Monogatari Series - Volume 20 - Chapter 1.03

003

Stained purple─and I was there in the bathroom.

There in the usual Araragi residence bathroom─having fallen on my butt.

“…Huh?”

Huh?

I stood right up and looked at the mirror, only to find a plain mirror, nothing particularly strange about it─reflecting nothing unusual as it reflected my usual self. I was properly mirrored, and it traced my movements.

An undeniable mirror.

I tried darting around, but it kept up with me─and naturally wasn’t stained purple, either. What kind of mirror took on such a color? No matter how I much gazed at it or rubbed it, it was just a plain old mirror.

Wasn’t there some phenomenon where if you keep on projecting the same photo onto a screen with an overhead projector, the kind you’d find in a school’s AV room, the emitted light gets burned on and doesn’t vanish even after you turn the power off? Could what just took place be similar?

Maybe I was just seeing things.

A waking dream? I might hallucinate Hanekawa, but would I really hallucinate me?

Who knew, contrary to my belief that I’d woken myself up by washing my face, maybe I was still half asleep─thinking so, I decided to finish the job and washed my face again, carefully.

Yes, with some refreshing cold water─but no.

That’s what I tried to do, but I must’ve turned the wrong handle on the faucet because I ended up washing my face with scalding water. I accidentally put myself in a variety-show scenario, but it did even more to wake me up than if I’d used cold water, so it was an acceptable outcome.

Hm.

Looking up again, I still found nothing but a plain mirror─the mirror was a mirror, and just a mirror. I’d panicked like I’d encountered yet another aberrational phenomenon, but I suppose such dramatic occurrences aren’t common.

I had to admit it felt somehow anticlimactic, or even the slightest bit disappointing, but now that I’d brought an end to my involvement with Ogi, I did want to live in peace for at least a short while.

I’d called out for Shinobu for no good reason, but it looked like I hadn’t woken up the nocturnal girl, fortunately. No reaction came from my shadow.

Well, that was good to know. There was no telling how many donuts I’d have to treat the spoilt little girl to if I’d summoned her for no good reason. She was a reliable little girl but came at a high price.

Yes, I’d only seen a shadow and mistaken it for a ghost.

Actually, forget about shadows. How hopeless was I to let my own reflection scare me? While Koyomi Araragi may have spent a year fighting tooth and nail against countless aberrations, he was indeed but a shadow of his former self.

Appalled and disgusted, I picked up a towel and began drying down my hair─my self in the mirror moved in the exact same way, of course, and as he reached out for the hairdryer in the drawer with his left hand, me with my right…

“       ”

A voice came from the bath─followed by the sound of the door opening.

It was Karen, the older of my two little sisters.

Huh?

I thought I’d checked before washing my face, but I guess she’d been bathing─where had she hidden that big body of hers? Our bath is of a very standard size, unlike in the anime─had she dived underwater or what?

I take back my earlier statement, she’s always going to be a child. I turned to face her, but then…

“Hm?”

I was left at a loss for words─no, maybe it all made sense now. Maybe you could say in that case, of course she could’ve hidden, not just in the tub but anywhere in the room. Karen Araragi, my little sister who’d long outgrown her big brother in height, approaching six feet and still growing.

Karen Araragi’s head─was far below mine.

“           ”

While I was speechless, Karen simply had nothing special to say as she pointed at a bath towel atop a shelf─her finger hardly making it up to my face.

She could’ve reached it if she stood on her tiptoes, but she always knew how to make work for my idle hands─okay, it’s an exaggeration that her head was far below mine, but still.

Was she even five foot tall?

She was shorter than Tsukihi… Maybe about Sengoku’s height?

“                     ”

Suspicious at last about the way I was sizing her up, she twisted her fresh-from-the-bath body.

“Uh, no,” I said, not sure how to reply. I handed her the towel for the time being.

“ ”

Karen took it and began wiping herself down but finished in no time given how little surface area she had.

“           ”

“S-Sure,” her big brother obeyed like some kind of servant.

I might have continued to if she asked me to dress her next, but I couldn’t stay confused forever.

“Um, Karen…right?” I asked as I handed the girl her underwear.

“                 ” she answered as if I was making no sense─Karen Araragi.

Yes. Of course.

I could never mistake a member of my family even after a height or size change, but fully acknowledging that fact─if I may, while teenagers get taller, it’s highly uncommon for them to get shorter.

Overnight too.

“…”

Not even Karen ordered me to put the bra on her, and as I watched her do it herself, I came upon an awful possibility. Wasn’t she about this height back in elementary?

An elementary-aged Karen had─no, no.

Ridiculous. Impossible.

Where was the demand for a lolita Karen?

A child forever, literally? That role belonged to someone, but not her.

As that thought went through my head, I asked, my voice nonchalant: “Karen, how old are you turning next birthday again?”

She fastened the hook of her bra and looked at me, her eyes expecting a birthday present (my aching heart).

“ ” she replied.

