Short Story 8: Pantile Defies All Vice 8
*
“What is it you want me to talk about?”
Jenniferlin Pantile, seated in her chair, asked after a brief silence.
“Didn’t that young monk say it too? That you shouldn’t look for meaning in talking with a friend.”
Those were good words, weren’t they?
Seeing Cokes laugh as she said this, Jenniferlin bit her lip lightly.
How could she possibly not search for meaning in a conversation with a friend who was nearing death?
No matter what she talked about, she couldn’t find any value worthy of it.
Thus, silence continued. Though her chest felt tight with the urge to speak, not a single word came out.
What should I talk about?
Jenniferlin posed the question to herself, one she had repeated so many times today it was tiresome even to count.
Or perhaps, should I ask her something? Should I receive from her some unfulfilled wish, some thought she wanted to leave behind?
Jenniferlin tried to open her mouth, but her lips merely trembled.
She didn’t even know if asking such a thing held any value in the face of death.
“Honestly, what would the you from when we first met say if she were here right now? Would she laugh? Well, if so, I suppose that means I did quite well.”
She found herself staring intently at Cokes’s face, which wore an expression of exasperation and sarcasm she couldn’t comprehend.
Illuminated by the small Magic Stone Lamp, that face was startlingly pale.
Jenniferlin gasped.
Had I not even noticed my friend’s face looked like this?
The moment she realized this, Jenniferlin almost impulsively blurted out words.
She almost cast aside all thought, letting only emotion burst from her mouth.
But what stopped her was the pale face of the friend who had caused it.
A smile filled with intense sarcasm.
Even without words, it conveyed: That’s not it, is it?
A powerful will, pitying and mocking their shared affliction, saying, What lies between you and me isn’t that sort of thing, is it?
At this feeling, understood only by the two who had traced the same outline of emptiness, Jenniferlin swallowed her words.
Am I an idiot? Even if I don’t seek meaning, surely there’s a proper way to do things.
Jenniferlin sighed.
When she finished sighing, Cokes’s expectant eyes were before her.
Very well, then shall I not meet those expectations?
“Shall we decide on an Epitaph then, my friend?”
Jenniferlin Pantile offered a smile truly befitting a Pantile.
*
“Give me your friendship, Cokes Candelight.”
The Eight-year-old Girl who spoke her old name was a familiar darkness.
It was the face of someone who had grown weary and disgusted, told time and again by the world itself, “This world is boring.”
The only point that differed from herself was that single fact: she could still reach out her hand.
That must have been the utmost the girl could offer; her small, wide-open palm was truly, truly tiny. From the moment it was offered, Cokes couldn’t look away.
She remembered herself, who couldn’t reach out.
No, to be precise, herself who couldn’t even conceive of reaching out.
In reality, it was an instant, but for Cokes, it felt like several astonishingly drawn-out moments later.
She was surprised to hear her real name, discarded long ago.
*
“Cokes Candelight, the woman who loved but one man her entire life.”
“Starting off strong, aren’t we?”
Cokes laughed, looking exasperated.
“You seem quite displeased that you didn’t know I was married, don’t you?”
“A foolish question.”
Jenniferlin replied while writing the Epitaph on paper.
“Simply put, I don’t like that you kept such an interesting story from me. I don’t like it one bit.”
Seeing the old woman give a wry smile at her honest words, Jenniferlin asked with just her gaze, “What about this Epitaph?”
“No good.”
The reply was a rejection.
“Well, yes, it was likely the only love of my life. There’s no doubt about that, but it’s simply a matter of there being no ‘after’.”
Besides…
The old woman looked as if gazing at an old wound.
“For the woman who threw it away to have such an Epitaph… he’d surely be displeased if he knew.”
“Is he perhaps still alive?”
“No, he died long ago. I suspect he managed to live a relatively happy life, didn’t he?”
She probably investigated and found out.
Jenniferlin thought so but didn’t inquire further.
Looking at her friend’s face, she understood that the man’s life must have truly been so.
Jenniferlin understood that her friend believed, at the very least, that his path had been beautiful until the end.
Either way, it’s a story from long ago.
Seeing Cokes conclude her words like that, Jenniferlin drew a line through the Epitaph she had written on the paper.
Well, I didn’t expect it to be decided on the first try.
Hmm.
“Well then… Cokes Candelight, the peerless gambler, the fool who bet everything on a child’s words.”
“Oh ho, trying to turn your own failure into someone else’s Epitaph? Quite bold of you, Pantile.”
“Don’t you think taking an Eight-year-old Girl, your charge no less, to a Gambling den was already betting quite high? Besides, I didn’t fail. The reason we missed out on profits back then wasn’t my fault, but because a certain Candelight wasn’t satisfied with just uncovering the cheating, but tried to fleece them using it as leverage, right?”
She corrected her friend who was trying to alter the past.
“Such trivial details from the past. Weren’t you the one who gave the go-ahead anyway? I’m the bodyguard, you know? Without my master’s permission, I wouldn’t have gone that far.”
A rebuttal came from the other side.
“Back then, I didn’t quite understand when to pull back. I was only eight, you know?”
As if such an eight-year-old could exist.
Her friend grumbled, recalling the past.
Jenniferlin attempted a counter-argument.
“It’s true the Gambling den was half-destroyed… no, completely destroyed, wasn’t it?”
“Completely destroyed, yes.”
Jenniferlin made a sour face as Cokes dutifully agreed with her correction.
She says it like it had nothing to do with her, but this old woman was the one who completely destroyed the Gambling den.
“It’s partly my fault it was destroyed, but…”
She tried to finish her sentence, but yielding to her friend’s gaze, Jenniferlin swallowed her words.
“Alright, alright. Yes, it was eight-year-old me who pushed things a little too far. Eight-year-old me. But the one who went on a rampage afterward wasn’t me.”
“That’s hardly an excuse someone who was precisely instructing who to beat down first should be making.”
Kekeke, seeing Cokes let out a cackle like the cry of some monstrous bird, Jenniferlin finally surrendered.
“Alright, rejected. This Epitaph is rejected.”
Without waiting for Cokes’s reply, Jenniferlin drew a line through the memo.
As she drew the line, Jenniferlin thought.
It wasn’t intentional, but thinking about an Epitaph naturally turns into reminiscing, doesn’t it?
Well, of course. It’s something affixed at the end point of one’s life.
It cannot be sought from the future, only from the past.
“Alright then, next is—”
It was more enjoyable than she had expected.