Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder - Stories

The gang took just one drop of her blood tears and left, as usual. The girl sat on the lawn and wept. Her father, who’d always been there to hold her hand, had been blown to smithereens. Seeing how she was suffering, I was moved—despite not being in the habit of empathizing with people—to pop on a pair of sandals and make my way over to the stately and by-now-familiar garden next door. I entered the grounds through a segment of wall that had been damaged in the fighting. When I got closer to her, I saw the grass where she was sitting was entirely slicked with red. These were the tears whose mysterious powers the gang was after.

She didn’t even raise her head as I approached. What do you do to get a woman to stop crying in a situation like this? “Chin up, now,” I said, trying to keep the squeak out of my voice. I told her that I understood how she felt losing her last living relative. That I had no one besides my doddering old man.

I thought I might be in love. As she raised her face, I saw a red tear trail down her cheek and knew I’d do anything to take her father’s place as her right-hand man. I didn’t know how to shoot a gun, but perhaps I could learn to drive instead. I hardly recognized myself. I knew what this was called: unconditional love. The gang would probably be after me, but being beside her, even just briefly, would be worth it. My very first experience of love for a fellow human being. I’d bare my heart to her, tell her everything. How I’ve never been able to sympathize with anyone before, but would try to understand the loneliness that must come from having extraordinary abilities. That we’d no doubt face plenty of obstacles, but hey, there’s always my old man.

She’d been still for so long, but suddenly she got to her feet. “Love?” she said, moving toward me, head angled inquiringly. “Love? Love? Think you’ll still love me once you’ve heard what I’ve got to say for myself?”

I didn’t know why she was acting so aggressive toward a guy who was obviously trying to help, but I figured she was probably confused.

“Nothing you can say will shock me,” I said, affecting calm, nodding like a man of the world. I hadn’t brought up my spying on her, but it was possible she’d been aware of me for some time.

“All this is my own fault,” she said, “for falling in love with my father.”

I was dumbstruck.

She looked into my eyes to make sure I was listening, and began her tale.

“I was ten years old when Mother first suspected I had designs on Father. She kept warning him, but he always brushed her off, told her not to be absurd. Said she had a bee in her bonnet. That I was only a child.

“But Mother was right. I meant to take him away from her. I used every trick in the book to turn them against each other. They’d been so close, but Father defended me until the very end, saying it didn’t do to suspect a child. He wasn’t interested in knowing the truth. He wanted to think of his daughter as some kind of angel. He should have realized that was hopelessly naive, if he remembered anything about being ten himself.”

She stepped toward me, holding out her little hands. I should have been thrilled, but my body felt all tense, looking for a way to escape.

“Mother seethed, grew hysterical. Unable to prove that I was a wicked child, she finally cracked and shouted at me, and raised her hand in anger. That was the moment I’d been waiting for. I stumbled hard on purpose, and fell into the road. I was taken to the hospital and had to have a dozen stitches, but after that the court made sure she could never see me again. Father, who’d adored her gentle nature, divorced her, and we moved away together. Do you see? I got the law on my side.

“That’s why Mother joined the evil gang. She needed to find something that was more powerful than the law. I’m sure she made a study of every conceivable means of murder, purely to make me suffer—you know about the wonderfully imaginative, almost artistic ways each of my brothers was killed. You couldn’t do that without a genuine love of killing, or a serious obsession.”

She gave me no time to respond.

“One other thing—those weren’t my little brothers. They were our children. Mine and Father’s. I could hardly go to a clinic, so I gave birth to them all at home, in the kitchen. I admit I was pretty surprised when the triplets turned up. This isn’t a fight for justice,” she said, pausing at last. “It’s a deeply personal matter.”

I tried to rouse my stiff tongue. “But aren’t they collecting your tears?” I said. “Those tears of blood, I thought they had some kind of special power.”

“The tears?” She shrugged. “Who knows? They don’t do a thing. Mother just takes them as trophies of the misery she causes me, drop by drop.”

I’d obviously gotten everything wrong. What with the pink hair, and the fact she was just a girl, I’d simply assumed she was a plucky young thing fighting on the side of good. I wanted to get away, but as she kept trying to come closer, I’d inched my way back over the deck, and found myself inside the house.

“Do you really love me?”

She sounded sweet, but I no longer felt like saying yes. “I should really go check on my old man,” I said, gesturing vaguely toward my house. “He hasn’t got anyone but me to look after him.”

She seemed to sense the advantage was hers. Grabbing my arm, she said, “If you love me, then find out how it feels to be me.”

“How it feels?”

“To lose your family. You try it.”

I’d realized a while ago that I was in over my head. But it wasn’t going to be easy to get off the hook. I couldn’t let my smile slip just yet.

“Lose my family? I couldn’t kill my old man,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean. To feel what I feel,” she said, immobilizing me with one hand, “you need to seduce him.”

“I need to—”

“If you want to get to know me.”

“But I’m—”

“That’s what you need to do.”

I hadn’t been lying when I’d said I wanted to understand her, but there was no way I was going to seduce my geriatric father. Just picturing it made acid rise in the back of my throat.

“Aside from Mother, no one realized that I’d seduced Father, not even Father himself. He was full of guilt for having ruined my life, and I planned to use that to make sure we went on living together like man and wife. With Mother legally out of the picture, there was nothing to stop me from lying to everyone else, and taking the secret of my wickedness to the grave. Or so I assumed.

“But I was wrong. Because then it all started. First my hair: I used to have beautiful black hair. But soon it started to turn pink from the roots out. I dyed it, but it wouldn’t take—when I woke up the next day the pink color would be deeper than ever. That wasn’t all. It grew out at an incredible rate. I always wore my hair in a bob, but now it comes down to my waist. Eventually I gave up cutting it, because it just keeps growing.

“Next was my eyes. Each time I looked in a mirror, my irises had lost some of their dark color, until they were finally emerald green, like a doll’s. And then my brothers. I told you they were mine and Father’s children, but the thing is, we only ever conceived the first one. The rest of them we don’t recall making. So all we were doing was living together, but my belly kept swelling, and I was trapped in a hell of perpetual morning sickness and contractions. Then, when I was giving birth, the babies’ little heads would get caught, putting me in agony. Some of them got stuck for too long, and they didn’t make it.

“I was gradually starting to understand what these changes meant. There was some force out there that wasn’t going to let me get away with what I’d done to Father, even if I’d managed to fool everyone else.