The Girl and the Dressmaking Scissors
My first meal in twenty hours was at a family restaurant. Until then, I’d forgotten I was even hungry, but my appetite came back at once when I smelled the food.
“We’ve had your father and your sister, so is your next target your mother?”
“No. My mother, at least, didn’t bring me that much pain. Not that she was very kind, either. I’ll let her off for now.”
This early in the morning, customers were sparse. Most of them were office workers in suits, but at the table next to us, a college-age boy and girl were sleeping in their seats, probably having been here since late last night. The ashtray between them was loaded with cigarette butts.
What did we even talk about in all that time? I couldn’t remember anymore.
“Next, I think I’ll get payback on a former classmate,” the girl stated. “It shouldn’t require as much travel as yesterday.”
“Female.”
Taking off my sunglasses to look, the mere contrast of her white skin and the wound felt painful.
When people come to loathe themselves - that’s the moment when they’re at their most fragile. People who are shamed are told they don’t have anything worth protecting, and lose the will to resist.
“…When I first entered middle school, the school’s delinquents were afraid of me,” the girl said. “At the time, my sister knew a lot of malevolent adults. My classmates thought that if they laid a hand on me, my sister would get back at them. But that misunderstanding didn’t last long. One classmate who lived nearby spread a rumor: "Her sister hates her. I’ve seen her drag her around and beat her again and again.” That turned the tables. The delinquents who once feared me, as if to take out their pent-up anger, made me their punching bag.“
She spoke as if all this were a decade or two ago. I felt like I was being told about a past she had long since overcome.
"I put up with it thinking that the situation would change once I advanced to high school. But I was only able to go to a public high school, where many of my middle school classmates went, so nothing changed one bit. No, if anything, it got worse.”
“So,” I interrupted to cut the story there. I didn’t really want to hear her talk too long about such things, and it didn’t seem like the kind of history where talking about it would make her feel better. “You’re killing again today?”
I assumed she was talking about her legs giving out. Well, there was no need to bluff in front of a irrecoverably hopeless guy like me.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I said, I don’t need it,” she grumbled with irritation, shaking her head.
“Blood isn’t the only problem. After taking revenge on both your father and sister, you should consider that there might already be witnesses. And just wearing a uniform in broad daylight will make you stand out enough as it is. Even your postponement isn’t almighty; it’s hard to handle minor incidents with it, isn’t it? I want to do as much as possible to prevent any trouble.”
“…Those are valid points,” she finally admitted. “Would you buy two or three outfits for me, then?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Puddles formed in the dents of the pavement, reflecting the dull blue sky and black silhouettes of trees.
Leaves filled the gutters in the plaza as well, rustling with the ripples made by the water.
I went to the nearest department store to let the girl buy whatever clothes she liked. She wandered around reluctantly in front of the various tenants.
“Well, I think they suit you,” I answered honestly.
“I wasn’t lying. Really, I think people should just wear what they like, as long as it doesn’t cause others any trouble.”
A woman clerk, dressed very provocatively and with long legs, approached and asked with a shallow smile, “Is she your sister?” She’d seen the stormy situation and mistaken us for siblings.
“I don’t think she feels that way.”
“Sure, let’s hope,” I said, faking a pained smile. “That aside, could you help her pick something out? I think she’s really having trouble deciding.”
“I see.” I didn’t ask the reason. Well, I could more or less guess.
It was about her family. She’d probably rarely been given the chance to buy whatever clothes she liked.
“Got it. How much money will you need?”
“Can you choose some clothes that would fit that girl from earlier?”, I asked the clerk, who skillfully picked out some outfits. Since I figured she might need them right away, I had the clerk take off the price tags too.
It made me seem no different from anyone else, just a regular shopper - not someone who’d come here to make preparations for murder.
I thought about what would happen when the effects of the postponement ran out. The girl would die, her acts of revenge would all return to nothingness, and instead, the reality of me running her over would return.
That man was like a shed skin which, by some terrible mistake, just kept moving. Not even causing death by way of drunk driving would be enough to surprise him.
My mom, meanwhile… I could easily imagine her using the news to boost her own confidence, saying “See, look at that! I was right to leave that man.” She was that kind of person.
