Tsukumodo:Volume 2 Eyes of Death

The eyes are as eloquent as the tongue.

The proverb is used when the eyes reveal everything even when it's not put into words.

That said, it's naturally not so easy to read someone's mind just by looking into their eyes.

In by far the most cases, words are necessary to convey things, and we can't really read someone's thoughts off their eyes.

In the first place, not all people show their feelings in their eyes. Some of them don't even show them on their face.

My workmate is like that. She only alters her mien so slightly that it's impossible to tell whether she's happy or angry, and when someone gets to see her deadpan for the first time, he almost certainly shrinks back. But even though she's unable to even just put on a friendly smile, she feels a vocation to attend to customers. I have not the slightest idea what's going on in her head.

Although I feel that I'm slowly starting to get the knack of understanding her thoughts.

Or is that just me?

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Not only your brain remembers things.

Your ears remember sounds,

your nose remembers smells,

your hands remember touches,

and your eyes remember scenes.

Have you ever felt familiar with something on hearing, smelling, touching or seeing it even before your mind reacted?

One theory says that that's because your subconscious mind has memorized it, but I feel otherwise.

I believe that our ears, our noses, our hands and our eyes can also remember things.

Among those, I'm especially intrigued by the memories of the eyes.

If you see what a person has seen in his life, you know his life.

Others' lives are very interesting; but once you hear about them, they quickly become boring.

That is because of subjectivism—bragging, exaggeration and lies.

But it's the life itself that's interesting, without any bragging, exaggeration or lies.

Therefore, I watch for myself.

I watch others' lives through their eyes.

As I did on any other day, I took a look at the empty seats in the first wagon.

There tended to be comparatively many empty seats in the first wagon of this train.

I wasn't exhausted; I was going to be sitting for hours later at work anyway. That notwithstanding, it was a daily exercise for me to sit in this wagon.

But before taking a seat somewhere, I looked around at the people on the other side.

There was a sleeping person, a reading person, a person applying make-up, a person playing a game, and many others. But among them, there was a girl who was looking out of the window. She was probably still in high school.

I sat down opposite of that absent-minded high school girl and started observing her.

She was wearing the uniform of a private school that was three stations from here. If my memory doesn't fail me, it was a quite famous all-girls school. The school badge on her collar was colored green, so she was a third-year student. Judging from the scratch she had in her kneecap, she either belonged to a club that did sports, or she had made that injury during PE.

After finishing that evaluation, I corrected the position of my glasses and looked at her—or more precisely, at her eyes. She noticed me and returned my gaze. I sharpened my eyes, projecting my consciousness.

Her eyes lost their focus for a moment.

Connected, I smirked in mind.

Looking at others means connecting to others to me. Once connected, I would go deeper. I would get the feeling of being drawn into their eyes when gazing at them. But in fact, it's the opposite: I throw myself into there of my own accord. Into those eyes, and into whatever lies beyond them.

I could see; I could see something—the memory of her eyes.

The things she had seen showed in my eyes, as though as her eyes had become mine.

The first picture her eyes had memorized appeared.

It was an alarm clock. Its clock hand was indicating 09:00 am. The field of vision extended for a moment, and then zoomed in on the clock. It was set to ring at 07:00 am.

(I see. She's indeed a bit late for a high school student. Looks like she overslept.)

Most likely, she had taken a second look at the alarm clock in surprise. Unable to accept the reality, she did so for nearly a whole thirty seconds, even though she would have been better off hurrying up already.

(Oh, that wouldn't be of any use anyway, I guess?)

When she went to the kitchen and ignored the breakfast prepared for her, her mother wasn't at home anymore. After that, I only saw how she prepared for school in a hurry. At first, anyway. To my mild amusement, she grew slower and slower as time went by, apparently feeling that it was of no avail.

I wanted to peek a bit deeper, but the girl stood up because the train had arrived at her station. Our connection broke off immediately. If the connection was as weak as that, I couldn't see any more than that.

Well, it was a good pastime before work, I comforted myself.

That's not what I really wanted to see. I was convinced that there must be more interesting things hidden behind others' eyes.

I let my disappointment out as a sigh and got off the train.

Would I come across an interesting sight today?

Suddenly, I heard the emergency break of a train.

I quickly turned to the origin of the noise. I was positive that I had heard something get squashed. A few seconds later, a scream echoed through the station.

There was a wave of people that assembled at a certain point of the opposite platform, and one that went away from there.

I rushed to that point.

"Somebody's fallen on the rails!"

"Somebody got run over! Hey, call the station staff!"