The three penguins stood in a line before the fluttering lace.
There was a rich, somehow nostalgic fragrance. A driving rhythm emanated from somewhere, steadily increasing in volume. Lights flashed in all the colors of the rainbow.
I momentarily met the eyes of my brother, who sat cross-legged a short distance from me, but both of us were struck completely speechless. There didn’t seem to be anything to communicate, no facts or understanding.
Then came sharp footsteps. Himari suddenly appeared in the strange space from out of the ceaselessly fluttering soft, white waves, wearing the penguin hat. However, the penguin looked strangely mature, elegant, transfigured into something like a real crown. Bathed in white light, she spread both arms with the finesse of a ballerina, her long hair unfurling forcefully behind her like an angel’s wings.
Her eyes were red, and a sharp light shone from them.
A peach-pink ribbon encircled the round collar beneath her face. Shining black gloves encircled her arms, ending just beneath her fingertips, leaving them bare. She was unmoving, a beautiful, doll-like form.
A black latex corset with white frills around the bottom highlighted her slender body, and from the bottom ballooned a skirt, so long it dragged across the ground. She wore high-heeled, knee-length boots, form-fitted to her dainty legs. These, too, were glossy and black. It was a penguin dress, through and through.
She walked forward with a cold expression, heels making a sharp chk chk on the floor. She looked down on us and smirked.
The driving rhythm shifted subtly, as though in tune with Himari’s every movement, sucking in time itself.
Himari suddenly crouched down, and each time she glanced at our faces, the rhythm followed. It grew impossibly loud, so loud that I instinctively tried to cover my ears. But Himari’s clear voice resounded.
“Surely, you worthless nothings shall be told!”
Himari straightened her back, waving her arms over our heads. A faint, mysterious light poured down above us from her fingertips.
“You must obtain the Penguindrum!”
This was the same voice that we heard in the morgue. It was Himari’s voice, but somehow different. It had a forceful power, one that seemed to spring from the pit of her stomach.
“Himari, what are you saying?” I raised my voice in confusion.
“We are not your little sister. We come from the place where your fates reside.”
Our sister, standing before us, said that she was not our sister. It was true that she was not her normal self, wearing that wild dress with those red eyes. But I could only see Himari as Himari.
“It’s the hat,” Kanba said with certainty. “That hat is controlling her!”
“But that’s just a stupid toy we bought at the aquarium!”
Himari silenced me with a loud, purposeful clack of her heel.
“Currently, your sister’s life has been granted a temporary reprieve by our power. However, nothing in this world comes without a price. We expect our payment for this boon!”
As she shouted this, another blast of wind blew in. Himari’s hair danced around her.
Kanba glared at her inscrutable, glittering face.
“What’s this about a payment?!” I started to say. “This is weird—whoa!”
As I spoke, there was a click, and a square-shaped hole opened up beneath my feet. I fell headlong into the darkness.
My consciousness grew hazy. The mysterious light and the grandiose rhythm that moved in time with this alien version of Himari drifted gradually farther away, and I lost consciousness.
Himari slowly approached Kanba, touching his chin with coquettish hands, lifting it ever so slightly.
Rather than reply to Shoma’s question, she tilted her face close to Kanba’s, so close that they nearly brushed cheeks, and whispered in his ear. Her voice was sultry, like the sweetest honey, just like the first words she spoke after a yawn when she was drowsy.
“Shall we initiate the Survival Tactic?”
She tore open the buttons of Kanba’s shirt with her free hand, touching his now bare chest. Then, she plunged her hand deeply into it, as though there was no skin or bone.
“Guh!”
Her hand moved within his chest, as though searching for something.
“A-aah!” Even as he gasped in pain, a faint crimson spread across his cheeks.
Then, slowly, she extracted something that shone with a brilliant light from his chest, and held it up to the heavens. It spun, shining with a blinding light, and rose up into the sky, eventually disappearing into the far reaches of the alternate space.
Though it was now the middle of the night and the rain stopped, the disquieted atmosphere had not dissipated in the slightest. The intermittent sound of dripping water from the kitchen sink, which usually did not bother them at all, was strangely irritating. Shoma, already a light sleeper, seemed especially fitful.
Kanba sat up carefully, so as not to wake his brother, breathed in deeply, and walked to the kitchen to turn the faucet off more firmly. Then, after some hesitation, he decided to go and check in on his little sister.
Beside the living room, where Shoma and Kanba spread their futons out to sleep, was Himari’s room. In the center of the room, totally at odds with the rest of the Takakura house, was a small bed with a luxurious red canopy. Both the canopy and the pillows piled up on the bed had been handmade by Himari, and the bed itself was surrounded by mountains of all her favorite things.
An angel blowing a trumpet, a candelabra, and a lamp shaped like a mushroom all glowed with faint light, and atop a vintage sewing table sat an old-fashioned sewing machine, fabric scraps, ribbons, lace, and bobbins. Embroidery thread and beads and buttons of every imaginable color and size were scattered around the room. Beside the closet were piles of books, above which were placed a number of Himari’s so-called “cute things.”
Beside a wooden rocking chair, which had been picked up from somewhere or other so that Himari could relax while crafting in her room, was a basket filled with yarn and knitting needles, along with a bunch of half-finished projects, doilies, and runners that could be draped over or used to decorate various things in the Takakura household.
In the middle of her bed, surrounded by curtains in her beloved peach pink that draped around her protectively, Himari herself lay like a princess beside one of the penguins, her eyes firmly shut.
Her long eyelashes. The buttons at the top of her nightgown were undone, her white skin bared.
The faint moonlight shone pale upon her slender throat.
Kanba stood at the side of her bed and brushed away the hairs that clung to her cheek with his fingertips.
Unwittingly bewitched by her face, he thought about the nature of humanity.
Why were people born? If humans drew breath only for the sake of being born, growing up, and slogging tediously through every single day until they grew old and died, then was this some grave sin? Or was this some cruel, humorless joke? If that was the case, wasn’t the beast who stayed faithful to their survival strategies, living only for the sake of living, not the most lucid, the most beautiful?
If something like God existed in this world, then there was one question which Kanba would have liked to ask: Does such a thing as fate truly exist in the world of man?
For example, if a human were to ignore fate, his instincts, and even his genetics, and fall in love with someone—if he would accept even the destruction of his own self for that person’s sake, could that person truly be called “human”?
“Or something like that,” he muttered with a self-deprecating smile. He fixed the collar of her nightgown, and then quickly pressed his lips to her cheek. As he pulled away from Himari, once again he gazed down at her, aching all the more. His face was terribly sad, without a hint of insincerity in his damp eyes.
Anyway, Kanba hated the word “fate.”
He stroked her hair once, unimaginably tender, then pressed his mouth to hers, her small lips parted in gentle sleeping breath. It was a kiss as reverent as that of a prince, awakening a slumbering princess.
Whether or not fate existed, Himari’s lips were startlingly soft and sweet, and tasted of a deep, deep darkness.