Give me a break, I sighed. Just what had I been born for? In twenty-two years of life, I’d never once felt a proper feeling of being “alive.”
The words that had crossed my mind countless times, I now let out and voiced aloud.
But my life, at least, didn’t seem worth living.
It was a composite facility with bowling, billiards, darts, a batting center, arcade games, token games, and a number of food and drink shops all in one place.
But I had to wonder, how did she obtain that information? I didn’t scrutinize her methods, but no doubt she had spent a lot of time looking into things.
The restaurant had glass walls, so you could easily see what was going on inside. Sitting at a perfectly-positioned bench, I tried to guess which of the workers was the girl’s target.
Ignoring my praise, the girl requested, “Let me borrow those sunglasses.”
“I don’t care. As long as she doesn’t know who I really am, that’s enough.”
The girl put on the round, shady-looking shades and sat next to me, staring fiercely into the restaurant.
The distance between her eyes seemed just a tiny bit too small, but when they were closed, you could very well say they were perfectly-spaced.
She was lively in her speaking and movements. A cheerful girl who young and old alike could adore. That was my first impression of her.
“Yes. I’m going to kill her today,” the girl carelessly remarked.
She folded her arms and thought. “No, those methods would stand out too much here. We’ll wait until her shift is over. There’s a worker’s entrance in the back, so as soon as we see her getting ready to get off work, we’ll head back there to meet her.”
“Indeed. If she tries to run, please catch her at any cost.”
The girl got two scoops of ice cream, and I stuffed my cheeks with fish and chips, listening to the sound of pins falling at the not-too-distant bowling alley. Young boys and girls were having a blast all around us.
Behind the glass was a pile of stuffed toys - all the same creature, one which resembled the child of a bear and a monkey. Just as I turned back toward the girl, we met eyes.
“…Go get me one of those,” she requested. “It seems it’s still going to be a while.”
“I wouldn’t be able to get it if you gave me a year. You have to do it.”
“Just go.”
If only she’d come with me so I could at least look kind of cool, I sighed. A gloomy college boy trying his darnedest to win a teddy bear in the middle of a weekday was just tragic.
After blowing 1,500 yen, I asked a passing clerk to adjust the positions for me, and then spent 800 more yen to finally get the toy in the hole.
Returning to the bench, I handed the bag to the girl, who brusquely accepted it, and afterward, occasionally stuck her hand in the bag to ascertain the bear’s fuzziness.
The woman’s shift ended after about 6 PM.
After being in a bustling place for so long, my ears were still trying to recover, and I felt dizzy on my feet. The cold autumn wind blew at my neck. Feeling chilly, I put on the jacket I was carrying under my arm.
The girl pulled out a leather case from her bag and took out the dressmaking scissors she had used the other day.
Getting another look at them, I felt they had an eerie shape. The holes of the two handles looked like eyes warped with anger.
The woman wasn’t showing up. As I began to wonder if we were a step too late, the back entrance opened.
Since she’d bullied the girl at school, I supposed she must have been about seventeen or eighteen as well, but she looked about my age, or a little younger.
She looked at the shivering girl standing before her dubiously.
The woman carefully studied her face.
The girl’s expression sharpened. It seemed to jog the woman’s memory.
Her cheeks slackened to make a smile.
I knew several people who smiled like that. People who considered beating others down their greatest joy.
This was the smile of a person who did such things to boost their own confidence.
The woman studied the girl from head to toe. There would be differences between the girl she remembered and the girl now, and she was trying to determine them so she could use them to her advantage.
I considered what that meant. Was it “You’ll never have a single good thing worth living for, but you’re still alive?”, or “I put you through all that hell, and you’re still alive?”
The woman gave a metallic scream and collapsed to the ground. The girl looked down on her scornfully as she writhed in pain. The sleeves of her caramel-colored trenchcoat turned red.
As she held her face and made a muffled scream, the girl took out a tool shaped like a nail file and began rubbing it along the blades. She was sharpening them.
After five passes on each blade, she discarded the file and lifted the woman up by her hair. The woman watched in horror, and the girl thrust the blades of the open scissors right in front of both eyes.
The woman, face covered in blood from her nose, repeatedly tried to call for help, but could hardly form proper words.
