wind up like that?

Even a total failure like myself didn’t need much time to figure that out.

“Hey! You!”

There was no reply to my command as it echoed slightly across the park.

The eerie silence that followed sent a shiver down my spine that was difficult to describe.

“Oh, is she…?!”

Unable to stand it any longer, I stood, leaping off my post on the bench.

Faced with this all-too-sudden emergency, my head—something no one should ever have to rely upon—was, as I expected, blowing a gasket.

Every inch of it was plastered with the worst-case scenarios I heard or saw on TV or the radio, a torrent of images running across my head.

What if this thing I was seeing before me was the same as what they did on TV recently? That tragic murder scene? The one they had to use a big blue tarp to cover up?

So much seemed to weigh me down at this moment, this second.

The iron bar the girl was gazing at wasn’t that high in the air. The problem was how she fell.

I heard there were people who became wheelchair-bound simply because they fell off a chair funny.

Even with playground equipment, if you fell off of it the wrong way, just about anything could happen to you.

“Oh, why is this happening to me…?”

I took another look around. As far as I could see, there wasn’t a single grown-up around.

This huge duty of mine, thrust upon me with no advance warning, made me feel like my heart was going to explode.

But I had no time to fret over things, no leeway to sit and worry.

I took another stride, leaping over the sandbox the kids from earlier left in a fairly trashed state. The girl, still on the ground, was now right before my eyes.

Please don’t be anything serious, at least.

The hope crossed my mind as I took another all-too-challenging leap.

And just as I did, the girl, completely immobile up to now, whirled herself upward.

Her deep black eyes, a fair match for her medium-length black hair, were dewy as she absentmindedly sized me up.

Ah, thank heavens. It wasn’t fatal, then. There was no blood to see, and there was still a healthy pink to her face.

She had a very refined face, actually. No doubt it’d bring her a well-qualified man and a fulfilling family life in the future.

I was just so happy that nothing was serious about—

With an ominous crack! a spark of electricity shot into my right ankle.

Given that I was still a mere wisp of an existence, capable of counting my age on two hands, I wouldn’t really know what being electrocuted felt like. But it seemed a fair way to describe the pain that stabbed into the very apex of my head.

Oh. Right.

Just a few seconds earlier, I was bounding across the park.

Concerned for the girl’s condition and potential future woes, I must have planted down my foot at the wrong angle.

My upper body, moving at high speed, used the outstretched foot as a fulcrum, thrusting it toward the ground below.

It wasn’t hard to predict what would happen at the next instant.

I’m sorry, little girl. Try not to stare too much.

“Daaaaaggghhhhhh!”

With a well-chosen, almost theatrical scream, I took a convoluted pose that looked just as well rehearsed as I hit the ground.

If this were a comedy sketch, living rooms across the nation would’ve been reduced to puddles of laughter by now.

Laughter and applause would have been preferable to this, anyway.

Instead, I was in the middle of a completely soundless public park, huddled down low and lacking the comedic timing of knowing when to get back up.

My foot, and the rest of my body, faced searing pain. But, needless to say, that didn’t matter to me.

The problem was the base, vulgar feeling known as “shame” that accompanied the pain, hurdling over it like a pole-vaulter.

Think about it. This guy, leaping right in front of you, then letting out an otherworldly wail as he slid to the ground.

…I was out of the game. It was terrifying.

Why did I have to do anything so unplanned, so pointless?

What should I do? Did I need to get up, pat myself down, and run off?

No, I shouldn’t. That crack I heard indicated that high-speed travel wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

I would be loping along, all but dragging my bad foot behind me. That much was clear. How could I infuse that innocent girl’s mind with yet more dark memories?

Which suggested that the only option was to stay here and wait for time to pass. Was that it?

If I didn’t plead my case to her, I would exist in the girl’s mind forevermore as “that weird freak who almost pratfalled right into me.” I didn’t like that much, but today, I had to resign myself to it.

I was fine with that. Really. So come on, time. Pass by a little quicker for me.

“Are you hurt?”

How could I possibly be okay?

My entire body hurt. I was painfully embarrassed. And now she was…

“Huh?!”

I looked up, only to find the girl holding a handkerchief right in front of my eyes.

Both of her saucerlike eyes were free of tears. Judging by her expression, she didn’t seem interested in trying to report me to the authorities.

