[POV: Shin]

  Shin should have kept walking.

  He knew the rule: if someone in a tourist market spoke flawless Japanese and smiled like they’d been waiting for you, you kept moving.

  But he’d spent three days trapped in conference rooms listening to men argue over graphs like their lives depended on error bars. The old town smelled of river water and sugar, and the painted roofs looked like candy in the sun.

  So when a voice called from behind a table of crystals and laminated “healing” charms, Shin slowed anyway.

  “Hey, brother. Over here.” The vendor hooked a finger, smiling as if she’d been expecting him. “I’ve got something interesting.”

  She looked local—wool poncho, black hair braided tight, greenish eyes that didn’t quite fit the rest of her face. Her age was a coin toss. Thirty? Sixty? Either way, she carried herself like someone used to being believed.

  Shin gave a cautious half-bow out of habit. “Do you speak Japanese?”

  “Of course. I studied in Tohoku, a long time ago.” Her grin widened. “And you look like a teacher who was kind to me. So—special price today.”

  He should’ve laughed and slipped back into the crowd. Instead, he glanced over her table: quartz pendants, galaxy posters, angel prints with too many wings, paper charms covered in mandala swirls.

  “I was just—” Shin began.

  “No, no.” She waved the words away. “For you, I have a special piece.”

  She crouched and rummaged under the table. Something scraped against wood. Then she produced a small cloth bag and tipped it into her palm.

  A hand.

  Not human. Not even close. Palm-sized, shriveled like jerky, the color of ash. Six fingers curled inward as if it had died mid-grab. The joints sat wrong in ways his brain couldn’t comfortably name.

  The woman watched his face like she was taking notes.

  “You know the monkey’s paw?” she asked.

  Shin swallowed. The story surfaced in fragments: three wishes, money paid for with a son’s death. “It grants wishes… badly.”

  “Yes.” She snapped her fingers. “That product was made by a wizard in my family line. It chooses a future with the highest probability—closest to your wish. But changing an observed future has… big side effects.”

  He’d met plenty of charismatic liars in grant panels. This one had better stagecraft than most.

  “So you made a safer version?” he asked, because curiosity was a trait his job rewarded and his life punished.

  “Future is messy.” She tapped the gray hand with a nail. “Past is easier. You pick a past you want, and the present stays the same. No problem.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does.” She leaned in, cheerful and absolute. “You wish you were rich back then? Fine. Now you already spent it. Present stays present. Only the memory is sweet.”

  Shin pictured it: years of parties and expensive mistakes, then waking up in the same small apartment with the same secondhand desk and the same empty sink. A fake history stapled onto a real life.

  “That’s… pointless,” he said.

  “Not pointless.” She wagged a finger. “You get what you wanted: the story. The feeling. Humans love feelings.”

  Shin forced himself to look at the hand as an object. The surface wasn’t leathery exactly—more like dense polymer with an uncanny texture. No pores. No hair. But the wrinkles were too precise. The shape was too… intentional.

  “Where did you get it?” he asked.

  Her smile turned smug. “Monkey’s paw used monkey because monkey is ancestor—past-adjacent. Gray hand uses alien.”

  Shin blinked. “Alien.”

  “Yes. The little gray men. Third contact with Earthlings, maybe.” She shrugged like she was talking about lizards dropping tails. “They shed tentacles sometimes. I got one. I made product.”

  The absurdity landed at the same time the details did: six fingers, wrong joints, the base cut smooth like a root vegetable. He’d seen enough anatomy to know Earth life didn’t do that. Even fakes usually copied something familiar.

  He should’ve asked to touch it, to check seams, to test the material. Instead he imagined it on a shelf in his lab—a conversation trap. Ten euros for a story his colleagues would pretend to hate.

  The woman held out her hand—her real one. “Ten euro. Right now. Open sesame.”

  Shin let out a short laugh. “That’s… a lot of confidence.”

  “Confidence is free.”

  He hesitated, then handed over a ten-euro note and took the bag. She slipped in a small card as well.

  “My web shop,” she said. “You come again.”

  “Thanks,” Shin managed.

  “My pleasure, brother.”

  He walked away quickly, the bag swinging at his side like a small weight pulling at his thoughts.

  Back in Japan, work ate the week.

  New experiments, student questions, email chains that multiplied when you tried to kill them. The gray hand stayed in the bottom drawer of his desk like an embarrassing souvenir. A prank he’d played on himself.

  Then a rare free day arrived. Shin drifted through his apartment until, around noon, he forced himself to sort his drawers.

