003
“Good morning.”
When I went out to the living room, breakfast was waiting for me.
I’m thoroughly awful at housework, catastrophically bad at both cooking and cleaning, not even rolling on the floor bad, and it’s all because my guardians, my grandma and grandpa, are extremely meticulous people and take much too good care of me.
I wasn’t blessed in the parents department in many ways (in any way at all), but I have been as far as grandparents go.
Then again, while the food was waiting for me, my grandparents weren’t. Grandma was doing the laundry, and Grandpa was out tending the garden. Ordinarily, the ideal family sits down to breakfast all together, but that never really happened for us.
Old folks start the day early─but that’s not why.
In fact, I start my day earlier than they do. I’m in the habit of jogging 10 km x 2 every morning before breakfast.
That day, too, I’d taken not one but two turns around town.
While I’m working up a good rhythm and a pleasant feeling during my run, Grandma and Grandpa finish their breakfast. I do my best every morning to pick up the pace so I can sit and eat with them, but, well, that’s not going to happen unless I basically double my speed.
Which means it’s not going to happen at all.
“‘A real family eats together’? Come on, that’s bullshit─look, that Hanekawa girl eats with her family, but they’re not together at all, are they? In the same place, but not together. And I ate with you most of the time, but did you think of me as family? I was your mother, but listen, were we really family?”
I finished breakfast while that voice chattered on in a corner of my head. I fully replaced the calories I burned on my run─thanks for the grub.
My auditory hallucinations were especially severe that morning, though.
The harbinger of something to come?
Or the aftereffect of something past?
…I guess I was just a bit mentally unbalanced that day on account of starting a new chapter of my life.
Really.
I was no good on my own.
I was no good at all on my own.
Thinking such thoughts, I reached for the morning paper─already somewhat wrinkled and puffed out from my grandparents having read it─and spread it out on the table.
With eyes as wide as saucers, I examined every inch, scanning all that had happened in the world yesterday. Being a regional paper, it was of course full of local news, which is exactly what I was looking for.
Stabbings, other incidents of violence.
Where and when they occurred.
I carefully checked each of those─and compared them in my head to my schedule and timetable the previous day. Recalling whether or not I had an alibi.
“…Phew.”
Finished with the newspaper, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Everything was okay.
Another day gone by, and I hadn’t committed any crimes.
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