“N-no! No, I’m, I’m totally okay! I just kinda tripped a little, is all…Uh. Ha-ha-ha…”

I sat up, mustering the best chuckle I could fake on the spot.

My act didn’t make her flee screaming. That was kind of her. But I was still fresh from playing out a live-action blooper reel in front of her.

Just because she held a hand out for me didn’t mean my shame was weak enough to let me accept the offering.

Watching me attempt to put myself together in a panic, the girl asked the blisteringly obvious question that stood between us:

“But, but that looked like more than just a trip to me…Looked really painful, too.”

The girl’s guileless query was like throwing kerosene on the dumpster fire of my shame.

Yes. You’re absolutely right. That last fall would probably make it to the top three most gnarly wipeouts of my life.

“I—I’m fine! Really! I trip like this pretty much every day, so I’m kinda used to it, actually.”

Nobody like that existed. If they did, they’d be dead in three days.

The reply, laced with equal parts gallantry and massive whoppers of lies, made the girl’s face grow even more incredulous.

“Used to it? Um, are you hiding something, maybe…?”

Her eyes peered intently at me, the suspicion now clear across her brows.

“Uh…heh-heh-heh…”

Great. Continuing on like this was just digging my own grave.

She’s leaping on me like a coyote, though, isn’t she?

Wasn’t she motionless on the ground a moment or two ago? Now she’s the perfect picture of health.

With that act of hers, you couldn’t have paid me enough to tell her, “I tripped because I thought you needed my help.” Not at all.

I have a bad feeling about this.

This was already bad, of course, but if I get involved any further with this girl, this would wind up even more of a pain.

If she started spreading rumors about this “weird kid who hurt himself cartwheeling toward me in the park,” it would be all hands on deck for me.

At this time in the late afternoon, too, I needed to extract myself out of here, stat. Even if it meant being the weird kid around the neighborhood.

That might leave me with some mental scarring, but so be it. I had to extract myself from this mess. I sighed.

“…All right. I’ll tell you the truth.”

This seemed to confuse her even further.

“Th-the truth?”

“Yeah. So basically…”

The lingering sense of embarrassment was bringing me close to the breaking point. I bottled it up with an audacious smirk as I continued.

“That thing earlier…That was just me practicing one of my secret moves. Something I can use to…uh, take down bad guys in a single hit.”

Silence.

Really, really painful silence.

All sound disappeared from the park, as if it were frozen in time. I could see my life gauge plummet as I accepted my new title as the biggest freak in the world.

Right. Now go away. Get freaked out and go away before my face turns into the remains of a forest fire.

That, and just forget about everything that you saw here today. Go home, eat dinner, go to sleep, fall in love, and live out a happy life for me.

But despite my prediction that she would waste no time running for the hills, the girl gave me a wholly unexpected reaction.

“Oh! That really was it!”

Her face exuded a blindingly bright curiosity. Sparkles flung out of every pore.

“…Huh?”

“That, that, that’s exactly what I thought you were doing! W-wow! Now it all makes sense…! Guess you wanna keep your secret moves on the down low, huh? Don’t wanna go blabbing about them to everyone, right?!”

The girl was, if anything, five times closer to my face now. “Y-yeah! Sure!” I blubbered, my head meandering between nodding yes and shaking no.

What kind of hidden fetishes did this girl have, anyway?

I was planning to go down on three strikes just then, only to find myself hitting an inside-the-park home run.

Completely ignoring my fidgety body language, the girl lifted herself up, eyed her surroundings for a moment, and said something even stranger.

“And just between you and me…so was I.”

“Um, sorry, what’re you talking about?”

I tried to regain some level of distance from her as I asked. The girl took another good look around the park, her voice dropping lower.

“My secret move! I was practicing my secret move!”

She looked deadly serious, even if her words were, by any impartial judgment, less so.

“Huh? Practicing? …You mean that spinning around the bar?”

That was the only thing I could think of.

“Yeah!” Another clean hit, it seemed. “Ooh, I should’ve guessed you’d know about it!” She was growing more and more excited, her face enrapt in wonder.

I didn’t realize there was anything to “know.” Why did she think they put bars like that in playgrounds?

And what did that have to do with whatever “secret move” she had in her mind?

Wait. Hang on. Could this girl be…?

“So, um, do you think twirling around on that bar is a secret move…?”

