What dragged Sato Kenta from the depths of sleep was a discordant resonance, a frequency that seemed to scramble his very brain.
“Mom! Are you awake? It’s already seven-thirty!”
The voice of his younger sister, Misaki—loud, unreserved, and intrusive. Normally, that voice reached his room as a mere ghost of a sound, but now it pierced his eardrums like a serrated blade, intimate and lethal.
Kenta tried to surface, but his body was a collapsed monument of lead. It wasn’t merely exhaustion; it was as if the lean, explosive musculature of his limbs had been stripped away, replaced by a parasitic mass of slack, amorphous flesh clinging to his skeleton.
(What is this…? I can’t generate any torque…)
He attempted to open his eyes, only to be horrified by the sheer mechanical weight of his eyelids. His field of vision sat lower than it should. And then, the scent hit him—a biological atmospheric pressure that was utterly vile.
This wasn’t the scent of his own room—the familiar, dusty tang of a high schooler’s sweat and uniforms. This was a stagnant vapor rising from damp bedding: a rancid, slightly sour odor of oxidized lipids. It was the raw, visceral effluvium of a “middle-aged woman,” a cocktail of residual cosmetics and the specific oils that come with the degradation of time.
“Ugh…”
Reflexively reaching to cover his mouth, Kenta froze as he saw his “hand.”
Mapped with bulging violet veins and gnarled knuckles, the hand was a geography of labor. Liver spots dotted the back of the palm, and while the nails were clipped short, the fingertips were rasped and dry from decades of abrasive housework. These were the hands of Minako, his forty-five-year-old mother—hands that had washed ten thousand plates and wrung out a million rags.
“…Ah… a-ah…”
The sound that escaped his throat was cracked, yet possessed a humid, seasoned resonance. Kenta tumbled out of bed with a frantic, uncoordinated desperation.
His center of gravity was shifted, unstable. The muscles behind his knees failed to lock, and his thighs, now laden with excess adipose tissue, rubbed together with a sickening, friction-filled sound. Crawling toward the full-length mirror, he swallowed the acidic surge of bile rising from the pit of his stomach the moment he beheld the “object” reflected within.
The entity in the mirror was not Sato Kenta.
The face peering through disheveled hair was etched with deep ocular canyons; the flesh of the cheeks, unable to resist the constant vector of gravity, sagged toward the jawline. Horizontal lines, like the rings of an old tree, spanned the neck. Through the gap in the pajama top, he saw the pendulous mass of breasts—flesh that had lost its former elasticity and now drifted sideways, a heavy, unmoored weight.
“No… this is a lie… Why am I in Mom…!”
His consciousness was entombed within the “decaying anatomy” of the woman who had birthed him. The realization didn’t just hurt; it systematically dismantled his adolescent pride.
If you’d like to read more, check it out here
コメント