Hanami no Sasayaki

The Murmurs of Hanami

花見のささやき

Ivan Sergeevich Vishnyov had been wanting to kill someone since early childhood.

He had always chosen her, an obnoxious teenager from his past. It was always her in his dreams and his eyes. Whatever. It did not happen, though. For various reasons. One was that he wanted to stay clear of jail time. So he just ordered another whiskey. His eyes rested on the sakura tree nearby.

He had never identified with the custom, as he thought it was useless. What the tree wanted to tell him while fluttering in the early spring breeze was not his concern. He never related to human emotions as they seemed superfluous. His sanctimonious soul remained resolute in its pursuit of the macabre.

He scoffed inwardly at the romanticism surrounding this natural phenomenon. As he nursed his whiskey, his gaze lingered on the young woman who had unwittingly become the object of his fixation. The real present young woman and the imagined one from his past merged together. The young woman entered his field of vision, and that was it as if love at first sight. That was perhaps how normal people felt when a beautiful woman entered the room. He envied the simplicity of ordinary emotions, even though he despised them.

In his mind's eye, he pictured the visceral act of violence, relishing the imagined sensation of power at the prospect of ending a life. He envisioned himself as a silent specter, a phantom lurking in the periphery of her consciousness, as she was trying hurriedly to reach the end of the park lane.

As he watched the unsuspecting girl disappear into the night, a sense of melancholy washed over him, mingling with the bitter taste of regret. He despised his own cowardice. He opened his wallet to fix his gaze at the two smiling faces. Maybe he would do it next time.