The Secret Menu
The hustle and bustle of the city center reached the shop only as the faint, rhythmic rasp of a distant sandstorm.
“Sweet Memory” sat at the dead end of a residential street, tucked into a corner where damp shadows seemed to cling like a permanent stain. Inside, the air was stagnant and heavy—a cloying miasma of cheap air freshener, supposed to have been replaced days ago, mingled with the rancid, oxidized stench of old cooking oil.
“…In the red again this month.”
Kenji closed the ledger on a desk blackened by years of grime. The strings of digits lingering on his fingertips felt as cold as a blade, carving away at the very fabric of their lives.
Five years. The exhilaration he’d felt when he quit his corporate job to open this place was now a phantom, leaving no trace behind. Across the counter, his wife, Manami, was wiping a table with hollow eyes. Her once-radiant smile and the soft, magnetic grace that used to draw customers in had been ground down by accumulated fatigue and a creeping despair for the future, reduced now to nothing more than a mechanical, repetitive motion.
It was then that a dusty old tome at the corner of a shelf caught the edge of Kenji’s vision. A few days prior, the owner of a nearby curiosity shop had pressed it upon him with a sinister, mocking grin, calling it “a lucky charm to bring in the customers.” Its blackened leather cover felt strangely humid to the touch, possessing the repulsive elasticity of a dead beast’s hide.
“Divide the soul, and exchange the vessels. A new perspective shall usher in a new prosperity.”
Kenji let out a self-deriding snort and read the passage aloud. It was a mere consolation—or perhaps a meaningless ritual sought by a fracturing mind. Yet, the moment he finished the sentence, the sounds of the room vanished.
To be precise, the air itself took on a physical mass, crushing his eardrums from the outside.
“…!”
A high-pitched metallic shriek, like a high-voltage current, pierced his brain. His vision blurred into the dark opacity of muddy water, and his sense of equilibrium collapsed instantly.
He fell to his knees. But before the impact could register in his mind, a definitive dissonance struck him.
“The floor… it’s closer.”
No, that wasn’t it. The height of his visual field had been unnaturally shorn away by dozens of centimeters.
“Cough… hack… what was that…?”
The voice that vibrated through his throat was not the familiar, low baritone of his own. It was a slightly raspy alto—a voice he had heard every day, but one that should never have belonged to him. It was Manami’s.
Panic-stricken, Kenji moved his hands to examine his body. What entered his vision was not the rugged, powerful hand of a man stained with the oils of coffee beans. The nails were trimmed short, but the fingers were slender—the knotted hand of a woman. The skin of the palm was roughened by housework, with thin calluses at the base of the fingers.
It was, unmistakably, Manami’s hand.
Then, the most brutal “reality” descended upon Kenji’s spine in the form of pure gravity. As he leaned forward, a violent, unprecedented “weight” pulled at his chest. It was the mass of several kilograms of flesh, unnaturally attached to the exterior of the pectoral muscles.
Following the laws of physics, it sagged mercilessly downward, tugging at the skin and compressing the ribcage from the outside. With every breath, the weight of this flesh obstructed the expansion of his lungs, restricting his oxygen intake. His wife’s breasts—which Kenji had once cherished and enjoyed as sexual symbols—now asserted their existence relentlessly as a “physical load” that could not be detached by his will.
“Ah… Kenji? Is that you? You’re in… my body…”
Lifting his face toward the trembling voice, he saw Manami standing there, housed within his own frame—Kenji’s body. She stared with a bewildered expression at the thick, hairy arms that had once been his.
“My voice… it’s yours…”
Every time Kenji spoke, the throat—devoid of an Adam’s apple—vibrated delicately, sending high-pitched tremors through the air. The divergence between his will and the resulting sound created a “malfunction” that unpleasantly disturbed his inner ear.
Kenji attempted to stand with unsteady steps, but the center of gravity of the body was entirely skewed. His pelvis felt wider; with every step, he felt the friction of flesh between his inner thighs. The “masculine gait” he had cultivated over a lifetime now placed an odd strain on his knees, making it impossible to maintain his posture. Furthermore, a strange, dull ache resided in his lower abdomen—an inescapable discomfort, as if his internal organs were sagging under the weight of gravity, or perhaps signaling the presence of an unknown organ: a uterus.
Crawling to a mirror, Kenji stared at the reflection. What he saw was a middle-aged woman over forty-five, exposed to the irreversible erosion of aging. The flesh of the cheeks had begun to sag slightly, and deep crow’s feet were etched at the corners of the eyes. The hair had lost its luster, and the skin tone could not hide the exhaustion of daily life. This was no “beautiful girl” from a fantasy, nor the “rejuvenation” found in fiction.
“This is… Manami?”
Kenji gripped his (Manami’s) stomach. Through his fingers, he felt a thick, soft layer of adipose tissue. It was a grim accumulation of biological necessity, stored to stave off winter’s chill or protect against hunger. There was not a shred of the frivolous concept of “sexual appeal” he had once held. There was only the misery of “matter as flesh” that had lost its metabolism and could no longer resist gravity.
“The way back… we have to find the way back…”
Kenji leafed through the old book in a frenzy. But the characters that had been so densely packed moments ago were now blurred and fading as if soaked in muddy water, reverting to blank pages. The disappearing text was the very process of the “original form” vanishing as an option from their lives.
“It’s no use, Kenji. It’s already gone.”
Manami, inhabiting Kenji’s body, spoke coldly. She was opening and closing her (Kenji’s) large palms, testing the muscular strength.
“It’s not heavy… I can’t believe how easy it is to lift my arms. The lungs… they just pull in the air on their own.”
Her words were the inverse of the despair Kenji was currently feeling. What was a “heavy curse” for Kenji was already beginning to function as a “liberation” for her. That definitive misalignment in perception carved an irreparable fissure into the silent shop.
Outside, the crows of twilight shrieked with ominous voices. Kenji trembled with narrow shoulders that were not his own, arching his back under the weight of his chest that he could no longer support. The fibers of his clothing irritated his sensitized skin. His breasts, unburdened by the restraints of a bra, swayed with an unstable lethargy at every movement, relentlessly eroding Kenji’s dignity.
On this day, their normalcy ended. Or rather, a distorted new reality had been forcibly sutured together like a surgical procedure. There was no catharsis, no salvation, no thread of a solution. There was only the brutal fact that tomorrow, he would have to drag this heavy body out again to open a shop with no customers.
Read the rest here 👇
コメント