“Yeah! My dad told me. He said, ‘Most foes, if you swing on that bar enough, they’ll catch on fire and die!’”

There was no doubt in the girl’s eyes as she delved further into her fantasy realm.

“I keep messing up just before I go the whole way around. But I got it totally mapped out in my mind. I know I’m gonna do it next time!”

“Uh…cool…”

So there you have it.

Back when she was on the ground, when I thought she broke a leg or something, she was just picturing herself doing a full revolution next time. Perfect.

“…Um, so I gotta get home…”

The smirk was a distant memory from my face by now, no doubt, painted over with a dull, pallid expression.

And who could blame me?

There was no telling how much energy I had consumed in the scant few minutes since I noticed this girl.

Probably several months’ worth, at least, I imagined.

“What? Already?! But there was so much I wanted to talk to you about…”

Give me a break.

I hated to break it to the girl, but I didn’t have enough life force left in my body for a rollicking conversation about deadly attacks using playground equipment.

The pain and fatigue that racked my frame, along with the sheer sense of emptiness this conversation was instilling in me, seemed ready to take physical form behind my back, becoming a giant city-destroying monster of some sort.

“Yeah, uh, it’s just about time, so…”

An innocent enough excuse. I gave it with a smile.

“Oooh…,” cooed the girl wistfully. I doubted she would continue to try stopping me now.

I looked at the clock. It was just at half past five.

A bit early to go back home, but I had a mission today—a cup to buy, to put it another way.

Considering how much time I wasted here, heading out right now would work out the best timing-wise, anyway.

Standing up with the foot I didn’t twist, I gingerly began to place weight on my other leg.

It was painful, as I expected, but not bad enough that I couldn’t walk.

If it was hopeless—if it hurt too much to stand—I couldn’t even imagine what the girl would say to me then.

“Okay, uh, I’m off.”

I tried my best to leave the park behind me at once. “Oooh…!” she replied, the dissatisfaction clear in her groan.

Looking closely, the two eyes that had me in her sights began to display a moistness that wasn’t there before.

Oh, crap. I definitely need to head out before this gets even worse.

Fighting off a slight sense of guilt over it all, I gave her a light “Heh-heh!” and began to drag my leg off to the park exit.

“Hey!”

The girl’s voice rang out after several steps.

What? What else could she possibly want with me?

I turned around, to find the girl’s pained expression now replaced with a soft smile.

“Wanna talk again tomorrow?”

Something about her face, about her words, rendered me speechless.

I wondered if I ever made anyone any promises about tomorrow before at any point in my life.

Nothing I could instantly recall, anyway.

What was I talking about? “Nothing I could instantly recall”? I’m still a kid.

I haven’t lived long enough to start burying my memories in oblivion.

“Sure. Tomorrow, right here.”

I turned around again and left the park.

Why did I make it so perfunctory? I wasn’t sure myself.

My ankle hurt with every step I took along the concrete path. But the way that pain so eloquently spoke of the day’s events seemed charming, somehow, at this point.

Better not hurt anything else tomorrow, I thought, attempting to gloss over my true feelings as I casually strolled off.

The neighborhood had begun to show the signs of a quickly advancing evening.

I shuffled the shopping bag from hand to hand to keep my arms from falling asleep, gingerly keeping my weight to one side as I walked. I must be some kind of pro at this by now.

“Good thing I found something nice.”

I was still limping as I made my way back home, fresh from a quick trip to the shopping arcade by the station for a new teacup.

The pain certainly made its presence known as I walked, but once I returned home and sat down, it shouldn’t be anything unbearable.

A bigger problem was that this ankle made me completely forget about my right cheek.

When the clerk at the shop asked, “Hey, what’s up with your face?” I gave the rather uncharacteristic reply of “What, am I that ugly to you?”

That stupid girl.

I have got to get back at her somehow tomorrow.

I walked on, silently, stewing in my own juices.

Reaching a road I was well familiar with, turning at an intersection I was well familiar with, crossing an intersection after waiting at the light the same amount of time I always did, I came to the apartment I lived in.

I opened the front door—just as I always did—climbed the metal stairs, and headed for the farthest door on the second floor.

It wasn’t that nice of a building, but once our next-door neighbor moved out two months ago, we’d had the entire floor to ourselves, mostly.

My mother liked that—“Now I don’t have to worry about how I look all the time,” as she put it—but for someone like me, left alone for much of the night, it honestly left me a tad uneasy.

