2,"Not Stopping" (short stories)
Added 2025-08-10 06:32:24 +0000 UTC(This is a continuation of the previous story)
https://www.fanbox.cc/manage/posts/10367594
—Huh?
Before I know it, I’m squatting.
My knees have opened on their own, and through the pantyhose I feel the chill of air against the insides of my thighs.
Even the way my weight settles onto the soles of my feet isn’t something I remember deciding.
My fingertips rummage inside my pouch.
A thin, hard cylinder—lipstick.
I lift it, pop off the cap.
Click, a small sound reaches my ear.
With just that, it feels as if the world begins to slowly sink.
I’m about to trace the outline of my lips when my wrist jerks wide,
and starts drawing circles around my mouth.
The greasy drag of the oil on skin and its cloying sweetness stick to the back of my nose.
Once around, twice, three times…
The pace is steady.
Like the pendulum of an old clock: left, right; left, right.
Stop, I think.
But the motion to stop won’t come out of my brain.
Only the word “stop” echoes inside my skull and thins away.
At the edge of my vision, a few people approach.
Arms lifting smartphones.
The cold of metal frames catches the light and for a moment burns my eyes.
Flash.
White light flattens my field of vision, the afterimage lingering behind my eyelids.
Even then, the hand doesn’t stop.
…Has it been a minute?
No, maybe ten seconds.
The edges of time blur; only light and sound repeat.
Laughter reaches my ears.
But I can’t tell whose voice it is or what it means.
It moves my eardrums as nothing but a waveform.
That wave eventually shaves down and rounds off the borders of my thoughts.
My knees shift slightly.
The blue stripes on my white socks warp a little with the motion of my ankles.
Grains of sand stuck to the soles of my sneakers scrape the asphalt—shrr…
Even that sound isn’t my will.
…Somehow, time has swollen to many times its size.
Repeating the same action leaves me with the fatigue of an hour.
Yet my muscles don’t complain.
My breath doesn’t falter.
It’s as if the motion has been cut out and my body has forgotten what “fatigue” is.
My head is pitch black.
Darkness spreads like a black water surface, with nothing floating on it—
no memories, no goal, no name, no past, no future.
Only repetition.
The hand moving the lipstick.
The angle of my knees.
The position of my feet.
Air going in and out.
They belong to something that isn’t me.
In time, even light and sound recede.
When I notice, all that remains is the feel of the motion—
the sensation of muscles sliding under skin, joints turning—
continuing on as if forever.
-To be continued-
