TheRupturedClassroomWoman

Hinokawa Mikuko arrived at the teaching building’s classroom as usual. She had formed a quiet routine: every day, she would come here alone to tidy the empty classroom. The desks were stacked crookedly, scraps of paper littered the floor, and faint dust floated in the air. She picked up the broom, swept the debris into piles, wiped the chalkboard free of faded handwriting, and neatly arranged the chairs beneath each table. At first, everything was ordinary. The classroom stayed quiet, the windows framed a pale blue sky, and the only sounds were the soft scrape of the broom and her slow, steady breathing.

As days slipped by, subtle oddities began to seep into the building. At first, she brushed them off as her imagination. A textbook left on a desk would shift its position overnight, even though no one else had entered the room. The faint scratch of writing could be heard from the empty hallway outside, yet when she opened the door, there was nobody there. The air grew heavier with each passing day. The sunlight filtering through the windows lost its warm glow. The clouds slowly darkened, tainted with a faint wash of dull red.

Weeks went on. The red hue spread across the entire sky above the campus. It was not the bright red of sunset, but a thick, murky crimson that hung low over the roof of the teaching building. The world felt suffocating. The walls of the classroom seemed to shrink inward. The shadows in the corners stretched longer and twisted into indistinct shapes. When Mikuko swept the floor, she sometimes spotted faint, muddy footprints on the tile, prints that vanished the moment she blinked. The temperature dropped, even though the season had not changed. The whole school was deserted; no other students or staff appeared anywhere on the grounds. The quiet was no longer peaceful. It pressed against her eardrums, heavy and menacing.

She kept cleaning anyway. It was the only familiar thing left to hold onto. She wiped the windows, but the red sky outside never faded. She stacked the textbooks, only to find them scattered again the next day. Whispers drifted through the empty corridors, too quiet to make out the words. The chalk on the blackboard would draw faint, crooked lines by itself when she turned her back. Fear coiled tight in her chest, yet she could not bring herself to leave this classroom.

This was the final day.

The crimson sky hung overhead like a heavy curtain. The whole teaching building was wrapped in a terrible, oppressive silence. Mikuko held her rag, frozen mid-wipe, when she sensed someone standing behind her. She slowly turned around.

A woman stood in the doorway of the classroom. Her long hair burned with the same scarlet colour as the sky. She wore a long, simple red dress that fell to her ankles. She stepped forward slowly, each movement smooth and silent, without a single sound of footsteps on the floor.

As she drew closer, Mikuko saw her face. There was no expression, no frown or smile. Her facial features looked hollow, almost flat, as if all life had been drained away. Her eyes were empty, blank voids. No anger, no sadness, no curiosity. Just endless, hollow nothingness.

The red-haired woman stopped right beside Mikuko. She did not speak. She did not reach out. She simply stood there, her empty gaze fixed straight ahead.

The red sky did not change. The classroom remained still.

And everything ended here.4