Nan-Core Read Online Free PDF Page B

shoulders and the back of his neck. I had no idea how heavy the grate was, but it was about two feet wide and over three feet long.
    “Hey, kid. H-Hurry it up …”
    “Ah, I just touched the edge, I’m almost there …”
    A muffled groan came from the man’s throat, but he couldn’t form words.
    I got up from the bench and started to move closer, holding my breath but walking normally.
    The boy’s thin neck.
    I was almost choking on the anticipation welling up inside me. Everything I could see around the dark hole had started to shimmer with radiant light: the park, the power lines, the sky. The creature called my self awakened. The new reality was so vivid it stung, and I wanted to suck it dry.
    “Ng, uugh …”
    The man gave another loud groan and I saw the boy’s legs scrape restlessly against the ground. I didn’t know if he had finally reached the hat or if it was the man’s grunting scaring him, but either way he was trying to wriggle out of the gap. The man holding the grate must have seen this, too. I could tell he was summoning his last reserves of strength for a final, desperate push, probably thinking the ordeal was almost over.
    Now—
    Making it look like I was trying to help, like I couldn’t bear to merely stand by and watch, I took the edge of the grate in bothhands. I was full of Nan-Core. I felt drunk but also sharply alert, both sensations ruling my consciousness without contradiction.
    I tensed my muscles, pretending to lift the grate while actually pushing it down. In fact, I hardly needed to put any effort into it at all. The man’s strength was already at its limit—it only took a slight nudge for his grip to fail.
    There was the sound of the grate coming down. Then the boy’s legs jerked unnaturally, convulsing. It was over in a second.
    The echoes of sound quickly died out, giving rise to an emptiness that made it feel like time had stopped. The man sat on his heels and the young girl was still standing as both stared vacantly at the inert legs on the asphalt. The thin, childish legs made the sneakers on his feet look disproportionately rugged.
    A crowd began to form. After some time I got to my feet and walked away.
    I wondered whether the man would argue his defense. Whether he would say his failure to hold on was because of a passerby, that someone had pushed down on the grate out of malice. That as a result, it wasn’t his fault the kid had died. Or did he not even realize what had happened in that moment?
    I ran these thoughts through my mind as I walked down the path. When I got to the vending machines I slipped some coins into one of the slots, hoping to soothe my parched throat.
    After reading this far, I sank weakly to the ground from where I had been leaning against the window frame.
    I couldn’t keep reading. There was a dull nausea wriggling in my stomach, and I had broken out a greasy sweat.
    What
are
these? What are they doing in our house?
I kepttelling myself to calm down, but I only began to fret more and more. I rubbed my hands vigorously over my face, wondering semi-seriously if I was dreaming. If it wasn’t a dream it had to be something Dad had written. Something he had tried for fun when he was young, something he had forgotten about. He had probably come across the notebooks when sorting his things, but hesitant to throw them out, had shoved them into a box instead.
    That must have been it. After all, what other possibilities were there?
    I couldn’t imagine someone as placid as Mom writing them. And it didn’t make sense to hold on to them if they were someone else’s work. My parents weren’t sociable people, they weren’t close enough to anyone to do that.
    Nothing to get worked up about
.
    I repeatedly muttered this to myself and tried to continue reading, but the chill was still there, crawling up from the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t see why I was getting so shaken up. What was it that made me think it was Dad’s diary, that it was a