𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄'𝐒 𝐌𝐘 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄? (𝗵. 𝗮𝗸𝗶) ✓

Girl

The first thing Hanasaki did when she got home was heave herself up the rickety staircase and drag her feet to the bathroom. Article by article, she stripped every piece of clothing from her frame with a manner that could only be described as abhorrence and tossed them into the growing pile on the linoleum floor. How long had it been since she'd washed them? Or even changed out of them? Her shirt had been so rigid with sweat it'd made her feel like a young butterfly emerging from its webby cocoon.

When at last she stood there, naked and shivering forcibly from the lack of heating within her house, she glanced up at the girl in the mirror.

Her reflection stared back at her with unerring constancy, its eyes a watery, limpid grey like rain on a car window. Its flesh was tinged hoary-yellow in the sickly light of the dying bulb, giving it the appearance of a preserved corpse. Slowly, gingerly, it traced the outline of its torso with a birch-twig hand. Hanasaki felt the rungs of her ribcage underneath the calloused pads of her fingers, the shallow curve of her breast, the stiff drum-skin of her stomach, tight and bloated with hunger. The texture of her body was all wrong; too thin and almost rubbery. The logical assumption to make would be that it was caused by days of not showering, but Hanasaki couldn't help but fear that she was turning into something much, much worse than just a girl who couldn't take care of herself.

Her hand moved to her face and stroked the sparse, downy hair below her nose. She couldn't remember the last time she'd bleached it, and now it cast a shadow over her upper lip like a boy's first wimpy moustache. The thought sent her fingertips roaming across the thick, dark line of an eyebrow, the narrow arch of a protruding cheekbone, the cracked pink surrounding her mouth. If she shaved her head right now, she could've passed for a man. Her chest was more than flat enough, her build too scrawny to reveal any sort of fuller feminine figure. She raked her hand through a sheaf of black hair, each coil glued together with grease. Hanasaki imagined a spiky fuzz that covered her scalp like a helmet in place of the cold, slick strands that snaked through the nooks between her fingers. Was this how small it was, the step that would rid her of her womanhood? After all, she had taken more after her father in terms of looks. Even though he'd never said anything that hinted at his disappointment, Hanasaki now wondered if she'd be standing here, examining herself like a specimen in a glass tank, if she'd only been born his son.

You were the prettiest girl I'd ever seen.

The words made the creature in the mirror wince and cringe away from her, its hard brow squeezing down over its eyes like it had been stabbed. What was prettiness to a beast like this? Its body was not made to appeal; its teeth meant to maul, not smile; its hands sought to defile, not soothe. Everything about it offended. Its very existence screamed raw, ugly threat, like a fox in a henhouse, its mouth already caked with gore before it had even started biting. When she looked at her reflection, it was not clothes that were missing — it was bits of meat dripping from her chin.

Something soft and furry pressed against her ankle. It mewled, twining round her shins in a perfect figure of eight before slinking out the room once more. She knew that even though he'd made a show of leaving, Lawliet would be lingering right outside the doorway, waiting for her to follow and finally give him his dinner. He liked to sing for his supper, and despite the fact he couldn't carry a tune if he had it in a bucket, she liked to listen.

It took all of Hanasaki's strength to not lower her head into her hands, to not bend her knees and tentatively near the floor until she lay there, a sorry, shaking heap of curled limbs and vulnerable flesh. Would the animal in the mirror cry like a girl would? Did it know how to cry at all, or would its eyes remain dry as it sobbed, a despair so visceral that the only tears capable of embodying it would have to be made of blood? How easy it would be to break, right there on the ground. Then she could at least pretend something wanted to hold her, even if its arms were far too icy to be her mother's.

But she didn't fall. Instead, her bare feet scraped their way to the open, water-spotted shower door, step by agonising step. She could hear Lawliet yowling from outside before she slid the glass shut behind her.

Hanasaki was on autopilot again. Twist the knob on the right first, ignore the freezing downpour from above, then turn the one on the left. Stand in the cold for as long as you have to. Then, when you feel it getting hotter, thaw yourself out and begin again.

If she closed her eyes, she could conjure up the illusion that she was outside, the sun beating down on her face like the first rays after a long, dark winter. As the seconds ticked past and the water seared away her skin and the red muscle underneath, she felt herself bloom into something beautiful, something that Aki really could have fallen in love with. She wanted the water to touch her somewhere where she could still feel. Somewhere where his words would've meant something. Was warmth not warmth, even if it came from the maw of a fire and not the clasp of a hand?

When she opened her eyes, she was burning.

Hanasaki wanted to stay like this forever.

Instead, she did what she had to do and turned off the shower, her fingers slipping on the damp metal. She'd forgot to bring a towel, so she had to traipse around her upper floor, unclad and soaking wet, tracking watery footprints after her that she knew she didn't have the energy to dry. When she finally found a clean one, she wrapped it around her shoulders and wandered back to the bathroom.

In the mirror, there was a girl.

When Hanasaki was a young child, she had a bad habit of crying whenever she got angry, which was often. Her mother would scold her when she saw how her bottom lip would crack and frequently bleed, but biting it had been the only way to stop the tears from coming.

That throbbing pain had come back, right behind her eyes as usual. She knew not to screw them shut from experience; that would only give the floodgates another good shake and bring her closer to the line from which she couldn't step back. So she bit down on her lip, hard, just to make sure she couldn't feel the ache in the front of her head anymore. Going under the shower had been a mistake. She'd let herself soften.

If she allowed her gaze to drift away from the girl in the mirror, the girl who looked just as horribly shattered as before but now scalded a sickly pink, she could also see Lawliet reflected, sniffing one of her puddle-prints. The girl in the mirror cried. Kazuko cried.

But Hanasaki didn't.