  His fingers found the bag.

  He stared at it a full ten seconds before opening it, like the act might invite something in.

  The hand rested in his palm, cool and dry. Up close it looked even more detailed than he remembered. The creases sat where creases belonged, except when they didn’t. The material flexed slightly, then returned to shape, too elastic to be bone.

  Shin’s mouth moved before his brain approved. “It’s… well made.”

  A normal person would’ve put it back. Shin’s curiosity didn’t work that way.

  “What would I even wish for?” he muttered.

  Money was easy, and he didn’t care. A better job? He’d worked himself into the corner he lived in; changing the past wouldn’t erase the habits that built it. Besides, he wasn’t miserable. Not exactly.

  It was the empty spaces that hurt. He was in his thirties and could count his close friends on one hand.

  He wasn’t bitter about it—not daily. Just in quiet moments, when the lab went dark and the world seemed to belong to couples and families and people who could talk without rehearsing.

  Shin turned the gray hand over, thumb brushing the sixth finger.

  A memory, the woman had said. A past you could sink into when the present got sharp.

  He could do that.

  He could give himself a version of life where he’d been loved—once. Just once. Something to prove he wasn’t fundamentally unpickable.

  The thought felt like a petty crime.

  “Fine,” he said softly. “Hypothetically.”

  He pictured a girlfriend from high school—far enough back not to tangle the present. A name came easy: Hoshiko, borrowed from a character he’d liked as a teenager. In his head she was blunt, competent, and allergic to games.

  His throat tightened with the strange shame of wanting something simple.

  Shin closed his fingers around the gray hand and lifted it.

  “I wish…” He paused, feeling ridiculous. “I wish I’d had a girlfriend back then. Make it true.”

  Pain cracked through him.

  Not metaphorical. Not poetic. It hit like a live wire under the skin—white heat racing from his palm to his spine, bursting behind his eyes. Shin’s knees buckled and he almost dropped the hand.

  Then it stopped.

  He stood there in his kitchen, heart hammering, breath ragged, staring at his own trembling fingers.

  Something had shifted. He didn’t know how he knew. He just did, the way you knew when a machine’s vibration changed and a bearing was about to fail.

  Shin stumbled to his closet, half expecting to find nothing and laugh at himself for panicking.

  His hand brushed cardboard.

  A large box sat shoved into the back like it had always belonged there.

  It hadn’t.

  The word echoed in his mind—hadn’t—while his brain tried to do two things at once: hold onto the old reality and accept the new one. The clash made his stomach roll.

  He dragged the box out. It was heavy in a familiar way that made his chest ache before he even opened it.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he whispered, and his voice sounded thin.

  Tape peeled under his nails. The lid came off.

  An album lay on top.

  Shin stared at it like it was a weapon.

  His fingers flipped the cover.

  The first page showed a photo: a teenage boy with an awkward smile that was unmistakably him, standing beside a girl his age. They leaned close enough to share warmth. Behind them, a red brick warehouse and a strip of waterfront that looked like Yokohama.

  His vision blurred.

  The memory didn’t arrive gently. It slammed into him, full-color and loud, carrying smells and sounds and the weight of another person’s hand in his. A first date. A train ride. The way her laugh spiked when she got excited.

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  Hoshiko.

  Shin’s mouth opened, but no words came. His brain tried to protest—he’d gone to an all-boys middle-and-high school, hadn’t he?—and then the new history shoved back with equal force: the schools had merged with a nearby girls’ academy, hadn’t they? Of course they had. It had been a whole thing. Teachers complained. Students acted tough and then got awkward.

  Both versions felt real.

  That was the worst part.

  He sank onto the floor with the album still open, head spinning.

  Minutes passed. Maybe more. When his breathing finally steadied, something warm rose behind his ribs—relief, joy, a childish rush that made him want to laugh.

  “It worked,” he said, voice shaking. “It actually worked.”

  His hands moved on autopilot, grabbing his phone. There was one person he could call without rehearsing every line: Okahara, his only real friend since university. A freelance designer with a weird life path and a talent for accepting nonsense like it was weather.

  The line rang.

  “Yo,” Okahara said. “You alive?”

  “I found… something.” Shin stared at the album again, as if it might vanish. “I was cleaning and found photos of my old girlfriend.”

  A beat of silence, then Okahara snorted. “Old girlfriend? Since when?”

  Shin’s stomach tightened. So Okahara didn’t remember. Or maybe he remembered a different version.

  “That’s the thing,” Shin said. He told him—about the conference trip, the market stall, the woman, the gray hand. He kept it simple. He didn’t have the energy to justify how insane it sounded.

