The Twilight Proxy
The autumn twilight was stained a garish, burning orange, as if the world itself were incinerating. On the way home from work, a cold wind brushed against the back of the neck, and red and yellow leaves, stripped from the roadside trees, danced across the asphalt with a dry, rustling sound.
Yuto was crossing through the park, as he always did. Ordinarily, this was a landscape he wouldn’t even register. But that day was different.
Near the water fountain, by a wooden bench, he caught sight of a solitary figure sitting alone. A black sailor-style school uniform. Short-cropped black hair. The girl held her knees, looking down as if her head were too heavy to carry. Her slender shoulders seemed to tremble slightly—perhaps from the cold, or perhaps for another reason entirely.
(…I should just act like I didn’t see anything.)
His reason told him so. However, the air surrounding her was so heavy, feeling like a “silent hollow” carved out from the surrounding bustle, that Yuto found himself stopping in his tracks.
“…Are you okay?”
When he spoke, the girl looked up slowly, with a sluggishness akin to a rusted machine starting to move. The moment their eyes met, Yuto felt as if a cold finger had gripped his heart directly.
Her eyes—Misaki’s eyes—were deep and hollow. There was nothing that could be called “life” in them; they held only a bottomless loneliness, as if she were staring at a place far, far away.
“…Who are you?”
“Oh, uh, I’m just passing through… I thought you looked unwell, so I just wanted to check on you.”
Overwhelmed by her hollow gaze, Yuto answered haltingly. A silence followed that made him want to bolt. Misaki stared at Yuto intently, but eventually, her parched lips trembled slightly, and she let out a voice that seemed ready to vanish.
“Please…”
“What?”
“Please… swap with me.”
Swap with me.
The moment he tried to ask the true meaning behind those words, Yuto’s vision warped violently. A fierce rotation, as if his semicircular canals were being shredded. The sensation that the ground had vanished and the sky was falling. Yuto tried to scream in despair at the terror of his body being turned inside out and sucked into an unknown abyss.
—!?
There was no impact. Only an overwhelming change in “gravity.”
When he next opened his eyes, Yuto was sitting on the ground. No, more accurately, he was “made to sit with his knees held.”
(What…? What is…)
In his confusion, Yuto looked down at his hands. What appeared there were not his own sun-tanned, gnarled palms. They were fingers as white as porcelain and startingly small. A girl’s hands, with nails trimmed short, giving a somewhat fragile impression. Looking further down, he saw slender legs wrapped in black tights, folded beneath him. And before his eyes, the collar of a navy-blue sailor uniform and a red scarf swayed.
“Is this… me…?”
The voice that spilled out was a girl’s melody—transparent, yet tragically high-pitched. His mind went blank. Faced with a reality that defied comprehension, Yuto looked up.
Standing there was a “himself” he recognized. Yuto, in the form of an ordinary young man in his mid-twenties, stood composed by the bench. But the person inside was the girl from moments ago—Misaki.
“Wh—what… what is this!”
Yuto (inside Misaki) screamed desperately. But the more desperate he became, the more the voice from the girl’s throat sounded weak and feeble.
Standing before him, Misaki (inside Yuto) clenched her fists as if testing her new “male body,” and eventually let out a faint, relieved smile.
“This is fine… Thank you.”
The voice was low—Yuto’s own voice. But the will residing within it belonged to a cold stranger, not himself.
“Hey, wait! You’re joking, right!? What do you mean by this!”
Yuto (inside Misaki) tried to stand up. But the unfamiliar hem of the skirt tangled around his legs, and overwhelmed by the unique center of gravity of a girl’s body, he collapsed back onto the ground.
Misaki (inside Yuto) gave no answer. She turned a complex gaze toward him—one perhaps full of pity, or perhaps rejoicing in liberation—and then quietly vanished into the depths of the park as the darkness began to fall.
Left behind were the sensation of the cold ground and a delicate body that didn’t feel like his own. Yuto (inside Misaki) gripped the front of the sailor uniform with trembling hands. His heart was beating violently, like a frantic bell. It was a small, yet hypersensitive palpitation he had never experienced before.
(This is a lie… this has to be a lie…)
The autumn night wind blew through, easily piercing the thin fabric of the sailor uniform and stinging the girl’s skin. Yuto felt his identity being forced into the “mold” of this black uniform and white skin. Stripped of his name and his body, he had been remade in an instant into a “nameless girl” standing in the autumn twilight.
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