Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 1.06

006

The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.

Paying no heed to Hanekawa’s injunction, I ran down the hallway and out of the building towards the quad, to the flowerbed, and once there I picked up the shrine housing the rock that resembled a stone statue and smashed it on the ground.

“Huff, huff, huff, huff…”

I mean.

There was no point in smashing it at this point─but I couldn’t help myself, I completely dismantled the shrine, reducing it to its constituent scraps of wood.

Even if I hadn’t, the second it no longer surrounded the rock, it was nothing more than that─in any case, I carried the scraps over to the garbage area.

The completion of a trip begun two years earlier.

“…”

Yes.

Needless to say, I was the one who had built the shrine for woodworking two years earlier and left it in the flowerbed, more or less just as Hanekawa surmised, instead of bringing it home.

The reason it rang a bell wasn’t that I’d made something like it myself for class─I’d made it myself.

I’d completely forgotten about it.

Even if I couldn’t remember things from two years back like Hanekawa could, this was pushing it. I’d said all kinds of horrible things about it, called it a crude, childish, raggedy-ass shrine, but it had been my own handiwork all along.

Now I understood Oshino’s detestable little smile.

He must’ve been holding in a massive burst of laughter─Hanekawa might have shown us an embarrassing side, but it was nothing compared to me.

Happily, Hanekawa (who probably assumed that no one could forget, so completely, something that happened only two short years ago) didn’t seem to have caught on yet…but I was so ashamed that I didn’t feel like I’d ever be able to look her in the eye again.

That said, my attendance record was dangerously poor and she had ordered me to turn over a new leaf, so if school was about to start, I had no choice but to return to the classroom.

As I trudged away from the garbage area, I caught sight of the stone that up until recently had been ensconced in a shrine. Yup, now it just looked like a regular old rock.

Nothing but a rock.

Immobile.

The offerings of candy were still there, but that alone wasn’t enough to make it look like a stone statue or an object of worship─if someone cleaned up the cheap candy, no one would ever leave another offering there again.

It made me feel a little guilty about having destroyed the shrine in the throes of my humiliation. Having built it myself, though, I knew better than anyone that absolutely no divine retribution would be forthcoming…

Yet I still felt a little bad for that rock. Thanks to my sheer laziness and shame at the thought of taking my failed creation home, it had been on a real rollercoaster ride, now worshipped as a god, now reduced to a regular old rock.

Apologizing to a rock is kind of weird, but… I entered the flowerbed and lifted the stone off the ground.

Is it worshipped because it’s an aberration, or did it become an aberration because it was worshipped, Oshino had asked.

Undeniably, this rock had “gone” so far as to receive offerings, even if they were only cheap candy. Realizing how my unprincipled behavior might have turned it into an aberration made me feel even worse.

A stone we took for granted.

Became a statue whose grace we took to heart.

It could have turned into a graceless aberration─its origins no longer relevant.

Graceless or not, it would have come to be taken for granted.

That day could have arrived.

The thought struck me, and in turn, drove home another. Maybe I shouldn’t be attending school without feeling much of anything.

If the teacher wasn’t there yet when I got back to the classroom, I’d ask Hanekawa. Did my failure to be grateful for everyday life mean that I was like a stone, or that I was made of wood?

Though if stone can become statue─and wood a shrine, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing.

“Huh? What the…this rock.”

And that’s when I noticed.

It was the texture that did it, though I hadn’t noticed two years earlier. No question about it, though, this texture, this feel.

“It’s concrete?”