Hunchback

by Saou Ichikawa

Here I was, feeling my spine being crushed a little more with every book that I read, while all those ebook-hating able-bodied people who went on and on about how they loved the smell of physical books, or the feel of the turning pages beneath their fingers, persisted in their state of happy oblivion.

Instead of tormenting myself about the chastity of my existence, I selected one of the futures I’d dreamed up and tweeted it: In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute. I had experienced what it was like to be a woman whose money had distanced her from friction; I wanted to become a woman who earned money through that friction.

The longer I lived, the more my body collapsed into an ever more aberrant shape. It wasn’t collapsing into death. Rather, it collapsed so as to live, collapsed as a testament to all the time I’d withstood. That made my disability decisively different from the fatal diseases or decrepitude of aging that the able-bodied might experience, where there was variation only in timing.

When I read a book my spine bends, crushing my lung, puncturing a hole in my throat; when I walk I bang my head—to live, my body breaks. What is the difference between taking life from a body like that, over a body that flourishes to exist?

in my daily life, I passed for the young, silent, serious disabled woman Shaka Izawa. That was why I kept on releasing into the world all those vulgar, immature, unreasonable thoughts via my Buddha and Śākya accounts. Those words were born from the slimy, gunky sludge of the swamp, the mud out of which the lotus flowers grew. Without mud, the lotus could not survive.

me fr fr i.e tumblr n reddit

“Are you that desperate to get pregnant? Or no, sorry. It’s having an abortion that you’re really keen on, isn’t it?” For once, I detected feeling in Tanaka’s voice. Namely, the contemptuous desire to view me as a perfect idiot.

He had agreed to bathe a woman with a severe disability for money, and while washing that deformed physique—a body he would rather not even have set eyes on—he must have felt as though he were polishing a heap of gold coins. Or maybe it went further than that—maybe he saw me, living as I was off the inheritance from my parents, as a pile of money that I hadn’t rightfully earned. Yet it was money that he couldn’t access.

If he saw me purely in terms of my money, then I would regard him the same way. Wasn’t that how society worked, after all?

He grasped my meaning without any preamble. Such was the mutual understanding that existed between the disadvantaged. True, I’d never conceived of him in that way in the past, but his self-identification as such was all that I needed. People like us had no talent for conversation in a faintly sterile major key. Yet we were able to voice our truths in a minor cadence—or even a Schoenbergian discord. We stepped out of the preexisting frameworks and spoke our minds atonally.

oh brother this guy stinkssss identifying as an incel is th same as being disadvantaged lol

As I cowered in front of him, this avid follower of my Twitter account that nobody else looked at, Tanaka brought his mouth up to my ear and whispered into it, “Come over here, baby.”

I'm going to puke.

Kneeling on the bed, he unfastened the belt of his beige chinos. His unzipped trousers and boxers came off at the same time, and suddenly his genitals drooped there right in front of me, utterly uncensored, crowned by a bush of hair. Veiled in sweat after his day’s work, they weren’t all that different from those I’d seen in the gang rape scenes from the erotic manga that filled up my Kindle library.

omggggg im dying

I had the urge to cut a long strip of flavored nori to size and stick it on top, to serve as the censoring black bar that I was used to.

she is hentai-brained silly

The warm, viscous liquid was almost impossible to swallow, and my feeble cough mechanism wasn’t powerful enough to bring up the gunk that went sliding down my throat. As it neared the juncture with my esophagus, I began to choke, and my body folded over. That was where the choke reaction was at its most acute.

girl, did u not forsee this?!

The reason that I gave away all the money I earned was to redistribute some of the enormous privilege bestowed upon me to those whose lifestyles were less fortunate.

n give a shitty blowie to a freak

“I don’t care if you hate me.” This line was less Teens’ Love and more Boys’ Love—narratives depicting relationships between men, marketed to women. There was no chance that I’d be able to win over a real-life man with such fictive dialogue.

looooooool, she gets it.

The stuffed Snoopy that had been perched on the chair sat on her lap. I’d bought it forever ago from the duty-free shop in Guam, where my family had had a holiday home. I’d had it cleaned several times, but it turned gray with dust again almost immediately.

snooopy

From the bright white of the ceiling, the dazzling round eye of the downlight stared down at me. I looked up at its brilliant light. On the other side of that light, lotus flowers bloomed. The flowers of Nirvana that blossomed out of the mud.

Down here in the mud, the seeds of life come falling from above, dazzling in their whiteness.