Pain,Pain,Go Away

004

Chapter 4: Coward Murderer
The girl was awoken by the smell of coffee. Seeing the thick slices of honey toast, the bisected soft-boiled egg, and the green salad spread out on the table, she sat down drowsily and slowly ate it all. She didn't look at me whatsoever while doing so.

"What are you going to do now?", I asked.

She indicated the wound on her palm. "I think I'll get payback for this next."

"Sounds like it wasn't your father who gave you that one, then." "That's right. He was generally careful in his use of violence. He rarely left marks anywhere that couldn't be covered up."

"Other than him, about how many other people do you want revenge on, would you say?"

"I've narrowed it down to five. Five people who have all left permanent scars on me."

So then there were five more wounds she was still postponing? Actually, there could be more than one per person. At least five more wounds was how I should think of it.

This led me to a realization. "Might I be one of your five targets of revenge?"

"Obviously," she replied aloofly. "Once I've enacted revenge on the other four, I'll subject you to a suitable fate too."

"...Well, works for me." Even so, I scratched my face.

"But don't worry. No matter what I do to you, when the postponement of the accident - that is, the postponement of my
death - wears off, everything that I've caused after my death will have never happened."

"I don't know if I quite understand that part," I responded, voicing a concern I'd had for a while. "Does that mean you hitting your father with a hammer, once the postponement of my accident wears off, will be undone?"

"Of course. Because before I could enact any revenge, you ran me over and I died."

That was when she told me the story about her first postponement, with the gray cat.

Finding the corpse of a cat she'd adored, going to see it again that night, seeing the corpse and blood gone, being scratched by the cat and getting a fever, then suddenly being cured of the scratch and fever, and gaining contradictory memories.

"So comparing it to the revenge on your father, you'd be the cat, and the hammer would be its claws."

"Yes, I think you have the idea."

So then, no matter how much harm the girl inflicted on others from here on out, all of it would be gone once the effects of her postponement ended.

"Is there a point to a revenge like that?", I wondered aloud, airing some honest doubts. "Absolutely anything you do will just be undone in the end. And "the end" being in ten... uh, nine days." "Imagine you're dreaming, and realize that you're in a dream," the girl explained. "Would you think, "Nothing I do will have an effect on reality, so why bother?", or would you think "Nothing I do will have an effect on reality, so I'll do whatever I want"?"

"I wouldn't know. I've never had any dreams like that," I shrugged. "I'm just thinking about what's best for you. Bringing pain to the people who made you unhappy won't bring back your lost happiness. I'm not trying to trample on your anger and resentment, but really, revenge is just meaningless."

"Thinking about what's best for me?", the girl repeated, emphasizing each word. "Well then, if not revenge, what do you think would be best for me?"

"Well, there's gotta be other stuff to do with this valuable time. Go around meeting your friends and people who helped you out, confess to people you like, or maybe used to like..."