Slow Prison Life

Little Brother Remembers the Old Days

My older sister is beautiful, but for some reason she casts a thin shadow. You could say, “She’s a beautiful woman if you look closely.”

If you really observe her you can see how beautiful she is, but she is someone who won’t enter your field of vision unless you’re consciously looking for her. While all the other young noble women who were aiming for His Highness and that status of princess continued to call her the “Daytime Moon” as an insult, I can honestly say I thought it was a little strange.

Because His Highness Elliott, despite being a man, really was sparklingly beautiful………..meaning that my older sister who liked to stay in the background really did fit the name Daytime Moon.

♠

“Oi, isn’t that George!”

George made an ever-so faint smile upon hearing Sykes’s slightly impatient, loud voice.

“Ah, Sykes…….”

Sykes ran up to the garden steps where George was sitting.

“I’ve been getting worried since you haven’t shown up at His Highness’s place lately……..you look so awful what happened!? Is it lack of sleep? Are you eating enough?”

“No, it’s not because of……..I’m just a little tired…….”

“Times like these you need steak. All your fatigue will recover with a little steak. I think for most bodies eating around 500 units of cooked rare red meat will improve physical condition.”

“No no, that’s not the problem……..”

George forced a smile while explaining to his friend.

“Alexandra returned home suddenly……….so, she said she was going to give me strict training in order to be a man worthy of her, and I’ve been crammed with intense education on foreign affairs ever since………my head is already unable to handle it and feels like it’s about to burst.”

“I see! At times like this………yeah, steak. You eat a lot, around fifty servings, and your mental fatigue will disappear before you know it!”

“Only you could solve your problems like that.”

“But Alexandra………it’s been over a year since she left with her parents overseas.”

“Yeah.”

“What. Did you get excited the moment you two met up again and kiss?”

“How is that possible you idiot? It wasn’t that kind of situation.”

There’s no way George could say she had been hiding, watching as he groveled in the dirt towards his older sister while begging that she not reveal every shameful thing he has ever done to their family though.

“Ever since, I’ve been unable to show my face in His Highness’s room even when I did have the time………

“I see~.”

Sykes made a knowing grin and lightly punched George’s shoulder.

“Well, you and Alexandra get along well. Meanwhile I just escorted Margaret.”

“Margaret is different from a fiancee, a more noble existence……….oi, before saying anything about me Sykes, aren’t you in the same position? Does Martina know about you losing your head over Margaret?”

A villainous smile floated across George’s face.

“Martina loves you so passionately. Compared to His Highness and Sis, and Alexandra and me, don’t you have your own burdensome political engagement? Well, you could never marry Margaret anyway since she has His Highness, but wouldn’t it be bad if Martina were to find out you were putting in so much effort for Margaret?”

Although Sykes’s fiancee is another engagement through politics, it seems as if she has been in love with him ever since they were children. She had moved away from the capitol, living along the country’s border because of her father’s new job, but that doesn’t mean her eventual marriage to Sykes was dissolved.

Before making fun of others, shouldn’t he be thinking about himself? George looked down on Sykes feeling just the tiniest bit of revulsion………..

Sykes was vibrating.

That huge body of his, it was shaking with hyper fine vibrations like some kind of toy.

Looking closely, a good amount of sweat was pouring down his skin, his hands had gone stiff, and his eyes were completely hollow.

“………….sorry. I should have never mentioned Martina.”

Sykes eventually settled down.

George then muttered a few words to him.

“……….that past uproar, I just remembered it.”

“What the? You remembering the old days or something?”

“Yeah, I guess you could call them memories……….though they’re a little strange.”

George picked up a pebble near his foot and tossed it away. It lightly glided through the air for several meters before digging itself into the lawn like a stake.

“For some reason I can’t remember what happened before or after, just that one scene.”

♠

He couldn’t understand if that was something he actually saw himself, or if it was something he experienced in a dream one night.

Perhaps it was a visual hallucination from a scene that had shocked him from a book, or it might have been a completely different scene, and it has just been transmuted into something else inside his head.

“The weather was really good, the garden spread out beneath the blue sky……..”

Perhaps he was remembering something from a garden party. There were children in George’s vision. However……….

“The problem is, there’s a disconnect, and I only see the middle of the scene.”

A girl with reddish brown hair stood on the bank of a pond in a large garden.

The little girl was in a pretty dress, and she was staring at the surface of the pond for a long time. In her hand were some pebbles which she occasionally threw into the pond. It was something that little children often did……..if there was nobody already there.

There was a boy in the pond, and he was drowning away from shore. He desperately reached out his hand, but the water pouring into his mouth prevented him from calling for help. He desperately struggled to rise up out of the water, but he just couldn’t make it to shore………..because the girl kept throwing those damn pebbles.