Things like ghosts and ancient curses…I couldn’t stand them.

My mother loved that kind of stuff, watching ghost hunter–type shows whose titles alone would make my skin crawl. I really wish she’d stop.

That one the other day, especially, when they were investigating that abandoned hospital…Dahh, I shouldn’t try to think about it. Think about something fun. Something fun…

“…Nothing fun around here, really.”

Passing by three empty apartments, I finally reached my own home.

I couldn’t tell exactly what time it was, but judging by how high the sun was, it probably wasn’t too far removed from my usual time.

…But that was really the only thing usual about tonight.

“Huh. The door’s open.”

In fact, as I approached, it was already halfway ajar. That’s dangerous.

Thanks to old age, the door needed to be shut tight, or else it’d creak open a little like that. But my mother was aware of that. She had to be.

“Was she in a hurry?”

I didn’t pay it much mind as I put a hand on the doorknob.

Until I opened the door and looked up, my mind was running along familiar lines: Better be more careful when I go out tomorrow. That kind of thing. I was such a hopeless idiot.

When I turned my face upward, there were two grown-ups in a room illuminated by orange-tinted light.

One I knew well—my mother, still wearing her prim work uniform.

The other I had never seen before, a large man wearing dingy-looking clothing and a ski mask.

“Ah…”

Why hadn’t my mother left for work?

My mother never wanted to let anyone in our apartment. There was no way she’d invite a guy like this inside.

So why was my mother on her side, teary-eyed, with her hands tied behind her back and a dirty washcloth in her mouth?

Why did this man have some of my mother’s favorite jewelry in his grubby hands?

The answer came pretty quickly to me.

But by the time it arrived, it was so late that none of it even mattered any longer.

Without a sound, the man’s right hand grabbed my shirt collar and tossed me inside the room.

“Gah!”

Unable to brace myself, my back hit hard against the floor, the air knocked out of my lungs.

At that moment, multiple lights twinkled in front of my eyes, as if an entire corps of press photographers was taking my picture.

I couldn’t take a breath.

I had never felt so helplessly unable to breathe in my life.

My mind fell into a panic as I tried to get up. I tried to prop myself with my right hand, only to find it quivering and useless.

My mother, lying down, let out a moan as she attempted to scream.

What? What is she trying to scream at?

What could it be…?

My hazy mind forced my eyes into motion, focusing on the jewelry in the man’s left hand as he was about to leave the room.

Yes. That had to be it.

The jewelry my mom slaved on the job every day to finally, victoriously obtain.

And the man was trying to take it somewhere else.

Makes sense, Mom. Who wouldn’t scream if someone did that to you?

For a single moment, my right arm found its strength again.

It pushed against the floor, springing my body upward.

On my feet, I used my momentum to lunge at the man’s back.

“G-give it back…That…that’s not yours…”

But right when it counted the most, I found myself pathetically powerless.

With a clicking of his tongue, the man flung my arm away with the same strength he showed earlier, kicking me back into the room.

“Ngh…!”

Thrown off balance, I found myself facedown on the floor.

My vision grew hazy as I tried to gasp for breath. There was no standing up for me any longer.

I quivered there for a while, silently. Then I heard some metallic clattering from the kitchen.

I couldn’t see it, but based on my mother’s echoing scream, I understood well enough what that meant.

The knife set. She bought a pretty fancy knife set a while ago. She practically never cooked, either. It stood proudly on the kitchen counter, completely unused. He was probably after something or other in there.

No doubt intending to skewer me before I could take another swipe at him.

One stab would be enough to silence me forever, eliminating the need to keep pushing me off his back. It’d be easy.

And now, with my ear against the floor as I lay there, I had crystal-clear insight on the fact that the man’s footsteps were approaching me.

This meant, probably, that I’d be dead in a few minutes. This didn’t seem to conjure any particular emotion within me.

At the same time, I can’t just lie here.

Summoning all the strength that remained, I managed to stand back up. The effort left me panting.

Despite all the suffering I had gone through today, all the pain signals my body transmitted into my brain before were gone.

As I figured, the man standing tall in front of me had a sparkling new knife in his hand.

Swinging blindly with my fists would be nowhere near enough to dispatch him now.

In fact, as far as I could imagine, there wasn’t any way I could so much as scratch him.

