When all logically untenable possibilities have been eliminated, if whatever remains seems untenable, then it is.
I hadn’t gone to class even though it was a normal school day, and I lay sprawled out on the tatami floor of my apartment engrossed in a book: Muju Ichien’s Tsumakagami. It was an oldish book (which is to say it was clearly ancient) that my neighbor Miiko had leant me. So I treated it gingerly, even though I was only skimming. We generally read either to educate ourselves or just to kill time, and on this occasion it was the latter. So when a knock at the door interrupted me in the middle of turning the page, I wasn’t particularly put out.
“Ahoyhoy. Sorry for the radio silence!”
My guest was, unexpectedly, Aikawa. What was unexpected wasn’t that it was Aikawa, but that she’d taken the trouble to consider the common practice of knocking and to put it into practice. There was no point in interrogating her about why she’d knocked, so I simply replied, “Hey. It’s been a while.”
Jun Aikawa. Occupation: contractor. Gender: female. Height: tall─short torso, long legs. Style and Proportions: both first rate. The fact that every inch of her body was clothed in primary red may have represented a minor issue, but other than that there was no fault to be found with her bespoke suit. She possessed a beauty that one hundred out of one hundred people would acknowledge─if you got rid of the bizarrely malevolent look in her eyes, that is. As for her hairstyle, I was pretty sure she’d kept her bangs neatly trimmed at some point in the past, but apparently she’d let them grow out, and now their lustrous crimson fell to her shoulders.
“Sure has. Oh, looks like your fingers have healed up nicely.”
“Yeah, thanks. So what’s going on? Oh right, please, come on in.”
“Nope, not today─”
At which point she flashed a cheerful grin my way. It was a vanishingly rare occurrence to see such an expression on her face─Jun Aikawa’s smiles were always full of irony and malice─so for a second I was at a loss. She didn’t seem at all concerned with such particulars, however, and still grinning, she reached out and put a hand on my shoulder; still grinning, she pulled me towards her; and, still grinning, she shoved the tip of the black, angular, extremely small but very serious-looking stun gun-like object she held in her other hand into my ribs.
A dull thud resounded from the region of my solar plexus.
“Nh. Guh…”
“Since we’re leaving right away.”
The Aikawa reflected in my eyes as they closed wasn’t grinning anymore.