Free Nan-Core by Mahokaru Numata Page B

candywould make her puke, but I paid no attention.
    “I don’t care if you throw up, just try them.”
    She ate the first of the rice balls with tears in her eyes, making it look like she was swallowing a caterpillar or something.
    “Another,” I said. Then another … and another. After the fifth she began to take a rice ball even when I said nothing, eventually eating about ten. Even after those, she occasionally took one of the rice balls still on the plate and put it in her mouth, as if suddenly noticing they were there. She told me various things about herself.
    “I take these off when I’m at home,” she said, peeling the bandages from her wrist and revealing the incisions to me for the first time. Brown stripes like those on the belly of a tabby cat lined the space between her wrist and the middle of her forearm. Some were old, others were still red and damp. A couple looked quite deep.
    “Does it hurt when you cut yourself?”
    “Of course it does. It’d be pretty dull if it didn’t.” When all the rice balls were gone Mitsuko opened a bag of caramel popcorn and tipped the contents onto the empty plate, then started to pick at that, too. “Sometimes there’s hardly any blood, even when I make a deep cut. It makes me restless so I make even more cuts. Blood’s warm, you know. It feels great when it runs together from a number of cuts and starts to trickle off my arm. I think I hit a vein once. It was amazing, there was so much blood, but I collapsed and passed out when I tried to wash the wound. I’ve been taking iron supplements since that time. I wonder why red, though. Not blue, not green. I think red’s kind of special, more than the other colors. But the blood dries the moment it’s outside. Like, look at the cover of this cushion. Turns into this horrible-looking stain.”
    I was quiet, listening to what she had to say, but she sounded like the narrator of some story, something from a video rented on awhim. The way she spoke didn’t give me any real sense of how it felt to cut oneself.
    The whole time, for some reason I was wondering whether there might be some way to stop Mitsuko from doing this. I didn’t want to let her cut herself anymore, even though I knew she might someday die by my hand.
    Strange men would sometimes call out to us when we were walking together outside. I suppose they regarded a woman who wore heavy makeup as someone that would readily sleep with anybody. For men, the fact that Mitsuko was an odd stick-like thing didn’t bother them so long as they could have sex with her.
    Among those men was a young worker at a ramen joint that was close to Mitsuko’s apartment. We’d never been inside the place, but whenever he saw us, either on his way out or coming back from a delivery, he always tried to flirt with Mitsuko.
    If she caught him watching, she gave a disgusted look. Yet, all of a sudden she’d start walking seductively nonetheless.
    “Oh shit, it’s Ramen again.”
    “Ladies, ladies. How ’bout a drive next time I’m off? I’ve got a pretty good set of wheels.”
    We’d taken to calling him Ramen; he had terrible skin and buckteeth, and from what we could tell he was essentially a walking ball of lust. He would bring his delivery moped to a stop and grin to show he’d had lots of experience with girls, but all the while his gaze would shift restlessly with fear.
    “Ugh, no thanks,” Mitsuko said, after we’d ignored him and walked on. “He’s like a dog in heat. I bet he jerks off ten times a day.”
    “You do that yourself, Mitsuko.” The words slipped from my mouth.
    Her eyes went wide; it was hard to make out where her eyeliner ended and her eyelids began. “Eww. Don’t be gross, I don’t masturbate.”
    “Cutting’s just a variation of getting yourself off.”
    I was still trying to get her to eat more, little by little, thinking she might lose interest in cutting herself if her diet improved. I had made potato salads, noodle dishes, and