NONOKA had led a life as ordinary as any child could hope for. Raised by two loving parents, her days were filled with quiet contentment, as steady and inevitable as the morning sun. This fragile tranquility, however, was brutally ruptured one day in her middle school years.
“Ms. Hiragi, could you come with me, please?” The voice of her homeroom teacher sliced through the hum of the classroom, jarring Nonoka from her thoughts. They walked the empty hallways in silence before reaching the nearly deserted faculty room, a place suddenly as foreign as it was familiar.
Her teacher, a young woman whose normally bright eyes now mirrored the gray pallor of the overcast sky, struggled visibly as the words caught in her throat. The silence stretched taut, suffocating. Finally, she spoke, her voice trembling despite her efforts to stay calm. “Ms. Hiragi, I…there’s no easy way to say this. There was a tragic accident. Your parents…” She paused, swallowing hard. “They’ve passed away.”
“What?” Nonoka whispered.
“They were in a car accident,” her teacher continued. “They didn’t survive.”
“That’s… That’s not possible…”
Denial was the first emotion to surge within her. She stared at her teacher, willing her to retract the words, to laugh off this horrific scenario as nothing but a tasteless prank. But the sorrow in her teacher’s eyes, the awkward shift of her gaze, bore only the weight of irrevocable truth.
“H…How?” Nonoka whispered.
She had seen her parents that very morning. They had waved her off to school. The notion that these vibrant, loving figures were no longer a part of this world was incomprehensible. The words, though spoken clearly by her homeroom teacher, refused to form a coherent truth in her mind.
“I…I’ve gotta get to the hospital,” Nonoka said abruptly, a strange calm enveloping her. Her eyes held a distant, serene expression as if she were looking through the walls of the room, through reality itself, into a place where her parents were still waiting for her. She turned sharply, ready to flee from the unbearable news.
Snapping out of her own shock, the homeroom teacher hurried after her. “W-Wait, I’ll drive you. How do you even know which hospital to go to?”
Silently, Nonoka got into her teacher’s car. The world outside blurred past. The next thing she knew, they were at the hospital, where Nonoka was guided directly to the morgue. There, under the harsh, unyielding light, laid her parents in eerie repose and covered with clinical white sheets. They seemed so still, as if they were just sleeping, but…not. Her legs trembled as she approached.
“Mom? Dad?” she ventured into the void.
No response came.
“Don’t be gone. Please, you can’t be gone. You’re just sleeping, right? This isn’t funny anymore. Please wake up. Wake up, or I’ll never forgive you!”
Nonoka’s hands found her mother’s shoulders, shaking them with a child’s futile hope for an answer. The unnatural stillness, the cold unyielding to her touch, struck her with a visceral dread. “Mom?” Her voice broke as she gently, almost reverently, lifted the sheet.
The sight that met her eyes was nothing short of gruesome. She moved to her father, lifted the sheet, and then dropped it abruptly. She backpedaled, her movements shaky and terrified until she collided with the solid, sorrowful presence of her homeroom teacher.
As the full, merciless weight of reality crashed down upon her, Nonoka’s knees buckled and she crumpled to the floor.