  Okahara let out a low whistle. “So this is a plot pitch for your next story.”

  “No,” Shin said, too fast. “It’s—”

  “Come on. You’ve always said you’d buried the whole ex thing.” Okahara’s voice carried casual certainty, like he was talking about a known fact.

  Shin froze.

  He had no memory of saying that. None. Yet as the words landed, another set of memories stirred—him and Okahara drinking cheap beer in a cramped apartment, arguing about the ideal girlfriend like it mattered, and Shin quietly admitting he didn’t talk about Hoshiko anymore.

  Two realities colliding again.

  His throat burned.

  “What… what was her name?” Okahara asked, suddenly more careful. “Wait. Dude, are you crying?”

  Shin wiped his cheek with the back of his hand and came away wet. He stared at the smear like it belonged to someone else.

  “I don’t know why,” he said, and it was the honest part. “I can’t… there’s a gap. I can’t remember everything.”

  “Hey,” Okahara said, and the edge in his voice dulled. “Take a breath. If it’s real, we’ll figure it out. If it’s not real, you owe me lunch for wasting my time.”

  Shin laughed once—small, broken. “Yeah. Sure.”

  He ended the call before his voice could crack again.

  When the apartment went quiet, dread slid in where joy had been.

  The seller had promised the present wouldn’t change. Yet Shin’s head was already full of new history—new schools, new relationships, new paths.

  If the past changed, the present had to follow. Maybe it didn’t snap instantly, but it would drift. Inertia. Cause and effect.

  He’d spent his whole career believing in chains of causality. He’d just handed someone a bolt cutter.

  The next morning, he went to work anyway, because routine was the only thing he trusted.

  He set his bag on his desk. A student, Takai, approached with a printed sheet.

  “Here,” Takai said. “Time and place for the farewell party.”

  Shin frowned. “Farewell party for who?”

  Takai blinked like Shin had asked what day it was. “For you, obviously.”

  Shin’s mouth went dry.

  A memory slid into place, slick and unwelcome: he wasn’t a full-time staff researcher at this institute. He was on temporary assignment from a university up north. His term ended in a week. He was going back.

  That was impossible.

  It also felt… true.

  Shin’s vision narrowed. The office noise turned distant. He gripped the edge of the desk until his fingers ached.

  “Sorry,” he forced out. “I’m not feeling well. I’m heading home. Tell Professor Sato—just… tell him.”

  Takai stepped back, alarmed. “Ah—okay. Get better.”

  Shin left without looking at anyone.

  On the subway ride home, he sat in an empty seat, forehead pressed to his palm, and tried to think like a scientist instead of a panicking animal.

  If the original timeline was A and he’d shoved the past into B, the present might hold for a moment—like a pendulum forced still. But the moment you let go, momentum wins. The world would settle into a new, coherent state whether he liked it or not.

  And small changes didn’t stay small. Chaos didn’t need much fuel.

  He’d ignored that because he’d wanted a comforting story.

  Now he was paying for it.

  Two wishes remained.

  That fact did not calm him.

  He stumbled into his apartment and dumped the market bag onto the desk, desperate for the seller’s “web shop” card. He shook it until something slid out: a business-card-sized piece of thick paper, printed with English and symbols that looked like runes.

  YOUR WHITE MAGIC — REM

  A URL sat beneath it.

  Shin powered on his laptop and typed it in.

  Connection failed.

  “Of course,” he muttered, irritation cutting through fear for a second. “Of course your web shop doesn’t exist.”

  He hit the keys harder than necessary. Nothing changed.

  Panic started to creep back in. He needed answers. He needed someone who understood the rules of the thing he’d touched.

  The phone rang.

  Shin jerked so hard his chair scraped the floor. He stared at the screen—an unfamiliar number—then answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Shin,” a woman said. Her voice was polite, older, carefully controlled. “This is Hoshiko’s mother. I’m sorry to call so suddenly.”

  Shin’s blood ran cold.

  He knew that voice.

  He didn’t know how he knew it. He just did.

  A sealed memory cracked open, and grief poured out.

  Hoshiko had died.

  A bus accident. A graduation trip. Fire and metal and the smell of burning plastic. Shin remembered being thrown out a window, landing on wet grass, the shock in his bones. He remembered stumbling toward the wreck, screaming her name, and then… nothing.

  His throat locked.

  “I heard you’ll be returning to Tohoku soon,” Hoshiko’s mother continued, as if reciting from a script she’d practiced. “Before you go, would you… would you come by? Just once. I’d like to see you.”

