The Third Death (Moon Ticket Request)
----"Death."
This was not something particularly unfamiliar to Sinon.
That was not to say Sinon had experienced death herself. Rather, death had always been close by her side.
At first, it was her father.
Sinon had never seen her father's face.
When Sinon was two years old, her father died in a traffic accident.
That day, her father and mother had taken Sinon with them to celebrate the New Year at her mother's hometown. They were driving through a county in northeastern Japan when, on an old single-lane road extending along the slope of a mountain, a large truck coming from the opposite lane failed to turn in time and crashed straight into them.
The truck driver was thrown through the windshield onto the road and died instantly.
The compact car Sinon was riding in, struck on the right side by the truck, went over the guardrail and fell down the mountainside, finally coming to a stop when two trees blocked its descent.
At the time, her father, who had been driving, suffered severe injuries and lost consciousness, but he was not yet dead. Her mother, sitting in the passenger seat, had only a simple fracture in her left thigh. Young Sinon, protected by the seat belt of the baby seat in the back, was almost completely unharmed. Their situation was not yet hopeless.
Unfortunately, that road was rarely used, especially late at night, and the phone inside the car had also been damaged in the crash. They were not discovered until a vehicle passing along the old road the next morning noticed the accident.
But by then, six hours had already passed.
During those six hours, Sinon's mother could do nothing but watch her father's body gradually grow cold from internal bleeding before