She pulled the scissors back, and just as the woman felt relieved to have the blades away from her eyes, stabbed the scissors hard into her neck.
Her target wasn’t the throat, but the artery. As she extracted the blade, blood flooded out. Not just pouring, but overflowing.
“We can just buy new ones again,” I told her.
I heard retching from inside. Sure enough, she was throwing up.
Considering her lack of hesitation in killing people, her reactions afterward were phenomenally normal.
It must have taken some extreme resentment to turn someone like that to murder.
And then there was me. How could I remain so calm after witnessing a murder? Was I the more deranged one for feeling nothing about being with a murderer?
She must have barfed up everything she ate today. Especially thanks to her white clothes, she really looked like she’d lost all color, like a ghost.
“You look terrible,” I told her jokingly.
“Not so,” I denied.
Strictly speaking, we should have gotten out of there immediately. We’d hid it in some bushes, but it was only a matter of time before the woman’s corpse was found, and the girl’s bag contained the murder weapon and her bloody clothes.
The girl swept the long hair out of her eyes and stared me in the eye.
I’d expected her to immediately reject the idea, but that reply sounded surprisingly on-board with it. She was just that worn out.
“Bowling?” Her gaze turned toward the bowling lanes opposite us, and her eyes widened. “You don’t mean, here, right this moment?”
Are you being serious right now?, she asked with her eyes. Very serious, I responded in turn.
“Not a bad suggestion, right?”
It was a moment in which our poor tastes coincided. Stay at the crime scene and have some fun. No better way to desecrate the dead.
After doing the formalities at the reception desk, we received bowling shoes that couldn’t have a more ugly design and went to our lane.
Turning around, I told her “It’s your turn.”
By the fourth frame, she was picking up spares, and by the seventh, she got a strike.
It was a nostalgic feeling. For a brief time, inspired by The Big Lebowski, Shindo had frequented a bowling alley absurdly often. Ultimately, the best score he managed was around a 220.
Sure enough, once the game was over, she was dissatisfied in a good way.
It seemed the corpse never got found while we were there. Or maybe without my knowing it, the girl had postponed its discovery.
We didn’t go back to the apartment that day.
If it meant not having to take public transportation, she’d rather sit in the hard seat of a busted-up car for half a day with the man who’d killed her.
She didn’t seem to have fully recovered from the shock from killing her classmate. No thanks to her lack of sleep last night either, she was unsteady on her feet as we left the amusement center.
I hurried to hit the accelerator and heard the engine racing. Irritated, I put the car in drive and hit the pedal again.
As I shot the girl a glance to blame her for not waking me up, I realized she’d nodded off in just the same way.
It would be better to find a hotel somewhere and get some proper rest there.
If our death was instant, with no time for her life to flash before her eyes, or for her soul to scream “I can’t bear for this to happen,” would that make it impossible to postpone?
That was perfect. If it had been a double-size bed, I would have had to sleep on the floor.
As I was filling out information on the form, it occurred to me I didn’t know the girl’s name or where she lived. I couldn’t exactly go ask her now, so I used a fake name.
Though she wouldn’t say it, she must have preferred to sleep on a soft bed than the hard car seat.
In front of the automatic doors, I turned back and asked, “It’s a single room for two. Is that okay? There were no other rooms available.”
The interior was plain, so it was a business hotel, all right. In the ivory-colored room, there was a square table between the beds with a phone on it, above which hung a cheap-looking oil painting.
Diligently getting all the stains off, she removed the water droplets with a towel. Then she sat down on the side of one of the beds and lovingly sharpened the blades with a file. Her tool to ensure the success of her objective.
Why scissors? Moving the ceramic ashtray from the writing desk to the bedside table, I lit up a cigarette and pondered. I felt there were far more dangerous weapons one could use.
But after a few minutes, she gets up and wipes her tears, then searches through the darkness for a tool to open the outside lock. She’s familiar with how to turn sadness into anger, giving her some lonely courage.
Rusty dressmaking scissors.
Why would there be scissors here? Wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, she could understand. Was anything that looked remotely similar just lumped together?
Paying no mind to the blood running from her finger to her wrist, she falls in love with the scissors. Looking at their sharp points, she feels courage welling up from within her.