  Shin couldn’t breathe properly. The new past had teeth.

  “Yes,” he managed. “Of course.”

  Hoshiko’s family home sat in a quiet suburb outside Tokyo, tucked into a row of neat houses that all pretended to be different. Shin arrived on a weekday, shoes too clean, hands too empty. He brought incense and apology and the feeling that he didn’t deserve to be there.

  In the living room, a small altar held a framed photo of Hoshiko smiling—bright-eyed, confident, the same face from his album and his sudden memories. The sight hit harder than any electric shock.

  He lit incense with shaking fingers and bowed until his neck hurt.

  Hoshiko’s mother poured tea. Her hair had more white than Shin’s mind wanted to allow. She looked like someone who had carried weight for too long.

  She studied him over the rim of her cup. “If Hoshiko were alive,” she said quietly, “you’d probably have children by now. She talked about you every day. You were… her pride.”

  Shin forced his hands to stay still on his knees. His stomach churned.

  Because none of this was supposed to exist. Not in the world he’d started in.

  And yet the pain in this woman’s eyes was real. The grief was real. The years were real.

  “Please,” Shin said. “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t know what he was apologizing for. Creating Hoshiko? Killing her? Stealing a timeline where she mattered and then leaving everyone else to deal with the consequences?

  They talked for a while—stories Shin half-remembered and half-invented on the fly. Some details came easier the longer he stayed. Other parts stayed blurred, like his mind refused to touch them.

  When he left, Hoshiko’s mother walked him to the door.

  “Next time,” she said, “come by the grave, too.”

  Shin nodded and stepped into the cold air.

  On the walk to the station, guilt sat heavy in his ribs.

  Changing the past didn’t just give him a private memory. It rewrote other people. It wrote grief into strangers. It created a dead daughter for a mother who hadn’t asked for one.

  The seller had mentioned side effects, hadn’t she? She’d said changing the future was dangerous because it was observed. But if you changed the past and created a person who wasn’t there before… the ripples had to be worse.

  Unless the person didn’t stay alive.

  A horrible thought formed with the clean logic of a theorem: dead people didn’t keep making choices. Dead people didn’t fork timelines.

  And then another thought followed, quieter and more poisonous.

  Was Hoshiko really “made up”?

  If every record said she existed, if every memory carried her weight, if her mother mourned her—was it honest to call her fictional? Or had Shin simply slid into a world where she had always been there?

  Either way, the next question punched through him.

  If there was a world where Hoshiko existed, could there be a version where she lived?

  The monkey’s paw story surfaced again: the mother wished her son back, and something knocked at the door in the night. Horror. Consequence.

  Shin wasn’t sure he believed in ghosts. He believed in physics, and in the brutal creativity of unintended results.

  But the market woman had described the mechanism as probability selection—choosing the nearest possible world where the wish could be true.

  So Shin didn’t need a miracle. He needed a plausible line.

  A cover-up. A misidentification. An “accident” that wasn’t what people thought.

  He reached his apartment, hands shaking, and took the gray hand from the drawer.

  It felt heavier now, like it had gained weight by being used.

  Shin closed his eyes and made the second wish with everything in him.

  “I wish Hoshiko was alive,” he said. “That she’d survived—and she was living happily somewhere.”

  The shock came again, lightning through his body. Shin bit down hard enough to taste blood, and when it passed he sagged against the wall, panting.

  Relief flooded him so fast it was almost nausea.

  He didn’t check anything. He didn’t call anyone. He couldn’t bear to learn the shape of the new consequences yet.

  Instead he drank half a bottle of cheap wine and fell asleep in his clothes.

  A week later, Shin stepped off the bullet train into a city dusted with thin snow.

  Tohoku.

  His “real” university. His “real” lab.

  The words sat wrong in his head, but the memories were there: paperwork, office keys, faces he recognized with the ease of repetition.

  A taxi dropped him at campus. The air smelled like wet concrete and exhaust. His breath fogged.

  He walked to a door he remembered opening a hundred times and knocked.

  Inside, an older professor looked up from a spread of documents.

  “You’re back,” the professor said. “Good. Rest this weekend. Starting next week, we move.”

  Shin bowed. “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  The professor waved it off and returned to his papers. “Data from the circuit experiments came in. Have Rem bring it over.”

  The name hit Shin like a pebble to the eye. Rem. The card. YOUR WHITE MAGIC — REM.

  The door opened behind him.

  A young woman stepped in, holding a folder.

