My Annihilation

It doesn’t even feel like this is me. It’s all so blurry, like something shrouded in a distant fog. But evidently somebody is going to take my place. Someone willing to take over for me, accepting all the horrors . . . I’m going to be saved.

“Turn this page, and you may give up your entire life.” Or so the first page said. But I had no intention of giving my old life up. He might have left behind unfinished business, but it was no business of mine. All I wanted was his identity.

A white suitcase stood in the corner of the room. My heart beat a little faster. I hadn’t brought that suitcase here. That must be where it was. Kozuka’s body. Trees danced outside the window, as if to tell me of the sinister nature of this place. But I had understood immediately what to do. Bury that suitcase in the forest, and this would all be o

Though only partway through, I reflected on what I had read thus far. This had been a dismal life. Right, I thought. That explains why his life cost me almost nothing.

If my intentions had been murderous, I’m sure I would have been too scared to bring her, coward that I am. There was something odd about my guilty conscience. Almost like I felt the guilt for having murdered her, but in advance, and brought her to the place trying to make up for it, in a bizarre mental loop.

This gave me the distinct feeling of a heavy object passing down my throat. I became afraid of choking on my food, each piece turning into dead weight after I had swallowed, like it was stuck there, so that I had to take these tiny little bites.

1 A cramped room in a rundown mountain lodge, and on the desk a manuscript, left open to page one, as if it had been waiting here for ages to be read.

When the hall had started to clear out, I went over to say something to him. My mouth dried up. My breath was shallow. The murder of the girl and the man they had arrested were plenty scary as it was, but what really terrified me was my classmate. I addressed him in a whisper. The range of lights decking the funeral hall transformed the tense figur

I had a place where I could go. A place I went when it was hard to breathe.