But I didn’t need to worry about that. Just stopping him for a few moments would work well enough.

I glanced at my mother. Tears rained from her eyes as she screamed at me.

Sorry, Mom. I don’t think you’ll be seeing that jewelry again.

Sorry I was such a failure. An idiot.

But I’m gonna stop this guy for you. Long enough that you can get away, at least.

At the very least, right at the end, I want you to think to yourself: I’m glad I gave birth to him.

I turned back toward the man, releasing the force in both legs in order to ram my entire body into the enormous frame of the man facing me—

I tried to, anyway.

The moment I took a step forward, the man was slammed against the wall.

My mother had rammed herself against him first—the no-longer-new knife buried deeply in her chest.

That took me a little longer to comprehend.

My mother tried to plead something with her eyes, her face twisted in pain, but all I could do was stare dumbly at her.

It was only when the man removed the knife from her, fresh blood flying in the air, that something snapped in my mind.

I couldn’t hear anything any longer, but I think I probably shouted something.

But it couldn’t have been that long of an interval between me leaping at him and him stabbing me in the stomach and stomping me to the ground.

I lay there, lined up nearly alongside my mother, attacked by the strange sensation of drowning in a frigid pool of blood.

My mom, through the tears, seemed like she was trying to tell me something through the gag. But, in the end, it never came across.

         

I was in an unknown town.

As far as I could see, there was nothing I could recognize in it.

There were no familiar colors in the sky above me. The only thing I could see in the inky blackness was a single unnervingly large sphere of some sort.

Yes. This was night.

I…or, really, any children like me…didn’t know about the night.

A world for grown-ups, partitioned away from the day, brimming with light.

A world just for adults, one I must never set foot upon.

A world of darkness, one that swallowed up my mother and took her away at regular intervals.

…I always hated the night.

The sound of my shoe against the concrete rebounded off the walls of the buildings, echoing tinnily against my ears with each step forward.

The wind that blew was cold and uninviting, whispering something dark and ominous to me as it breezed past.

Whenever the miasma of crisp neon in the night entered the corner of my vision, I turned away. It felt like something I must never look at, lest something awful happen.

It felt gross. Nausea began to take me.

I was seized by something resembling dizziness as I kept going down the road, not knowing where it would end.

“Hey, kid, you shouldn’t be here.”

Suddenly, it felt like someone was whispering in my ear.

“You’re still a kid, aren’t you? You have no idea what the night is like. Get on back home, okay?”

“…Like you’ve got a right to say that. What do you know?”

“Oh, everything. I’m a grown-up.”

The voice, which seemed permanently attached to my ear, began to gradually enrage me.

“Stop treating me like a kid!”

The whispering voice began to emit a shrill, piercing noise.

It sounded a bit like someone laughing, a bit like a snake sticking its tongue out at me.

“You’re a hopeless case, aren’t you? You just blundered your way blindly into here. I can tell. So listen. What I’m trying to tell you is, you have no comprehension of the most important thing in the world.”

The voice was shriller than before. It felt like its lips were practically touching my earlobe.

“The most important thing?”

The moment I asked, the echoing steps stopped. I didn’t stop walking, but the sound muted itself out.

I looked around, surprised, only to find the shimmering neon, the building walls, even the moon floating above whirling around me.

“What’s happening?!” I shouted. But I could no longer hear my own voice.

A boundless darkness, a black that no light could shine through. Even my own trembling frame seemed to melt into the void around me.

“Can’t you see them? The ‘lies’ that infused themselves into this place?”

I felt like the whispering voice was coming from inside me now.

“Grown-ups make the lies creep into the darkness. That’s how they protect their own hearts and minds.”

I couldn’t understand what it meant. I felt boxed in, unable to breathe. Get me out of here.

“Do you understand, boy? This is the night. A grown-up world you have no clue about.”

…What are grown-ups?

Why did my mother ever have to venture into that world…?

“Do you want to know? If you want to know…you must forget about that pure, unblemished heart of yours.”

Forget my heart?

“Yes. In the deep, dark, solitary world of the night, there is no need for a heart at all. All you need are ‘lies.’”

My consciousness, which I had so valiantly tried to keep intact, finally began to give on me.

Everything I owned felt like it was being melted into the darkness.

The final words were the only thing that registered in my dwindling consciousness, seeping into my fading heart.

“You must deceive them all, boy.”