Slum Online by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

taller than me.
    “Well? Ain’t you got nothin’ to say for yourself?”
    “Ain’t,” I answered, not stirring from my seat, “ain’t a word. Or didn’t you learn anything in school?” A burst of laughter erupted from behind the cabinet. Three Earrings’s pal.
    “You’re startin’ to piss me off.”
    “Only starting? Must be losing my touch.”
    “You wanna come say that to my face, bitch?”
    “Etsuro, don’t,” Fumiko interjected, twenty minutes too late.
    “You should go on home,” I said, standing.
    Three Earrings, his pal, and I walked out of the arcade. Two against one was hardly a fair fight, but I don’t think fair was high on their agenda, and I didn’t bother to ask. Most of what happened in RL gave fair a wide berth. The only rules that mattered were the rules of wherever you happened to be, and you could count on each and every person to follow his own interpretation. Right and wrong were in the eye of the beholder, and they were secrets best kept to yourself.
    We fought in the back alleys of Shinjuku. An air conditioner was kicking up a racket of a sound FX. I threw a punch and missed. One of them threw a punch and hit. My health gauge went into freefall. Their fists rained down on me so fast I was fairly certain they were using the cancel bug. I gritted my teeth. A knee hit me in the stomach and I rose into the air. Just a bunny hop, really, compared to the graceful arcs traced by a character hit with a counter in Versus Town . This is too easy , I laughed to myself.
    My health gauge dropped to zero.

     
    “Are you okay?”
    My eyes opened at the sound of Fumiko’s voice.
    I was lying lengthwise across a rock-hard bench. Fumiko was cradling my head in her lap. She had placed a damp handkerchief over my face. My mouth tasted of iron and blood and cloth. Moving would have required too much effort, so I just lay there with my head in her lap, listening to the sound FX of her beating heart.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It was my fault.”
    “No, it wasn’t you.”
    “You usually go around picking fights?”
    “Actually, that was the first fight I’ve ever been in.”
    “Like I said, my fault.”
    “No, I was asking for it.”
    It really wasn’t Fumiko’s fault. There was something deep inside me that had made me take things too far. The sound FX of Three Earrings punching the control panel, something I could never hear an opponent do over the Internet, might have had something to do with it. Truth was, I couldn’t explain exactly what had made me do it, so I didn’t even try.
    “Does it hurt?”
    “No more than you’d expect.”
    “You’re bleeding,” she said, gently wiping my lips. I felt the heat building in my chest rush out between my teeth.
    “A balloon full of blood,” I muttered.
    “What?”
    “Something a friend of mine said once. People are two-thirds water, so we’re just a bag of skin with blood sloshing around inside. That’s why we bleed when we’re hurt.”
    “You think he’s right?”
    I closed my eyes. “I dunno.” A red balloon drifted through my thoughts.
    Around when I started elementary school, my mother took me to a rooftop fair at one of the local department stores. There was a person dressed up in a bear costume. If you beat the bear in a game of rock-paper-scissors, you won a balloon. Not a silvery, Roswell UFO balloon. A shiny, blood-red balloon.
    I figured out how to win watching the bear play his first game. His hands were essentially mittens, so he could only throw rock and paper. Watching a few more games, I noticed the bear was delivering rock and paper pretty much fifty-fifty. If it was a tie you got to go again, so as long as you kept throwing out paper, sooner or later you’d win. With a setup like that, you’d have to be a dolt to lose to the bear. Of course the whole point was to keep the kids happy, so I’m sure they had enough on hand to give every kid in the place and his brother a balloon. But to me it didn’t seem