Hm. I wasn’t dealing with lolita-Karen, after all. Then again, she didn’t start wearing a bra until middle school, and while her height was one thing, her legs and torso hadn’t filled out like this during elementary. I’d guessed the answer to my question even before I asked, but it did away with the awful possibility of another godforsaken time warp.

Good.

You only need to experience something as absurd as time travel once in your lifetime─in fact, once is once too often. In terms of absurdities, though, my tall little sister shrinking overnight by about a foot rivalled traveling through time.

It wasn’t right, no matter how you looked at it.

Oshino had warned me countless times about blaming everything on aberrations. Although I’d faced this side of myself and reflected on it not long ago, might my little sister be the victim of some urban legend? I hesitated to give voice to the thought.

“ ”

Since my perplexed look seemed to be perplexing her in turn, she wasn’t seeing things the same way… Though I was no longer speechless, I realized I mustn’t speak carelessly─Karen didn’t know she’d suffered from an aberration even last time around with that bee. She hadn’t begun to notice that the Araragi residence was quietly turning into a haunted house, and I wanted her mind and spirit to remain in good health─but did anything like that exist?

An aberration that makes you shorter…

The scariest yokai in the world for a short guy like me, but when you think about it, is it really so scary? I’ve heard of monsters that grow larger like the mikoshi-nyudo, but…

“                           ”

“N-No, it’s not like I have any… I was thinking of maybe going for a bike ride on my own.”

“                                   ”

“A-Ah…you really are disbanding, then. Right, at long last you’ll be a high schooler, in its full glory, huh?”

“                                         ”

“Oh…”

I did wonder (in a bad way) about these things to think about, but it seemed like we were able to conduct a proper conversation.

Didn’t someone say that you don’t need to be too scared of aberrations if you can communicate with them?

It did also seem like Karen’s voice was somehow flipped around, but maybe that was my imagination. Maybe it was echoing since we were near the bath.

How does a voice get flipped around, anyway?

How do you even express that?

“                             ” Karen said after all this time.

Just as she finished putting on her panties.

Perhaps this was her complex, maidenly heart talking; she was fine being seen naked, but not in her underwear. I felt relieved, though─I’d started to wonder how much longer I was going to be there.

Yeah, sure─acting calm, I exited the bathroom.

I’d failed to dry my hair but was no longer in a place to be concerned about that. I climbed straight up the stairs and, without even knocking, opened the door to my little sisters’ room that I’d ignored moments ago.

“           ”

“Do you two think I’m Sleeping Beauty or something?”

Tsukihi Araragi, who had immediately reacted in the same way as Karen─was no one but Tsukihi Araragi.

Tsukihi-chan.

Well, I guess Karen was also no one but Karen, but at least Tsukihi hadn’t gotten any taller or shorter.

No deviations in her elevation. Normal sized. A 1:1 scale Tsukihi Araragi.

Even her hair was down to her ankles just like the day before─Karen said they were about to go shopping, but Tsukihi still had on the yukata she wore around home.

“                               ”

She laughed, and nothing about her struck me as unusual─if I wanted to nitpick, her voice did sound a little strange, but that had to be my paranoia. If you asked me how exactly, I didn’t have a clue.

“Hey, Tsukihi? Is there something a little weird with Karen? I saw her just now in the bathroom─”

“                               ” Tsukihi said, neither listening to a word I said nor answering my question (instead answering a question I hadn’t asked) as she passed by me─but no, judging by this line, she hadn’t found Karen’s height to be strange in the least. She couldn’t have gone to bed and gotten up in the same room without noticing…so then, had my eyes fooled me?

Had the steam from the bath refracted the light to make her look shorter or something? If I wanted a logical explanation, sure, but that was such a stretch.

I couldn’t come to a logical understanding. Or to any understanding at all.

“Tsu-Tsukihi?” I stopped my sister reflexively.

“       ”

She paused in the hallway and looked back at me, but I didn’t know what to say.

Hasn’t Karen gotten shorter somehow? Even shorter than you.

Maybe that’s what I needed to ask, but she’d doubt my sanity if it was just a misunderstanding on my part.

And so, “You’re wearing your yukata wrong again,” I pointed out in my desperation.

“                                                 ”

She started undoing her obi in spite of the distance that remained between her and the bath as she descended the stairs─how much of a tomboy was she, anyway?

There’d been a change in her attitude lately according to Karen, but I couldn’t detect any kind of growth or shift given the way she acted.

Right as I had the unsettling thought that maybe it would’ve been nice if Ogi had done something about just her…

“     ” a voice came from the stuffed doll adorning a corner of my little sisters’ now-empty room.

Yotsugi Ononoki─it goes without saying.

The corpse doll. The parting gift left behind by the experts.

“                                                                                                 ”

“…”

Ononoki seemed the same as ever, making this meta statement the moment Tsukihi left─but something was very different about her tone.

It wasn’t her usual monotone.

And─she didn’t have on the blank expression she always wore.

Yotsugi Ononoki, the rigor-mortised corpse doll.

Said it with a dashing look, of all things.