You continue walking along like that.
As if you’re a small child again, being led by the hand through the rain by a parent who has come to pick you up from school. Somehow enjoying yourself. Happily.
For you, the rain doesn’t seem to be that unpleasant.
Yet, there is no parent at your side, nor is there anyone at all. All alone, you walk along. The ceaseless rain seems to penetrate the otherwise empty darkness.
Within the puddle, swollen by the rain, the dim outlines of the man and woman having the argument fade and melt away until their forms are unrecognizable, yet still they spew hatred.
Yet you still maintain the rhythmic sound of catching the rain with the umbrella. Naturally, the hateful words of the man and woman never reached you. They’ve been erased by the sound of the rain, leaving your surroundings awfully quiet.
Leisurely, you walk along.
Before long, you spot something up ahead resembling a stairway.
It has a surprisingly narrow entrance that is sprouting unnaturally out of the ground. A stairway extends down from there, though you cannot tell where it leads. You head straight for it, perhaps because you are sick of wandering along with no destination, or maybe you’re anticipating something within.
You close the umbrella, causing falling droplets of water to drum with a “tap, tap” on your rear end. You step toward the stairway as if you’re being sucked into it.
Your soaked braids sway as you descend down the wet and slippery steps. It is dark and you can see nothing. You have no idea what is waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
Moving forward with only the slightest hint of light to guide you, you finally reach the end.
What awaits you is a dense forest — a sea of trees.
What should have led you underground has instead led you outside. It’s baffling, but you don’t seem too concerned about it. You gaze around you with curiosity.
The trees stretch on interminably. Your view is essentially blocked, obstructed by all of the trees. The trees, oddly lacking in vitality, envelope you, hiding you away. At some point in the dense sea of trees, having let go of your umbrella, you find yourself standing next to something completely unnatural.
It is a vending machine — a complete mismatch to the suffocating wilderness.
Like a moth drawn to a flame, you approach the vending machine. An exceedingly ordinary, brand-new vending machine. As if enchanted by the soft drinks, teas, coffees, and so on offered within, you press your face against the machine and stare like a kid coveting a clarinet.
You feel around inside your breast pocket, looking for some change.
However, you shake your head and mutter something quietly, likely not having found any.
A delicious beverage with which to quench your thirst might be the perfect symbol of a fabulous meeting with someone new, or perhaps some fantastic accomplishment. As you cannot get one, you choose none of the drinks — even if you wanted one bad enough to sprout an arm from your throat — nothing will come of it. It would only be a temporary solution anyway.
You ruefully lift your hand up to the vending machine, then carelessly begin to walk back into the sea of trees, as if having given up. Your surroundings don’t appear to be suitable for taking a walk in, and yet mysteriously, the grass at your feet has been maintained with the care of a lawn, leaving not even the slightest obstacle.
You finally glimpse some spaces between the trees, and so you slide your petite frame through those spaces.
On the other side of those spaces is a straight road.
A road paved in asphalt. However, there are cracks in the road, weeds poking their heads through the cracks, as if it isn’t being maintained. With no cars passing over it, it reminds you of the skeletal remains of some enormous creature. You step onto the road, then take a look around.
It is a straight road, stretching on and on, as if slicing through the dense forest. It stretches on endlessly, obscuring the other end of the road and leaving you without a clue as to where it leads. Yet you press onward, as if to assert that a road is the sort of thing one should walk on.
The sound of your shoes on the pavement echoes.
The road is long and endless; it is similar to a highway built for cars to drive on.
Traversing it on foot is extremely difficult.
You continue walking on and on and on...... You become bored, you become tired, and even so, in the end, you haven’t arrived at any sort of destination. You are trapped in this straight road.
That’s when you suddenly realize.
Something strange is standing right in the center of this unending highway.
It’s rather unobtrusive, so unassuming and vague that you almost pass by it without noticing.
Staring at the intermittent white line etched into the road has a hypnotic effect, which is often the cause of people falling asleep at the wheel. In the same way, you walk along the unending road and slowly begin to space out, losing your sense of vigilance.
However, once you become aware of it, you can no longer ignore this sinister thing.
No matter how you look at it, you have no idea what it is, this baffling form. For a split second, it looks like a human. It is as if someone the same height as you were hidden beneath a raincoat. You happily head straight for it, likely pleased to encounter another person for the first time, then freeze up in shock.
That is no human. If one had to pick something, it looks closest to a jellyfish.
A jellyfish the same size as a human......
It is a disgusting thing, like its blood-drenched organs have been yanked out and it has been restructured into the shape of a human. Or perhaps like a human who has been turned inside out, their organs now on the outside — or like their organs have shot through their flesh and were left exposed, that might be closer to how it looks.
Large intestine, small intestine, and other nondescript organs drip with blood from something unknown, like a pitiful creature in the middle of an autopsy left undone. It stands stock still, giving no hint of a reaction.
Terrified, you hurry away from it.
Returning straight down the path you came from, you look back only once.
As if predicting your fate and the end of that straight path, a bell rings out from that object that looks like a slaughtered corpse, just once — the kind of bell that signals fate, like the kind rung to remember the dead during a funeral. As if in mourning. As if out of sympathy.
You plug your ears and run away.