Spice walked through the plaza carrying a stethoscope -shaped gadget.
“What are you doing?” Mocchi called out to him.
“Listening to the town’s ‘small invisible voices.’”
Mocchi tilted his head.
“Today’s World Tuberculosis Day. An invisible germ took tens of millions of lives a hundred years ago. Even now, it’s still happening, somewhere in the world.”
“Even now?”
“Yeah. Except now that there’s medicine — sometimes it’s the voice of someone pretending to be fine that makes diagnosis harder.”
Mocchi thought for a moment, then said:
“I pretend to be fine sometimes too.”
Spice turned to look at him.
“When, exactly?”
“When the load I’m carrying is too heavy.”
Spice gently pressed the stethoscope to Mocchi’s chest. “…And now?”
“Now I’m normal,” Mocchi said. “Talking about it made it a little lighter.”
Margin note: In his “record of invisible voices,” Spice wrote, just for that day, a date and the word “recovery.”
【Today’s Drop】
- World Tuberculosis Day (March 24): An international day commemorating Robert Koch’s discovery of the tuberculosis bacterium on March 24, 1882. Tuberculosis remains one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases.
This is an English translation of “見えない咳の音”, part of Tales of Amencho Town (蛙鳴町奇譚).
