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The room smells of urine and slightly metallic from the blood that coagulated on the girls’ bruise mottled skin. It is dark inside with little light coming through the windows casting rectangular shapes on the dirty floor. A rat runs into a dark corner with something in its mouth.
He scratches above his right brow in confusion. The girls are holding onto each other like scared little birds and breathing heavily, trembling. Suguru demands an explanation. The fat man with straight brows and a stupid scarf around his neck says they are the cause of all this like Suguru should have known that.
“No,” he says. “I’ve already determined the cause of the incidents.”
The beetle-browed woman with a down-turned mouth claims her grandson was killed by these two girls. The one with blonde hair cries out in protest but the woman cuts them off with her bileful voice, “Shut up, you monster!”
“Your parents were exactly the same! We should have killed you when you were babies!”
Suguru now stands at a crossroads, down one path walks him who despises these spiteful creatures and down another walks him who turns his back to that feeling and keeps walking until his body is just one more in a pile of corpses at the end of it. Here Suguru makes a choice and sticks to it, there won’t be any more delaying of it.
In this choice is entailed another one, between a boy and a world. If Suguru chooses a world free of curses, he needs to leave him behind.
Baldwin says love has never been a popular movement, that the world is held together by the love and passion of a very few people. Suguru wants to believe that the world is being held together, that there is enough love to hold it together, that even he could love enough to hold it together.
Suguru loves, enough for it to cave holes in him and shovel fragments of the boy into the holes as it digs more, more holes to fill with more of him because it is a duplicating desire, wanting and wanting as it is supplied. Suguru loves, enough for it to burn like a self-inflicted wound opened to get the lover’s hands to care for it. Suguru loves, enough for it to hold him together and shatter him and put him back together and do it all over again. Suguru loves, enough for it to feel like suffocating, like kissing your way out of then into death as you share four lungs worth of oxygen in a room with the air sucked out of it but perhaps no love is enough to hold this place together as a monster rips away its seams.
Suguru wants to choose the boy with aquamarine eyes, the boy who blurts out “I want to kiss you.” before he does for the first time among the tall azaleas’ bubblegum pink flowers, the boy who tastes like artificial strawberry flavoring and saccharine, the boy who is there when he wakes up from a nightmare to hold his face in his hands whispering “I’m here, Suguru. It’s okay, I’m here.” and bury his head into his chest like a mother soothing a newborn who just lost the shell of life containing it, preserving it from the world, the boy who welcomes him into himself like his body was made as a home to shelter Suguru, the boy who comes to him without knocking, the boy who knows the keys are under the pot.
Suguru wants to choose being held like he is dear and caressed like he is ravishing and kissed like he is cherished. He wants to choose being looked at and seen, being touched and known, being reached for and wanted. He wants to choose being undressed like he has so much to give then covered like he has so much to preserve. He wants to choose erasing his borders and letting himself seep into another’s soft ooze of self but the monster keeps ripping the seams apart and Suguru will never catch up with those gentle, loving hands. Suguru should start ripping too, faster and at the right places then stitch it back together, right sides facing up.
Suguru lifts an index finger, a shapeless curse creeps out of it, and speaks, “It.. It’ll… It’ll be fine.”
“Hey, you guys. Come outside with me for a second.”
Suguru chooses the world, the demanding place that is always about to fall apart—and he has the power to bring it together, not without breaking it further apart but to bring it together still.
The woman manages to let out a few cries before the clawed hand of the curse with four black eyes smashes her into a bleeding mush of flesh. It stuffs the man into its mouth and his vermillion blood gushes out from the crevices between its long yellowish teeth.
Suguru reaches for the jujutsu badge in his shirt pocket that has been digging into his chest the whole time and drops it in the pool of blood on the ground.