They stayed silent like that until the Nokia keypad phone in Kano's pocket began to vibrate.
"Hey, Shoichi!" The voice on the other end belonged to a somewhat rough-sounding middle-aged man-more precisely, Shoichi Kano's father, Takeshi Kano. "It's been ages since Dad last called you! Our ship just docked, so I thought I'd let you know I'm safe!"
"Our ship's in Dalian, Liaoning, China right now! Man, that was one rough voyage. The waves in a few places were downright terrifying! But we finally made it to shore!" Once Mr. Kano started talking about the voyage, he slipped into a sort of nonstop flow, leaving Shoichi Kano no chance to get a word in.
At last, Takeshi Kano finished saying his piece, and the conversation turned to things like, "How have you been lately, Shoichi? Is school going well? Has anything interesting happened?" Of course, Shoichi Kano couldn't tell him, "I got myself another mom," nor could he say, "I awakened an innate Cursed Technique, and in another ten years or so, I might have to fight in the Culling Game." He could only muddle through with vague answers, occasionally slipping in some inconsequential school news.
Throughout his call, the Slit-Mouthed Woman never interrupted. She merely watched him with the ghost of a smile, an emotion Shoichi Kano couldn't decipher lingering in her dark gray eyes.
She didn't know why she was doing this either, why she instinctively refrained from exposing the boy's lies.
Whatever the reason, the tense lines of his face as he answered the phone, along with his forced casual tone, drew her gaze like a magnet.
"Phew..." Once the conversation ended, Shoichi Kano let out a long breath and pressed the phone's end-call button.
"Well?" the Slit-Mouthed Woman asked.
"My dad said..." Shoichi Kano gathered his words. "Their company gave the sailors a bonus. He'll wire it over through a bank in Liaoning. That should probably tide us over for a while."
"And then?"
"We'll deal with that..." Shoichi Kano sighed and tossed his phone onto the coffee table. "When the time comes!"
The Slit-Mouthed Woman placed both hands on his shoulders, forcing him to turn and look her in the eyes. The icy touch made Shoichi Kano shudder, and then his vision was filled with nothing but those beautiful, inhuman eyes, with their gray whites and white pupils.
"What I mean is," she said, her breath sweet as orchids, "if your father's a sailor, he still has to come home eventually, doesn't he? Roughly when will he return to Japan? And how do you intend to explain all of this then?"
"If he has no talent for cursed energy, he most likely won't be able to see a cursed spirit like me. But... that ring on your hand is just an ordinary ring I infused with cursed energy. Strictly speaking, it's a half-baked cursed object, and he can see it. What do you plan to do then?"
Her rapid-fire questions left Kano's head spinning. In the end, Shoichi Kano simply hadn't thought that far ahead.
So Kano fell silent, but the Slit-Mouthed Woman clearly had no intention of letting him stay that way. She kept forcing him to meet her gaze, even lifting his chin with her hand.
"Sweetheart, running away won't help. You'll have to face it eventually, won't you?" Once again, she exuded that gloomy, cold fragrance, a mixture of green tea, sandalwood, and rotting wood that made his soul feel weightless.
"But I really don't have any way out!!!" Provoked into a sudden flare of anger, Shoichi Kano practically shouted, "It's not like I can kill my father, is it?!"
"Besides, this house is still in his name." Kano gestured at the furnishings around them. "There's no way he won't come back! Worst comes to worst, I'll just come clean when he does!"
"Perhaps..." The Slit-Mouthed Woman curled her lips, gently stroking the stitches at their corners. "I could help you..."
Shoichi Kano shot her a fierce glare. Influenced by his unstable emotions, the newly born, immature cursed energy within him surged wildly, whipping up a powerful gust through the room. The curtains fluttered madly, and the potted plant beside the TV cabinet rustled in the sudden wind.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman's smile vanished. An even stronger wave of icy gray cursed energy spread outward, like a bucket of ice water poured over a flame, instantly extinguishing Shoichi Kano's nearly uncontrollable surge.
"Sorry." Her apology was stiff, as though it were her first time using the word.