Her eyes growing accustomed to the dark, she becomes able to vaguely tell the contents of the drawer. She resumes searching the toolbox from top to bottom, despite the drawers’ resistance to opening.
She has all the time in the world.
An ill-omened scratching sound echoes through the shed in the dead of night.
The girl came back from the shower wearing clean nightwear. The plain white one-piece-style gown didn’t seem like pajamas to me, more like a nurse’s gown or something.
She finished sharpening the scissors, and as she held them up to her eyes to examine them closely, I asked her, “Can I take a look at those?”
Good question. If I just said I was curious, I knew she’d immediately turn me down. I searched for more effective words.
Right as she was about to put them back in their leather case, I had it.
Apparently that was an acceptable response. She warily handed them to me. Maybe she was pleased about her favorite tool being complimented.
Sitting down across from her, I held them up to my eyes the same way she’d been doing. I thought the blades were polished so clean as to be mirrors, but surprisingly, it wasn’t so.
Only the minimum amount of rust had been removed - of course, I then remembered it was only in my theoretical story that they’d been rusty.
“Very sharp,” I remarked to myself.
These sharp blades could easily cut into flesh just as easily as a ripe piece of fruit.
I imagined it. I wanted to stab a person with these scissors; so, who should I stab?
Like the teddy bear, the scissors seemed to help give her a sense of security. She might not have realized it until just now when she was relieved of them, and though shaken by her helplessness, was trying to act like she was fine. That’s how it seemed.
Without her weapon, the girl was now almost powerless. I thought about what would happen if I stabbed her right here.
Or if I stabbed her throat, that made a comfortable voice like a glass harp.
It seemed the girl’s scissors had given me the same urge to kill.
I put my index finger in one of the holes and spun the scissors around.
If she says the same thing two more times, I’ll hand them back, I decided - by which time the girl’s eyes had already changed color. Clouded, I should say.
From the smell of ash on my head, I realized she’d hit me with the ashtray.
I touched my forehead to check its condition and found a bit of blood on my fingers, but thought nothing of it, having seen enough blood to bore me in the past two days.
I picked up the ashtray from the floor and put it back on the table. The girl sat on her bed, facing away from me.
I’d awakened from a kind of intoxication. I couldn’t believe myself. I tried to remain calm, but with all the events of the past few days, I felt like I was steadily losing my mind.
As she turned around, tears ran down her cheeks.
She was more fragile than I’d been thinking. Me holding the scissors with that creepy smile must have reminded her of her bullies.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
It had been a long time since I’d gotten a wound worth calling a wound. When was the last time I got an injury at all? Turning the shower off, I searched my memories.
I believed myself to be gentle and entirely non-violent, but maybe I was concealing more violent tendencies than the average person, and they simply never had much opportunity to surface.
As I changed into pajamas and dried my hair, my phone vibrated in the pocket of my removed jeans. I didn’t need to check who it was. Sitting on the bathtub, I answered it.
“Hate to admit it, but you’re right,” I confessed. “I was really suffering.”
“Listen, I’m calling you from a public phone right now,” she said dubiously. “It’s a phone booth on the street corner. But there are lots of spider webs above my head, and it’s really grossing me out.”
“I went walking on my own and it started to rain. This booth was the first thing I noticed when I went looking for shelter. You don’t get many chances to use a public phone these days, right? But I didn’t have a ten-yen coin, so I put in a hundred. So let’s talk for a while, okay? …Hey, did you just say you were "far away”?“
"Yeah.” I thought I probably didn’t need to explain myself, but I went on. “I’m staying at a hotel, about a five-hour drive from home.”
“Nope, I made her cry. She hit me with an ashtray. I’m bleeding from the forehead.”
“Even if I were that kind of person, you’d sooner be my victim than her.”
The crying killer was sleeping with her back to my bed. Her long and damp black hair splayed out across the pillow and sheets. Her shoulders calmly rose and fell.
Then my crime would be atoned for by a tiny bit.
I thought about how if I turned on the TV, I might hear about today’s murder, but I saw no point in checking.
Touching the wound on my forehead triggered a burning pain, but it comforted me how it served as proof of my existence.