Mizuri (Sometime during Mizuri’s ‘Vacation’)

Mizuricounted the marks on the cherry blossom tree’s trunk. Five hundred and twelve. About a month under a year and a half. She’d added a new mark every day, though she didn’t remember it. Today would be the five hundred and thirteenth mark.

She knew it had been five hundred and twelve days, but the duel with Owari-sensei felt like it had just happened yesterday. In fact, she had no memories of those days. She’d figured her condition out somewhere in the second month, when she’d finally started wondering why the marks kept increasing on the trunk. There had been more than seventy marks then, but she hadn’t known where those had come from.

She’d finally concluded that Owari-sensei had made it this way, to at least dampen the severity of the consequence of losing the duel.

Her body grew every day, but her experiences didn’t. To her, “yesterday” was still the duel against Owari-sensei.

Quite the long-but-short vacation, she guessed.

Everything seemed to reset every day, though Mizuri had no way of proving it. Somehow the clearing always looked familiar, though that could very well have been just the memory of looking around before her duel against Owari-sensei.

Mizuri still always had her lunch packed in her bag, and the taste never changed. Not that she remembered the taste—it just seemed so familiar, even though the day of the duel had been the first time she’d decided to cook for herself and not simply buy from the convenience store close to the Higashi Academy.

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Her uniform was always clean when she woke, and she didn’t smell. That was how the idea that everything reset themselves within the clearing everyday presented itself to her. After all, wouldn’t hundreds of days in a forest without a bath reduce anyone to a smelly bag of flesh?

She didn’t have problems with her other needs, either. Everything reset anyway, so she figured any excretions from the previous day would be gone.

The book was once again on the fallen tree trunk. It had no title, but Mizuri had given it a title somewhere along the way, and strangely the title had stuck in her mind.

Mizuri’s Cry.

That was all the protagonist did, after all. She cried out to the sky every night; every night while she chased her boy, every night as she watched him turn into a man.

Every night as she watched him chase another woman.

Every night as she watched him get himself further and further ensnared.

And every night as she screamed at his unhearing ears as only she could do; that she was there, just there. That she was just waiting for a signal from him that he wanted to be saved.

And she had howled an angry but determined cry at the night sky when the story had reached an unfinished end and the man had died in her arms. Her cry had reached the heavens then, reached Mizuri’s heart.

She knew it. She didn’t remember, but she knew it.

But knowing never stopped her from opening the book every day. She read ravenously.

The story’s Mizuri had mostly only cried, but she had done so beautifully.

Mizuri read the book.

She sometimes imagined she was the protagonist, Mizuri. A similar name, a similar family background—none. Though the Mizuri in the book didn’t actually have a surname.

And Mizuri sometimes cried when the protagonist cried, and she felt a familiar ache in her chest, as if she’d been the story’s Mizuri.

At the end, she opened her mouth, but closed it again. Not today. She’d disturb the birds.

Mizuri’s Cry, huh? She thought to herself. Would I cry?