She could actually apologize? That was an eye-opener for Shoichi Kano.
Kano took a deep breath and repeated his stance. "We'll deal with it when the time comes!"
He deliberately averted his gaze, afraid to meet the Slit-Mouthed Woman's dark gray eyes, because he felt she was looking at him like a cat that had been teased into arching its back, bristling, and hissing.
The Slit-Mouthed Woman rose from the sofa. Judging by the direction she took, she was heading for the kitchen.
"What would you like for dinner, sweetheart?" She had subtly offered him a way to back down, and Shoichi Kano had no reason to keep snapping at her. Honestly, he couldn't outbite her as he was now anyway.
So he pulled his emotions together and hurried into the kitchen too. "Let me see what ingredients we have left."
Over dinner, neither of them mentioned the earlier scene, as if by unspoken agreement. Setting aside the Slit-Mouthed Woman's identity as a cursed spirit, it was a picture of a harmonious shared meal. Although human food supplied her with less than one ten-thousandth of the energy she could gain from the cursed energy produced by spreading fear and hunting humans, occasionally tasting food and playing this little domestic game with her pet was a novel experience for her too.
After dinner, Kano returned to his study and quietly worked on the homework his teachers had assigned. Halfway through, he noticed the black-covered notebook he had left there. A nearly imperceptible trace of cursed residue from the Slit-Mouthed Woman still lingered on it, enough to prove she had leafed through it that morning.
Kano thought it over. Since she couldn't understand the Chinese written in it anyway, he decided to leave it alone.
As for the lewd drawings in the back...
Didn't she like looking at them?
And so the boy's mischievous streak took over. After the existing lewd drawings, he added several more of the Slit-Mouthed Woman, even taking special care to render the stitches at the corners of her mouth, lest she fail to recognize herself.
The first few pictures were fairly tame. The Slit-Mouthed Woman wore either her default outfit-a long brown trench coat, straight-leg trousers, and small leather boots with high or medium heels-or a somewhat conservative flight attendant's uniform, neither of which exposed much skin.
But further on, each picture grew more revealing than the last. Among that pile of thoroughly R18 drawings, a bikini with a thong bottom practically counted as mild!
Only after finishing these did he close the notebook in satisfaction and put it back where it had been.
"Have some fruit, sweetheart?" The Slit-Mouthed Woman set a plate of cherry tomatoes beside Shoichi Kano's hand. They had clearly just been washed, with droplets of water still clinging to them. A few even had little disposable plastic forks stuck into them to make eating them easier.
Judging by the look in her eyes, this was clearly a follow-up to her earlier "apology"-she had come to offer food as a peace gesture.
What else could Shoichi Kano say? He simply mumbled, "Thanks, Mom," and started eating.
When the Slit-Mouthed Woman saw Kano begin eating the fruit, her smile nearly burst the stitches at the corners of her mouth. Her expression was just like someone watching their sulking kitty finally relent under their coaxing and accept the food they offered.
When morning came, Shoichi Kano stared at Miss Slit-Mouthed Woman lying beside his pillow, struck speechless.
Cursed spirits weren't supposed to need sleep, but she seemed to have gotten hooked on cosplay. She had even simulated something like dormancy to synchronize with Shoichi Kano's body clock.
He stared at her sleeping face for a long while, gathering his resolve.
Just as he had worked himself up enough and was about to speak-
The Slit-Mouthed Woman woke. A watery haze still seemed to veil her eyes, and only after blinking for a while did her gaze gradually focus.
"Morning, sweetheart."
"Good morning, Mom." Shoichi Kano tried to adopt a more appropriate tone. "Shouldn't you be making my breakfast?"
The Slit-Mouthed Woman waved a hand, wriggled around in bed for a while, and rolled herself up in the covers. "Go take care of it yourself. I've just discovered that lying in bed is pretty comfortable. Especially... when I wrap myself up in the covers."
"It feels like I've returned to my original state, before I was even a cursed womb... Hah... hah..."
She had fallen asleep again!
Before you continue