Tuesday
Night
✦ ✦ ✦
It comes on suddenly in the dead of night when I’m all alone in my room. It comes whether I’m sleeping or sitting or standing or squatting. It starts from my fingertips, or my navel, or sometimes my mouth.
That night, the black droplets came as tears spilling from my eyes. Mote by mote, a river of unending pitch-black tears, the streams growing gradually until they fell like two waterfalls from my eyes. The simmering, writhing black drops spread to cover my face and then flowed down my neck to my chest, arms, and waist—until every last inch of my body was covered, down to the tips of my fingers.
All colors but black drained from the surface of my body at that point. I’ve never had a chance to watch my body’s transformation, so I have no idea what it looks like. I merely get a sense of my body changing. Assimilating into the black drops, into a form without skin, without flesh, without bone, a form which is no doubt dreadful to look upon. But like I said, I haven’t actually seen it, so I couldn’t actually say for certain. For all I know, maybe I look rather endearing to an outsider, like one of the soot sprites from that one movie. A makkuro kurosuke.
When I was finally able to see my own body, it had transformed into something like a six-legged beast made of pure darkness. As I gazed at my reflection in the full-length mirror, the only things that shone on my wavering black form were the whites of my eight eyes, set above a bottomless, inky crevice of a mouth.
The first night that I viewed my own form, the black drops on the surface of my body went wild with the shock. I nearly ended up demolishing my room. However, I found that I accepted it with unexpected ease once I tried thinking of myself as something like a monster appearing in a video game or the strange beasts that I had seen in anime. How lucky that I was born in the modern age.
When I first transformed, my body was around the size of a large dog. If I want to grow larger, I can will the black drops to move and become as large as a mountain. There was no point in enlarging myself now, though. I was still stuck in my room.
I thought then that I might go outside. Careful not to smash my window the way I did on that very first night, I sprang up lightly and squeezed myself through a tiny crack in the windowsill, slipping out of my second-story room.
My body briefly scattered like a liquid, reforming into a more aerodynamic shape as I tore through the air. In a flash, I landed soundlessly upon the ground. I was in an empty lot about three hundred meters from my home. Previously, I’d just jumped as hard and as far as I could, but after landing on a doghouse in a stranger’s yard and crushing it, I decided to start aiming for more open areas. Luckily, the poor pup happened to be sleeping outside his home that time. I slipped him a bit of jerky later.
The night breeze felt good, and there was a comfortable quiet around me as I expanded my body to about three times its original size, under the gaze of a half-sleeping stray cat nearby. After testing out a variety of sizes, I had determined that this one was the most comfortable for sitting, which was the closest I could get to a comfortable resting position. Seeing this dark monster suddenly spring up beside it, the sleepy-looking stray skittered away at top speed. Sorry to have disturbed your peaceful sleep, kitty.
Now a beast as wide as a road, I strode down the empty street, my six legs moving in an insectoid rhythm. Normally, this was when I would start thinking about what I wanted to do next, but tonight I had only one destination in mind.
As I continued walking, scaring off a dog who was harassing a cat along the way, I came to a crossroads. Last night, I’d turned left here and made my way out to the sea. The shore was quiet this late, and the sound of the waves put a pleasant stop to the pulsing motion of my inky form. I still had a bit of time, so I thought perhaps I could stop by the sea again tonight before moving on to my objective.
As I let the fond memories of the night before overtake me, a scream came from off to my left. I shuddered and turned to look.
I saw a fellow who had been riding briskly along on his bicycle. He seemed to have noticed my presence just as he was about to collide with me. He let out a loud scream and toppled over on the spot. I felt badly for the poor guy, but there was nothing that I could do for him. For now, I put thoughts of the sea aside and made a break down the road in the opposite direction. Whenever I caught wind of others around, I always ran away. That guy would almost certainly think that this was all just a dream when he woke up the next morning. Of course, it wasn’t a dream at all. I would still be here, the window still broken, and the doghouse still destroyed.
My quick retreat was perhaps a bit too speedy. Before I knew it, I ended up somewhere that I didn’t recognize. Hoping to get a better grasp of where I was, I moved to a nearby park and made myself larger than a house. As I swept my gaze around, far taller than even the power poles, I found that I really had traveled an incredible distance. Far on the horizon, I could see the shore where I had spent those fleeting moments the night before.
I needed to get back home before dawn. So, for the time being, I shrunk back down until I was around the width of the road again and began leisurely making my way back towards the sea.