But this time, she could not look down. There was only blackness and the feeling of her dead legs being massaged by ghosts.
Mami’s throat tightened. “You want to strap me to a bed?”
The instruction was maddeningly simple. He would leave the room. She was to transfer herself from her chair to the hospital bed, secure the ankle restraints to the bed frame—tight enough to feel real but loose enough to release with a single pull of a safety cord—and put on the blindfold. Then, she was to press the red button. Nagase Mami - Wheelchair-bound Young NGOD-220 -...
Silence.
The afternoon light slanted through the tall windows of the Yamagata Prefectural Rehabilitation Center, catching the dust motes in lazy spirals. Nagase Mami watched them from her usual spot by the window, her hands resting motionless on the black rims of her wheelchair. At twenty-two, she had been here for eight months. The accident—a fall from a climbing wall, a snapped spinal chord—felt both like yesterday and a lifetime ago. But this time, she could not look down
“Let go,” Hoshino’s voice came from a speaker, calm and distant. “You are not falling. You are being held.”
But her hands were shaking. And she was smiling. A broken, ugly, real smile. “You want to strap me to a bed
Her room was neat, sterile, and unbearably quiet. The only personal touch was a single climbing shoe, still faintly chalked, sitting on her bedside table like a relic.
The hum stopped. The pressure vanished. The blindfold felt just like cloth again.
Her breath hitched.
She looked at it as a starting block.