This is the first part of a new series called Mirror. Each story is its own thing. No connections between them except the name. Read it, and tell me what you think. This particular story has multiple parts
Shinzo Haruka was the kind of boy who believed you.
Not because he was stupid. Because he wanted to. He wanted the world to be the kind of place where people meant what they said. He wanted his friends to be his friends. He wanted the things he was told to be true.
That's why he trusted Hanzo. That's why he trusted all of them.
I knew Shinzo since we were six. We grew up in the same lane in Yamato — the old village on the edge of the valley, where the rice fields run right up to the forest and the forest runs right up to nothing. There's a shrine on the hill above the village. Nobody remembers who it's for. The old people say it was there before the village was. They say the village was built around it.
Shinzo and I used to climb up there when we were kids. We'd sit on the stone steps and look down at the houses and pretend we were kings. He'd always say the same thing: "One day we'll live somewhere else. Somewhere bigger."
I'd always say the same thing back: "Where?"
He never had an answer. He just smiled.
That was Shinzo. He believed in somewhere else. He just didn't know where it was.
The thing with Hanzo happened in October.
I wasn't there. I heard about it from three different people, and none of them told it the same way. That's how rumors work in a village. Everyone knows the shape of the story. Nobody knows the truth of it.
What I know is this: Hanzo had been peeking into the girls' changing room after gym class. Shinzo saw him. And Shinzo — because he was Shinzo, because he believed in doing the right thing, because he was naive — told a teacher.
Hanzo got called into the office. He got a warning. Nothing more. The teacher said it was a "first offense."
But Hanzo didn't forget.
I saw him the day after. He was standing by the shoe lockers with his hands in his pockets, staring at the wall. His face was blank. But his jaw was tight. And I remember thinking — I remember this clearly, even now — "He looks like a door that's been closed."
He didn't say anything to me. He didn't say anything to anyone. He just stood there, and stared at the wall, and then he walked out.
That was the last time I saw him before Shinzo disappeared.
Nobody watched Hanzo for ten days.
That's what he said afterward. I don't know when he said it, or who he said it to, but the words got around. "Nobody watched me for ten days. And then that brat did."
I don't know what Hanzo did. I don't know how he did it. But I know this:
A week later, Shinzo wasn't in school.
I asked his parents. They said he was ill. They said he'd be back soon. They said not to worry.
But they didn't look at me when they said it. They looked at the floor. They looked at the wall. They looked at anything except my face.
And I noticed something else.
Their house was quiet.
Not the quiet of a sick boy sleeping in the next room. A different quiet. A deep quiet. Like the house itself had stopped breathing.
I went to the shrine that afternoon. I don't know why. I just did.
I sat on the stone steps and looked down at the village, and I thought about Shinzo, and I thought about Hanzo, and I thought about the way Shinzo's parents hadn't looked at me.
And then I heard something.
Footsteps. Behind me. Coming up the steps.
I turned.
There was no one there.
But the bell above the shrine — the old one, the one nobody rings — was swinging.
Just barely.
Just enough.
Part Two coming soon.
— Om
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