  Black hair braided. Greenish eyes. A wool poncho that looked like it belonged in a tourist market.

  She smiled.

  “Dr. Shin,” she said in careful Japanese, voice lighter than Shin remembered. “Long time no see.”

  Shin’s pulse spiked.

  It was her. The seller. Only younger. Or maybe she’d never been older. Maybe Shin’s memory of her had already been rewritten.

  He stood frozen while the professor took the folder and left with her toward the lab area.

  As they passed, Rem leaned close enough that Shin felt her breath at his ear.

  “This was going to happen,” she whispered in English, calm as a lab report. “When the moon is out, try the website again. You’ll get surprise.”

  Then she walked away as if she hadn’t just shoved his world off a cliff.

  That night, Shin sat alone in his new apartment, laptop open, the business card on the desk like a dare.

  Outside, the moon hung over the city, pale and hard.

  He typed the URL again.

  This time, the page loaded.

  The header matched the card: YOUR WHITE MAGIC — REM, in English. The background was a starfield. The site sold the same kind of “mystic” junk he’d seen in the market, packaged for online checkout.

  Shin scrolled, annoyed. “This is your surprise?”

  Then he saw it: a huge icon centered on the page, too bold to be an accident.

  VIDEO CALL — CLICK HERE

  His throat tightened.

  He clicked.

  A black window opened. Text appeared: PLEASE WAIT.

  The camera light on his laptop turned on without asking.

  Shin’s reflection flashed in the dark glass. Tired eyes. A man who had spent his life pretending he didn’t need anyone.

  Then the call connected.

  A woman’s face filled the screen.

  Shin’s heart stopped.

  It was Hoshiko.

  She looked older than the photos, but it was her—same sharp gaze, same mouth that always seemed ready to say the truth even when it hurt.

  She wore a uniform. Behind her were machines and monitors, steel walls lit by harsh white light.

  “H-Hoshiko…?” Shin’s voice cracked.

  Hoshiko looked straight at him, expression firm.

  “Hi, Shin,” she said. “It took you long enough to remember me. So the seal on my memories has finally been broken.”

  Hoshiko was wearing something resembling a military uniform. The background was a room filled with machinery and screens. Could this be inside a warship or something...?

  “Hoshiko! You really were alive!”

  Today had been full of surprises. After a slight delay, Hoshiko responded.

  “I’m sorry, it was a classified mission, so I couldn’t contact you for a long time. I’m currently aboard the ‘Stellar Ship MZ,’ an unofficial UN Space Force vessel stationed at a base on the far side of the moon.”

  “Stellar... Starship? Such a stuff exists?”

  “Actually, Earth is being targeted. Our accident happened because the bus driver swerved sharply to avoid an alien ‘Grey’ UFO that crashed during a battle above us.”

  ...Now, Shin could clearly recall the memory of the accident.

  In that accident— Shin was sitting by the window and was thrown out, luckily landing on grass, so he didn’t suffer serious injuries.

  But she was trapped inside the burning bus. Shin lost consciousness while desperately trying to reach her. They said the bus was engulfed in flames, leaving only the frame behind...

  “Hoshiko! Were you okay in those flames?”

  “Yes. I suffered severe burns inside the burning bus and fell into a brain-dead state, but I was revived using alien molecular machine technology. That’s why I’m working for the UN Space Force now.”

  Come to think of it, Shin remember the hospital I was rushed to had unusually heavy security.

  “Humans built this MZ using technology from reverse-engineered the alien UFO. Earth isn’t the only hostile alien presence in space. This MZ is about to embark on a mission as an envoy to establish security treaties with friendly alien civilizations.”

  “How long...?”

  “Don’t worry. The MZ can break through the apparent light-speed barrier using dark energy space warp navigation. I’m not entirely sure yet, but I think it’ll take about a year.”

  Hoshiko smiled brightly on the screen. It was definitely the smile of the Hoshiko Shin remembered so well.

  “But—was it really okay to tell someone like me such classified information?”

  “It's fine!　You’re a scout recruit for science and technology too. Rem was one of our agents. This video call also serves as your final interview, and the officer in charge is listening. You can’t join this voyage, but when you return, let's work together in space.”

  “Yeah!”

  Shin nodded firmly.

  Shin wasn’t sure if this ending was due to that alien’s magic or if it had been planned all along.

  But my one remaining wish was already decided.

  Shin would wish, long in the future: “Please let them live happily ever after.”

  For the present is an extension of the past, and the future is an extension of the present.

  *“The Monkey's Paw” is written by W. W. Jacobs.

  (FIN)