A/N: Full author's notes on my profile. Enjoy!
Today was a normal day.
Shiki had gone through her normal routines- normal breakfast, normal bike ride, normal school day- and then she had gone home. Some attempt had been made to break up the monotony, however, as her best friend, Eri, came home with her. Though, this happened so often that it was also normal.
Shiki wished it wasn't though. To her, normal seemed terrible.
Oh, she would smile, laugh, act happy, but inside she was too depressed to put into words. That was because no matter what she did or how hard she tried, Eri always seemed better than her.
That feeling was extremely pronounced today.
Shiki stared down at the paper in front of her, pencil clutched in her hand. She started to sketch something, but quickly erased it. Looking across the table at Eri, she saw that her friend's paper was mostly taken up by a sketch of a shirt that looked better than some store bought clothes Shiki had seen. Not that that was unusual. The two girls would often brainstorm ideas together. Eri would come up with something amazing, Shiki wouldn't, and then Shiki would end up sewing Eri's latest creation.
And Shiki hated it.
She had been to a few fashion shows (with Eri, of course), and it was always the designer that got the credit. Nobody cared about who sewed the outfit.
Shiki didn't want to end up like that. She didn't want to be lost in Eri's shadow.
"…Shiki?"
She started, coming out of her thoughts, and realizing she had been staring at Eri for an uncomfortably long time.
Eri looked at her, and, after a glance down at Shiki's blank paper, said, "Having trouble?"
Shiki nodded silently, her gaze dropping. She hated the sympathetic look in her friend's eyes.
"You're not meant to be a designer."
Shiki's gaze shot up, now wide-eyed. The two girls stared at each other in silence for a moment (a second? A minute? A hour? Who knew?) until they both heard the snap of breaking wood. Shiki hadn't even realized her grip was tightening, but the pencil she had been using was now split in two.
Suddenly there was the scrape of chair legs, the pounding of running feet, and then Shiki was outside on her bike, peddling down the street as fast as she could. She didn't know where she was going, but she didn't really care. She just wanted to get away.
Around her the sound of the city roared. On any normal day, Shiki found, in the thrum of the voices and pounding of feet, a comforting background music to her life. It was something she had grown up with, and it normally served as a reminder of the life of everyone and everything around her.
On a normal day it would have, but now, with cold wind and hot tears in her eyes, it was anything but normal. Now the sound of Shibuya beat at her mind and silenced any thought she might have.
Looking back, after she had a chance to calm down, Shiki remembered a book see had read a few years ago called A Hat Full of Sky. It had been translated from English, and Shiki suspected the author had used a lot word play that made no sense in Japanese, but it had been in the translation anyway. At the end of the book, there was a fairly long speech about how, because humans had evolved from monkeys, they still had a bit of monkey in them. But the monkey didn't know about right or wrong, and it didn't think about consequences. It just knew what it wanted, and was barely smart enough to figure out how to get it.
Shiki sped down the streets of Shibuya, not thinking all. She heard a car coming up behind her, and at that moment, Shiki gave in to the monkey.
Her arms jerked, seemingly of their own accord, steering her into the path of the oncoming car. Time seemed to slow, and Shiki thought "What am I doing?"
Then time resumed it's normal pace, caching up to the moment with a flash. The girl and the car meet with a instant of white hot pain, the screech of metal on metal, and the sickening crunch of fragmenting bone.