Earthlings

Natsuki¹ told Yuu² that a grown man was going to kill her. She begged him to have sex before her body stopped being hers. At two in the morning they sneaked to the graveyard, where by candlelight they pressed together — Natsuki¹ desperate to reach a place inside Yuu²'s skin that the teacher hadn't touched.

Afterward, she swallowed stolen sleeping pills. Yuu,² who had once watched his own mother⁸ attempt the same thing, forced them from her mouth. Then Kise⁴'s flashlight found them naked among the graves, and the adults came running.

Natsuki¹ was locked in the storehouse. Yuu² was beaten in the rice fields. In the morning, she found the marriage pledge hidden inside her shoe, with Yuu²'s handwriting in the margin urging her to keep her promise. They would not meet again for twenty-three years.

Locked in her room for weeks, Natsuki¹'s magical thinking intensified until Piyyut's voice rang crystal clear in her broken right ear. He told her Igasaki⁵ was possessed by a Wicked Witch who would kill her unless she struck first.

At three in the morning she let herself into Igasaki⁵'s house — he'd shown her where the spare key was — carrying a grass-cutting scythe from the garden shed. The world turned pink. She perceived a blue lump on the bed, not a sleeping man dosed on his own anxiety medication.

She brought the scythe down, chanting the word Popinpobopia like an incantation, until the lump stopped moving. She burned her clothes and the blade in the school incinerator. The murder went unsolved. Natsuki¹ joined Igasaki⁵'s grieving parents in handing out witness-appeal flyers at the station.

Twenty-three years vanished into survival. At thirty-one, Natsuki¹ registered on surinuke.com — a site for people seeking to evade society's expectations through marriage, suicide, or disappearance. She found Tomoya,³ a man forced to bathe with his mother until fifteen who could not tolerate a real woman's body.

Their marriage was architectural: separate bedrooms, separate meals, shared housework governed by precise rules, physical contact limited to accidental fingertip brushes. Both saw society as a Factory manufacturing babies through brainwashed components.

Their union was camouflage, designed to deflect the surveillance of relatives and friends who monitored every couple's reproductive progress. It was the most comfortable relationship either had known — two people hidden in plain sight, their reproductive organs quietly observed but unused.

Tomoya³ lost his seventh job and spiraled toward wanting to die, but Natsuki¹'s stories of Akishina had built the mountain house into his personal paradise. Through a chain of family phone calls and the intervention of Natsuki¹'s eldest aunt, they gained permission to visit.

Uncle Teruyoshi,⁷ now white-haired and diminished, drove them up the winding mountain road. There they found Yuu² — unemployed, living in the house after his company was acquired and he took voluntary redundancy. He was polite but guarded, particularly with Natsuki.¹

When the couple explained their alien worldview and sexless arrangement, he responded with the careful distance of someone determined to remain an Earthling. Three people who had once been inseparable as children now circled each other like cautious animals sharing a den.

Kise⁴ arrived first as a pressure agent, dropping pointed remarks about outstaying their welcome. Then Tomoya,³ pursuing his theory that taboo-breaking would undo his brainwashing, visited his elder brother and earnestly proposed an incestuous act.

His brother secretly recorded the conversation and called their father. Tomoya³ fled back to Akishina by bullet train, but his father followed with the address from Natsuki¹'s parents. He beat Tomoya³ until a tooth flew out, then dragged both of them home.

The cross-examination that followed came from every direction: Natsuki's mother⁶ demanded she become intimate with Tomoya,³ calling it a wife's duty. Shizuka⁹ was recruited to deliver the same sermon over dinner. Tomoya³'s father declared their sexless marriage worse than barrenness and threatened divorce.

In a private karaoke room, Kise⁴ dropped her bombshell: the night of the summer festival, she had followed Natsuki¹ and watched Igasaki⁵ take her into his house. She'd peered through the garden window. Her interpretation was monstrous — she'd been jealous. Too ugly and hairy for anyone to notice her, she saw her younger sister being chosen by a handsome man as divine favoritism she herself had been denied.

Then she asked, almost casually, whether Natsuki¹ had killed him. Natsuki¹ denied it. Kise⁴ smiled and pivoted to demands: get intimate, produce a baby, live decently — or face consequences. What Natsuki¹ didn't yet realize was that her sister⁴ had retrieved evidence from the school incinerator and preserved it for over twenty years.

Tomoya³ announced he would submit to the Factory and proposed divorce so Natsuki¹ could escape alone. She refused — they would escape together. At Uncle Teruyoshi⁷'s house, where Yuu² was staying while preparing for job interviews, they stood around a table bearing Tomoya³'s wedding ring, Natsuki¹'s wedding ring, and the wire ring from the childhood graveyard ceremony.

They recited inverted vows: swearing not to love, cherish, or stand by each other, but to live life for its own sake. Yuu² officiated, bewildered. As the couple turned to leave, he followed them outside.

He confessed he'd spent his life obeying unspoken orders — from his mother,⁸ professors, employers — and now, encountering freedom for the first time, the only thing he could think to do with it was come with them.

Back in Akishina, they redesigned existence from scratch. Time dissolved into Light Time and Dark Time. They went naked, slept in a communal mound of bedding, stole vegetables from evacuated neighbors after a landslide emptied most of the village.

They discussed sexual desire with clinical detachment, concluding that solitary satisfaction was more rational than mating, that love was merely an anesthetic the brain manufactured to prettify reproduction. They cut the telephone line.

Natsuki,¹ for the first time since childhood, felt her body relaxing — the cells that had been clenched for decades slowly uncurling in the presence of two creatures who wanted nothing from her flesh. Meanwhile, Kise⁴'s furious voicemails accumulated on the phone Natsuki¹ checked across the red bridge. She smashed it on the road and threw the pieces into the river.

Igasaki⁵'s elderly parents arrived in darkness with a golf club and evidence Kise⁴ had preserved — a recording, a partially burned scythe, bloodstained socks. Natsuki¹ killed the mother with a calligraphy trophy; together the three killed the father. A landslide sealed them in completely.

When food ran out, Yuu² proposed butchering the corpses. They drained blood, carved flesh from bone. Eating miso soup with human meat, Natsuki¹ tasted food for the first time in twenty-three years — her destroyed mouth restored, her broken ear suddenly clear.

They began tasting each other's flesh too, unable to stop. When Kise⁴ and their mother⁶ arrived with a rescue party, they found three naked, swollen-bellied creatures who introduced themselves as Popinpobopians and promised, with serene confidence, that the condition was contagious.