Working off of the assumption that these were eyes and nails, that would mean that the rest of their body was invisible in the darkness. Judging by their posture, they were probably sitting. Was this an invisible person or something? When I posed the question to them, however, they immediately replied, “No, I’m just a normal person.” Exactly what about this was normal? I still didn’t know if they even were a person.
“I am surprised that you can hear my voice too,” they muttered, forgoing any explanation of why I could only see their eyes and nails. I thought hard about this.
“Could you…always hear my voice…?”
“Yeah.”
The lights meant to be eyes drifted up and down. Another nod, I supposed.
“Up until yesterday, I could hear your voice, but no matter what I said, you could never ××××.”
“Wha…?”
The words cut out partway through. They were drowned out by some sort of interference, like the noise you hear when a radio frequency doesn’t quite match up.
“I was surprised that you could suddenly ×××× all of a sudden today.”
Once again there was that sound, like television static. Judging by the context, the incomprehensible word was probably the same sort of word as before.
“And now I can suddenly hear you…”
At my earnest reply, the girl—wait, was it all right for me to call her a girl? The voice sounded female anyway, so—in front of me said, with reasonable suspicion, “I wonder why…”
“Just before, you called me an invisible person… So nothing besides my eyes and nails looks ×××× to you?”
“Nothing but the glowing parts.”
I pointed, and the two upper lights moved downward. “I see…” I heard her mutter in some sort of understanding. Because I could not see where her mouth was, her voice came suddenly, and it was tricky to catch her meaning. Then, there was that noise again.
“Do you have any body parts besides the glowing parts?”
“Of course I do.”
I was unsure if I should believe that, but if I did choose to believe her, I couldn’t help but start to imagine the hazy outline of the rest of her form, if what I could see were her eyes and nails. Judging by the placement of her eyes, the length of her arms and legs would not be at all unnatural for a human.
“I can see your body ×××× though,” she said.
There it was again.
“My body looks…what? I didn’t quite catch you.”
“××-××.”
It seemed like she was sounding the word out, but I still couldn’t hear it. What on earth was that noise?
“Clearly. Distinctly… Does that make sense?”
“Ah, yeah, I can understand those. There was just a part I couldn’t make out. Um, so anyway, I can only see your eyes and nails, but you’re saying you can see my whole body?”
“Yeah. Even before you could hear my voice. I always just thought you were a dead person, the way you’d appear here and then disappear without doing anything. I would try talking to you, but I never got any reply. That’s why I was so surprised before.”
For a long moment, the eye lights went out. I could tell that she was more at ease than I was.
“So why is it I can only see your eyes and nails?”
If I was to believe all that she said, then this was a bizarre inequality.
“…I mean, I guess it makes sense if you think about it. In a dark place like this, you would only be able to see the parts that are glowing. Honestly, it’s weirder to me that I can see all of you.”
“Dark…”
No, that wasn’t it. Though it was faint, beyond her eyes and nails I could still see the wall and bench. There was clearly no body there. I offered a proposal.
“What if I turned on a light?”
“Lights are forbidden.”
“Forbidden? By who?”
“The government, obviously. Guess you don’t know about ××××××.”
There’s a lot I’d like to ask you, she started to say, when the lights that were apparently her eyes went wide and turned to me.
“Oh.”
The girl, who had seemed quite calm until now, suddenly sounded frightful. Judging from her glowing nails, her hands moved slowly up beside her eyes. She looked as though she was covering her ears.
“That’s the siren. I’ve gotta go.”
I didn’t hear any siren. I turned my focus to beyond the walls but heard nothing from outside the shelter.
“Goodbye.”
All I heard was an abrupt word of parting.
“Huh?!”
“I have to go. I’m still alive.”
“Hold on, what? Wait!”
A parting as sudden as our meeting. Though I still knew nothing, felt nothing, understood nothing, I was immediately terrified that this special thing was going to leave me.
“You don’t have to go, though,” she said calmly.
“I, uh, no, I mean that doesn’t matter.”
She sounded like a worried parent.
“I don’t know where you came from or where you’re going, though. If you are alive, I’m sure we can meet here again.”
Was that really true? Or was this special moment going to end here, never to occur in my life ever again? I began to imagine going back to my boring everyday life, day after day after day with nothing but a sense of premonition, and I shuddered.
The girl made of only eyes and nails, not seeming to share my concerns, stood up, at least as far as I could judge by seeing the position of her eyes shift. “Goodbye,” she said once more. From the movement of her nails, I could see her walk towards the wall opposite where I was standing, disappearing just before she would have collided. Or rather, the lights of her eyes and nails simply went out, gone. Nothing more.
“Hey!”
I called out, but there was no reply. I called out once more again, but of course there was still nothing. Had she left, or was she simply ignoring me? Regardless, it seemed the conversation stopped here. There was probably no point in saying anything else. The only thing I could do was leave.
Now, just as I’d always assumed I was, I stood alone in the bus shelter. Just before her departure, there were two things that I was able to determine, or rather, to suppose: First off, judging by the height of her eyes, she was probably no different in height from the average human woman, perhaps about 160 centimeters—though if there was any strange elongation from her forehead upward, I would have no idea. Second, though I could not see the rest of her body, it probably did exist, just as she said. When she stood up and it appeared that she was turning around, one of her eye lights went out of view. That probably meant that she had a head and that the one eye had been hidden by the angle she was facing.
Once more, the bus shelter was dark and quiet. Left alone in the simple prefab structure, I was thrown into a sense of disarray, of anxiety. My pulse shamelessly began to quicken in a much different way than it did when I was exercising.
It had only been a few short minutes. What had I just experienced?
What had happened to me?
For a while I stood frozen and dazed, vividly replaying what I had just witnessed again and again in my head. I kept questioning it: Had that really happened? I had no idea. Maybe it was just a dream, though how horrid it would be if that were true. At the same time though, I had to wonder: Could my own boring subconscious really come up with a being with such a fantastical appearance? A creature that looked like a human, invisible but for her nails and eyes?
What the heck? What the heck was that? What in the heck had just unfolded before my own two eyes?!
I was not ready to allow myself to feel any reckless joy. I had no idea if there would even be a next time. She’d said that we would meet again, but I had no proof of that. Even if I truly had encountered this girl, if this was to be our only meeting, then it was no better than a dream.
Regardless, I knew that just standing around there forever would gain me nothing. If what she said to me was true, then perhaps if I came back the next day something might happen again.
And, if in fact this was a dream, if it truly was, then I needed to wake up so that I could recognize that fact. I couldn’t linger in this dream of something special forever. I steeled myself and made up my mind to exit the shelter.
I put my hand on the handle and slid open the door. When I stepped outside, I was buffeted by a cold wind, but it did not awaken me.
I was still standing in my own normal world. Though, while I knew that it was too soon, far too soon to be happy, for a few seconds I merely stood there, wearing an expression that I would never show to anyone else.