Whenever that drowning child tried to make it to shore, that young girl threatened him with some sharp stones, acting nothing like how a child would. It was only at those moments when the little girl threw a stone that you could hear the boy scream.

“So strange, that girl’s face………”

That girl was making the boy drown, but she was so calm, with no emotion in  her expression.

She wasn’t sneering at the boy, looking down on him like a bully, nor was there any anger or hatred in her eyes. Just indifference, as if she were forced to watch her parents’ lecture about, “Make sure the bonfire is out completely”……..as if she were doing some trivial task in an office, a business face.

Then around the girl, there were a group of boys whose clothes had gotten all muddy. They were all sitting down, crying.

All of the boys were bigger than the girl, but with tear-stained faces they were all yelling, “Please, forgive him already,” “He’s going to die. Stop it already,” trying to convince the girl………but the girl ignored all of them, continuing to watch the drowning boy.

Sometimes one of the children would try and get close to the girl………..but she was too quick, and the boy would always be repelled by another pebble.

♠

“That’s all I can remember. Nothing before or after. Only that scene is seared into my brain.”

“……….what are you saying, that’s a pretty surreal scene.”

“Yeah. It’s even more surreal that I can’t say it’s just a nightmare. It might have really happened, but I don’t understand what I saw. I heard from a scholar that it might be a metaphor or something, but I just didn’t get it.”

“You remembered it………Hahah, maybe it has something to do with these recent events with your sister.”

“Maybe…….”

George’s head dropped, crestfallen.

“……….I realized myself. This, my heart is being gouged out in the same way………”

That vision, it wasn’t a dream.

That was reality.

“No part of that strange memory was a dream. I was simply remembering what had happened before my eyes.”

“…….possibly right?”

“Yeah…….for some meeting, Sis threw sanctions on a boy simply because she didn’t like him…….”

The two men fell silent, leaving the only noise to be heard the cry of a passing swallow, trying to induce a more cheerful atmosphere.

After a little while George lifted his head up.

“Because of that. When I remembered that, I did notice one thing.”

“……….What? If it’s another scary story, could you spare me?”

“You can’t ask that when I don’t even understand it………I, am not good with Alexandra.

Although Alexandra is a childhood friend, honestly we aren’t that close.

From the beginning she was cruel, abusive, and loved to play pranks. She always seemed like she was hard to deal with, and I remember her as a bully.

As you’d expect she calmed down recently, but even now she has a condescending attitude and is verbally abusive, so when she traveled with her parents on their overseas inspection, honestly, I was relieved I wouldn’t be seeing her for a while.

“But, that was also part of my misunderstanding.”

“Misunderstanding? I only knew her from a certain age, but hasn’t she always been like that?”

“Yeah. But when I think about it and connect that to the memory I remembered earlier…….I realized I got various memories confused with one another.”

The girl who did things to George wasn’t alone.

“When I think carefully about what was done to me, I realize it wasn’t just one girl. I can’t remember her face, but there are times when the girl doing things to me has blonde hair, and times when she has reddish-brown hair.”

“Oi, that’s…….”

“That’s right. It was the blonde girl who would always abuse me verbally. Meanwhile the reddish-brown haired girl would always silently do something……..pranks, experiments she called them. Alexandra wasn’t the one doing those experiments though. It was Sis.”

Sykes stared up into the sky. Today too the sky was high.

“……….Alexandra too is a victim of a misunderstanding.”

“That’s how it is. I did a bad thing to her……..the number one memory that made me dislike her, wasn’t even her.”

“……….what happened?”

“……….I can only remember one scene from this memory too.”

♠

How old would I have been? In the garden, I was spending my time looking for, and playing with some snails.

Then before I knew what was going on, a girl came next to me, grabbed my hand, and took me to the back of the garden………

That girl with the reddish-brown hair took me to a place where nobody would see, and suddenly pulled down my pants.

“Wh, what!?”

“Right, a little…….could you lend me your butt?”

Like that, in the girl’s hand was a box of firecrackers………..

♠

“Wait, hey that’s…….What happened!? What did she do!? What the hell……..No, as you’d think! I’m too afraid to even ask!”

“Hahahah, don’t worry about it! That’s all I can remember! I can’t remember what Sis did to me……………….I can’t remember………”

The strange, high pitched laughter of two men echoed in the gardens as a passing maid tilted her head to the side, wondering what in the world was going on.

♠

Recently Sis has become more beautiful.

Perhaps it’s because she’s living as she’d like now, or maybe I’m just stereotyping her and putting myself in her shoes.

But the true her genuinely sparkles, a person who is radiantly beautiful. At the very least she has a beauty that wouldn’t be outdone by His Highness.

The true Sis, she isn’t a Daytime Moon.

She’s a supernova whose explosive power is just about to devour the sun.