III

“I miss you.”

“I wish this weren’t true.”

“I want to see you all again.”

These words fall out of my jaw like the pattering of rain on soil. Den Coyre is my home, but I left it because I wanted more out of life. The sky is unlimited, and, as a young beast, I would reach out and swirl the stars around my claws. A cup of galactic peppermint tea to awaken my senses.

Why did I leave? I know the reason why I did, but I have yet to learn the feeling for why I did. Behind this simple desire was an emotion, and that emotion remains out of reach, even further past the stars I yearned for in my youth.

“Do not worry, my Son.”

My mother’s voice is calm. She has lived a long and modest life in Coyrety. 

“Damn those aliens, we should have been the ones to go.”

My father’s voice is tense. He has lived a long and modest life in Coyrety as well. 

But both speak empty words. They know they are dead. They have been dead since people realized that Sieve itself will die. 

So far, I too have lived a dead, empty life since then.

……

It was four months after Fates were decided. Only then did I really notice how dead everyone was. 

“Hello, Lorenz.” I puffed out my chest because I liked him. Held my tail at a more graceful angle than I usually do. Made sure my antlers gleamed a bit in the sun.

“Hey, Col.” I liked it when he called me that.

“It’s good seeing your face again.”

“Likewise.”

“How have you been?”

“Good enough.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Running the shop, as usual.”

“Don’t you do anything else?”

“No.”

“Don’t you run the literature club at school?”

He looked at me with a profound lack of emotion in his eyes. I knew exactly what he meant to say with that: “I have no more reason to live. I’ll only do the bare minimum to survive. It’s not like I’ll end my life before the big show, so I’ll just coast along with nothing to show for it when we’re obliterated.”

That was the day I broke my heart ahead of time. I gave up on him because he too had died. There is no use in pursuing someone who has lost the will to live. 

That was also the day that I died. There’s not much more to say about it.

I went home.

“You used up the rest of your money, eh?”

“Yeah.” Eori sulked.

“Do you need more money?”

“You’re awfully generous now, Col.”

“I don’t need it anymore.”

“...Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Are you really sure?” She seemed to be implying that she’d run out of it within the day instead of the month.

“Yes.” I wanted to rid myself of these useless possessions that only the living care for.

“...Alright.”

I handed her ten hundred-bills. She smiled, but her eyes were dead too. 

……

An empty life, I say. I lay on the couch and ponder my worth. I go out to run and try to keep myself physically fit, but what’s the point if I’m just going to perish anyway? Perhaps I do it so I can pretend like this was all a dream. 

I’m not quite listening to my parents’ voices anymore. They drone on in the background as I lay stretched out on the sofa in the upstairs living room. Bickering with each other as if the world were going on as usual, they leave the phone on, the image facing towards the ceiling as their antlers pass by every now and then. 

I leave my phone on the coffee table. I’m hungry.

The stairs creak under my weight, as they do for anybody who goes up them. Before, when Eori and I used to have guests over, we would have them go upstairs before us and we would joke about how heavy they must be. Now it’s just us two, and this creaky whine sounds horribly pathetic without the sound of laughter to cover it up.

Eori is making her pasta, a recipe I recognize well because I taught it to her. It uses feral meats from my country, but we don’t have those here, so she uses local seafood. It’s not bad, but I miss the traditional way of making it.

“It would have been nice if our friends could come over and–”

Wailing.

“And what? And what. You know, I actually saw Touma and Lorenz today. When’s the last time you’ve seen them? Well, I’ve been trying hard to act like nothing’s wrong and go outside like a normal person. But I guess all it takes is one friendly face and suddenly I’m stranger to my own world, so why do I even try, why—”

She burns herself on the pan and runs to the window and screams, something mix of anguish and sorrow, yet a tinge of laughter escapes the very end of it, as if feeling that pain as a proof of being alive.

Too much stress has been building up lately. Now I want to cry too. I walk over to her and hug her, my only remaining friend in View-of-Few.

An idea crosses my blank mind—she’s never been to Coyrety.

I want to say, “Let’s just go to Coyrety and die there. It’ll be nice.” But I feel that would do her wrong because she herself is from this town. She doesn’t have family here anymore, yet she seems to love this place more than herself. It would be torture to make her leave when these are the last days she’ll ever exist here at all.

But… we’ve been friends for a while, and I feel that even in this deep sorrow she has for Sieve and its people, she would want to see something new before dying.

She looks up at me, and her bald head shines in the evening light. It’s almost blinding, like when the sun shines on the ocean off in the distance.

“Kiss me.”

I recoil in surprise and hit my head on the mug shelf, swearing to myself as I run back upstairs and leave Eori in a minefield of shattered glass. But she’s agile and she’s already caught up to me, apologizing profusely, and I just want to get away because the longer this nightmare goes the weirder it gets.

Please, let me wake up from this nightmare.