She just arrived home from school to read some of her Manga, which ranged from Original English Language Manga, Original French Language Manga, although to ones directly made and licensed from Japan. From ongoing titles, to flashes in the pan; overnight successes, and those who disappear during the night. Super stardom for the lucky few, and obscurity for the rest. But she had left this world behind when beginning to expand her reading to other comics in other countries, specifically from France. But she found that she was missing one volume from one specific series. And couldn’t recall whether she had in fact purchased in online, or never bought it at all.

At first she thought she heard the sound of her older sister, sitting in the rest room, reading one of her books. But then remembered that herself and her sister had been grown up for years, and they very rarely talk to each other anymore except for the Holidays. She lounged on the couch, wearing her Birkenstock Boston clogs, and would fantasize about the characters that she would read, bleeding from out of their necks. They called the “Blood Otaku”, because she would play with herself when she would see a cute girl in one of her Mangas, getting her head chopped off with a guillotine or ax.

Her mother was outside of her room, making dinner in the oven. It was a bacon and mushroom pizza, using sriracha and spicy tomato sauce. She would imagine the tomato-sauce oozing from out of the severed necks of anime girls, warrior maiden whose heads would be lopped off with a curved sword a cross between a Claymore and a Katana. “Ros Serayamos”, designed to to break armor, and from the curve of its blade be effective at decapitations.

It was getting late, and she headed for bed.

While dreaming of girls that were headed.

The morning red sunlight beamed through the window. She got herself dressed in her rose hat, and her Esiabas. Esiabas had the upper of a French Sabot, or a German Holzshuhe, but the pronged soles of Japanese geta. She tapped danced in the driveway all the way to the bus. Normally you would think the school system would have a problem, but certainly no students she ever had a problem with ever said anything about. Instead the ones that tried, would end up a bloody mess on the floor of some abandoned building in the city long sense abandoned by those who did construction in the Potato District.

So eventually people just tried to stay away from the girl with the manga books. The “blood otaku”, they would call her. Who had a weird gate, and an extremely straight back. In this town, very few people talked to each other anymore any since the Pandemic regulations, and this had only recently began to loosen up after the vaccinations. Certainly nobody would be exchanging blood spatter along the floor of the bus.

At school, class would go as normally.

At lunch she would dig out one of her books, that was the most recent release of some obscure Literary Magazine and Rah Esioma publication: one with more of a lyrical approach to caption production, with its layout covered in different ranges of purple on its website, that she would purchase the book online from. Here in these books, would be plenty of decapitations by “Ros Serayamos”, the armor crushing sword.

Trapped in a prison of deranged desires, the flow of blood flowing in every single page, she had to be extremely careful about what page she would be seen reading. Although generally she would set at the table that was closest to the wall in the schoolyard, closer to the English of Honors English class. And in her mind, the entire schoolyard would be flowing with blood on every single page, like some deranged Golden Age comic anthology.

A new girl, who arrived at the school, sat across from her.

“They say that you’re the Blood Otaku. Why is that?” she asked.

“Lets hope that you never find out. Just kidding! It’s not true.”

“Well thank Mother Mary.”

“Are you religious?”

“…Yes”

It had been many years sense she had interacted with a religious person. Generally she avoided them, under the assumption that they would not approve of her sexually, although there was no reason to assume that there would not be a left-leaning religious person. Although the schism sense the start of the Franco-Japanese wars largely made both sides of politics more and more extreme. So she simply resolved to never interact with anymore with different politics. Although this later evolved to seldom interacting with anyone. And perhaps that was why she came to only read Esiomi, American French and Japanese language manga, made by fellow enthusiasts of the French and Japanese languages.

She just needed to make sure her new friend never saw of the real books she was reading, in case a real relationship would ever blossom.

Otherwise she would know what she was a lie.

And that she was…the Blood Otaku.

She had one small body, and one large head. Compared to the size of her head, one might thing her body would not be able to balance. However she would maintain her posture even at the expense of her neck. At night when off her shift, she would prop her head up on a special cushion, while watching the television. This was in large part to prevent her from breaking her own neck. But somehow she managed to avoid this paralyzing injury long enough to carry out her daily shifts at work. By this point she was used to it. And it was better than being stuck as an eight year old in a 48 year old body. Without all the wrinkles of age, that would mar her appearance.

At school, in her early years, she mostly avoided bullying. This was not do to the fact that she could take them on a fight, rather that they knew that the slightest touch would break her neck, and that they would likely be charged as adults by the legal system, and shot through the neck with a widow arrow blade in the back of the school by a guillotine archer. However, she would sometimes use this quirk of an appearance, to talk bullies out of harassing some of the male peers that she was into: at one point, she pushed herself in front of one of the bows, and narrowly avoided getting injured in the process.

It was by the nature of her appearance, thus, that the boys that would encounter her would not have to worry about bullying. But often this meant the boys being to freaked out by her appearance to ultimately seek a night out with her, leaving school to largely be that of a lonely experience. Yet neck, she carried her head on her shoulders with the best of her ability, and at times using most of her body strength just to get herself to stand up straight, so as not to break her back. At work she would be given the lightest tasks, because of the size of her head, otherwise her back would likely snap in half, and she would be wheelchair bound for the rest of her life.

This girl would sometimes have the urge to create in her bedroom, however at other times she would be so bus consuming powders that she did not have the time in the day to do anything else with her time. This meant it being difficult for per parents to encourage her to find a line of work that was more suited for the size of her head. Although the tediousness of office work would luckily make her fall asleep at the desk. And her head, do to its sheer size, would be quite difficult to pick up.

They might even need a special miniature crane that can fit inside of an office building, that could her pick herself back up in the office. Therefore her parents were able to tolerant her living with her, if it meant in some way having some kind of a fulfilled life, as empty of one as it was. And this was all before the Pandemic hit. Combine with the year of isolation, and all the mask wearing that would fog up her glasses, at sometimes she struggled to have the energy to even watch television.

But with new subscription services, she could largely watch whatever she wanted, even if it wasn’t always her choice. She would also sometimes watch rented DVDs. But there simply was no escaping a very important fact:

Her head was to big to be practical.

But apparently her ego didn’t match.