九

When I open my eyes again I find myself in a familiar place. Ashi-Toku station is a station with only two platforms, one each for trains going either way on its singular line.

Keisuke hauls himself onto the platform and sits down across from me.

“I really am sorry you know, about what I did to you,” he says.

“But you did it.”

“But I did it, and I can’t undo it. Sorry.”

The high school girl swipes her train card over the scanner, once for herself and then a second time for her brother.

“After Hori died I thought about a lot of things, didn’t get very far. At some point along the way, thinking about you became the only thing that didn’t make my head feel heavy.”

“I know what that feels like,” I respond, “it was the same for me with you. At least it was.”

Excitedly, the young boy points at a vending machine as his sister tries to drag him past it. She loses.

“What changed?” he asks.

“I started… thinking. Nothing good ever comes from thinking. Everyone always said we’d end up together, we thought we’d end up together. It seemed inevitable. And when things seem inevitable…”

A cold can of cola drops to the retrieval hatch in exchange for a couple of 100 yen coins. The high school girl tells her brother to wait for a moment before opening it.

“...they feel like death,” I finish.

“Is that your cruel idea of a joke?” Keisuke says as he points out the scene unfolding again in front of us.

The two siblings set into place just behind the yellow safety line. One of them does not notice the other.

“No, I’m just being honest.”

Keisuke turns to face me for the first time.

“Ruri. You’ve seen this enough times now. Tell me…”

The boy who wants to be a footballer kicks the air as he imagines himself scoring a great goal. This drags the siblings onto the yellow safety line. The boy fails to notice, the high school girl fails to care.

“...what could I have done? What could I have said to her to stop her jumping? What did I do wrong?”

“There’s nothing you could’ve done,” I tell him.

“No, there has to have been something.”

Instantly, I understand why he’s trapped here, why this is the core regret behind his soul’s collapse. He’s stuck asking himself what he could’ve done to prevent this, when in reality there was nothing. He was just a child, he had no way of picking up on any signs his sister would’ve been giving off, but he can’t accept that his sister would just kill herself. Someone had to have made a mistake for such a tragedy to occur and his sister is dead so he has no one to blame but himself.

The high school girl falls in front of the oncoming train, she did not stay behind the line. She is no immovable object, her body engulfs her brother’s as it is sent back the way it came. The siblings bounce on the tarmac, then they skid for two seconds, then they roll for a couple dozen meters, then they bounce again and come to a stop. The brown sugary liquid incessantly tries to penetrate the pool of blood that threatens to drown the siblings. It can't.