COTE : Three days of happyness

A Liar And A Little Prayer

When Horikita  first came to the apartment as my observer, I couldn’t help being unnerved by her gaze.

My thought was: “If my observer were the opposite of her - ugly, dirty and middle-aged - I’m sure I’d be able to relax more and think about what the right thing to do was.”
The observer who now stood before me instead of Horikita was a man rather like that.

He was kinda short, he had unsightly bald spots, his face was red like a drunk’s though lush with whiskers, and his skin was oily. He blinked unusually often, he snorted as he breathed, and he spoke like he had phlegm caught in his throat.
“Where’s the usual girl?” was my first question.

“On break,” the man bluntly said. “I’m filling in today an’ tomorrow.”

I put my hand to my chest in relief. I was grateful observers didn’t take shifts. Horikita would be back in just two days.
“So even observers get days off,” I said.

“‘Course, gotta. Unlike you, we still gotta lotta livin’ to do,” he replied sarcastically.

“Huh. Well, that’s a relief. And her break’ll be over in two days, and it’ll be back to normal?”

“Yep, that’s the plan,” the man said.
I rubbed my sleepy eyes and looked at the man in the corner again, and saw him holding my album. The album of all my vending machine pictures.

“What the hell’s this?”, he asked.

“Don’t you know about vending machines?”, I joked.

“Tch. I was tryin’ to ask what you’d take pictures like this for.”

“Same as people who like the sky taking pictures of the sky. Flower-likers taking pictures of flowers, train-likers taking pictures of trains. You do it because you wanna. And I like vending machines.”
The man flipped through a few pages in boredom, then declared “Trash,” and tossed the album at me. Then he looked at all the paper cranes strewn around and gave an exaggerated sigh.

“So this is how you’re spendin’ your life, huh. Stupid as hell. Ain’t you got anything better to do?”
His attitude didn’t make me that unpleasant. In terms of honestly saying what I thought, he was easier to deal with. It was much preferable to being stared at from the corner like I was an object.

“I might, but if I did anything more enjoyable than this, my body might not be able to take it,” I laughed.
He continued to find fault in everything in that same way. This observer’s a lot more aggressive, I thought.

I learned why after lunch, when I lied in front of the fan listening to music.
“Hey, you,” the man said. I pretended not to hear him, and he cleared his throat. “You ain’t causin’ that girl any trouble, are ya?”

There was only one person I could think of to whom “that girl” could refer, but I didn’t expect the man to refer to Horikita that way, so my reply was delayed.

“By that girl, you mean Horikita?”

“Who else?” The man furrowed his brow as if displeased by me speaking her name.

Seeing that, I felt some fondness for the man. So you’re my ally, huh.
“Let me guess, you’re friendly with Horikita?”, I asked.

“…Nah. Nothin’ like that. I mean, we’ve never really seen each other.” The man’s tone suddenly got more docile. “Only talked a couple of times through documents, that’s all. But I was the one who bought her time, so I saw her for about ten minutes, long time ago.”

“What’d you think?”

“Poor girl,” he said plainly. “Really, really pity her.”

He seemed to mean it.