M is for Metamorphosis
It's the third period of the school day, right before lunch. Ah. That's right. Biology, supplies a distant voice in Anri's head.
Normally, everyone would be pretty sleepy by now. But today the class is agitated. They sit up in their seats, squinting their eyes. Whispers scurry across the room.
"Ewww…"
"That's totally disgusting."
"Ugh. Just… ugh."
"Isn't it a bit tasteless, to be teaching that right before lunch?"
"I don't want to look! I can't look!"
"Quiet down, class," mumbles their middle-aged teacher. He dabs sweat off his forehead. Despite his own words, he looks remarkably discomfited. "So, today, we'll be learning about…"
Anri stares.
She doesn't find it disgusting.
She finds it—familiar.
The projector stretches the image on the board before the horrified class. The calm voice of the narrator clashes horribly with the mass of oozing flesh writhing in pain in the video. A black shadow squats over it. Knife in hand. Its eyes are pitiless pits of shining black.
"The parasitic wasp injects its eggs into the caterpillar…"
She watches as the wasp stabs the caterpillar. Again. And again. The victim's green gelatin body writhes, mirrored in the lenses of Anri's glasses. Anri imagines it going into shock, falling to the floor. Its destiny changed, forever. Would its blood be red, like human blood?
Red blood, human blood—she is familiar with that. The thud echoes in her ears, again, and again, of bodies hitting the pavement. She's never killed anyone with Saika—Saika is made for loving, after all. But, after slashing that many bodies, Anri has to wonder if she's capable of doing something like that. If she had to…
Somehow, she has no doubts.
"The larvae take over its body…"
Just like the way Saika took over the bodies it slashed, made them into its children. Anri hadn't bothered trying to figure out how Saika worked. It was an enchanted blade—something that didn't belong in reality.
Does something like her, its owner, belong in reality, then? Maybe it would be better if she didn't. But she has learned, nothing in this city is normal. The so-called everyday reality—there is no such thing. It's just an illusion, spun from the longings of humans for a nonexistent normality.
But that doesn't make her existence any less wrong.
Inside the caterpillar's body, the maggots writhe, fleshy white sacks of meat. Switching back to an outside view, the camera reveals the caterpillar's translucent skin, stretched taut. Unnatural movements bulge against its surface, threatening to pierce the skin, to spill out. The narrator informs them that it is "near time for the larvae to be born."
The class groans in disgust. One girl mimes sticking a finger down her throat. Makes a faint retching noise.
Retching. Throwing up. Vomit-worthy. Is this what people think of parasites, like her?
Why shouldn't they think like that? Tugging down her skirt, Anri folds her legs demurely. Her pencil lies limp between her fingers, her notebook blank, unwritten-in. What had Harima Mika thought of her, after all? Hadn't she been living off her just the way this wasp's children were living off the caterpillar? Perhaps the image hadn't been quite so grotesque, quite so violent, but the idea was the same. Just the word parasite is enough to evoke feelings of revulsion in most people, suggesting something unnatural, unfair, unwanted. Cowardice is disgusting; everyone hates a clingy person. The label certainly fits her—parasite, leech, bloodsucker. Living off a host, keeping her distance from the others who might find her out.
But Harima Mika, she thinks, has rejected her. Harima Mika is no longer her host.
Host.
Her eyes crawl sideways, first one way, then the other, their movements hidden behind a screen of hair. Fidgeting, her fingers close on the pencil.
Blonde hair and brown eyes. Black hair and grey eyes.
Her new hosts—
No.
Anri refuses it.
Imagine yourself pushing the idea away, she thinks. Reject it, as if you are rejecting something physically. An idea isn't something she can cut, but even someone like she has enough of her own strength to control it.
She doesn't want to think of them that way.
It's impossible for her to love them, but she can at least not prey off of them. They are healthy, young, vibrant. She refuses to weigh them down. If they are determined to sweep her along in their current, and they do seem to be, then she will accept that. But Anri refuses to fall on them.
Anri looks down. There, two feet, encased in school-approved shoes. She can walk. On her face, two lips. She can talk. In her head, what's speaking right now—a mind. She can think. She has her memories and her pains, but who doesn't in this world?
It is past time she made her own way in life.
"Soon, the caterpillar is paralyzed by the larvae inside it. They inject a…"
Anri suppresses a smile.
After all, things have changed. She's gotten to know the boys well. She knows there's no way she could paralyze something like those two. Kida, the self-titled blonde hurricane of love, a winking whirlwind tossing out coy glances and smiling words. Mikado, with all the quiet, hidden charge of storm clouds gathering over the city at night. They are forces of nature.
There's no doubt that they will become something amazing, some powers truly to be feared—or admired—even in a city as full of admired things as Ikebukuro. Their destinies are long paths ahead of them, filled with unseen turns and a million forks. Without that parasite to prey off of them, the caterpillars can look forward to full lives in the air. She imagines their jeweled wings catching the favor of the sun as it smiles their way.
And as for Anri—
She holds no hopes of becoming something that beautiful. But at the least, she can change, too. Something homely, she thinks, a smile tracing her mouth. A beetle, maybe?
No matter. There is still hope. She can escape her abnormal cage of stillness and join the strange parade of the so-called everyday.
The future is running before her, and Anri is determined to catch up.
Involuntarily, her hand dances across the white page. A single lead mark, two—IB, a simple sketch of a butterfly.
The page is blank no longer.