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英語聞き流し10分間名作リスニング。英語テキストとMP3ダウンロード、その他の物語はホームページよりご利用いただけます。
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When I was little, my mother constantly said badthings about others.
She believed that, even when someone was kind toher, there must have been some plot behind thenice gesture.
To sum up what she talked about every day, thereare only evil people in this world.
In kindergarten, mothers would fix a lunch box fortheir kids and the kids would have it with theirclassmates and their teacher.
At one lunch time, when I was opening a lid of mylunch box, I inadvertently dropped it to the floorwithout having a single bite and it overturnedthere.
I lost my lunch.
While other kids laughed at me, my teacher, whohad been trying so hard to make me play with otherkids,
cleaned up the mess for me and took me to a smallcandy store outside the kindergarten.
She told me to pick any bread I liked.
I picked one timidly, feeling afraid what kind oftrap this would be, as I didn't have any money.
She suggested one more.
I couldn't figure out what was going on and shookmy head.
She picked one more piece of bread by herself,took out money from her own wallet, and gave allthe bread to me.
I was stunned.
She bought me lunch.
It was the first time that someone unrelated to mewas so kind to me.
Since then, I had started talking to her.
Even after I finished kindergarten, I had keptexchanging letters with her and I still send her aChristmas card every year.
She was the first person who destroyed my mother'stheory of the evil world and taught me that therewere some good people in this world.
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A couple of nights ago, I woke up in the middle ofthe night when I heard a loud thud.
I thought something had fallen from the shelves,but the minute I dozed off, a thud woke me upagain.
This time, it sounded like my inner noise comingfrom my head.
I opened my eyes and saw my room spinningvertically like a funhouse at a fair.
At first I thought it was a strong earthquake.
I covered myself with my futon and waited it tostop.
Then I noticed there was no noise of anything thatshould fall or be broken though the earthquake wasstrong enough to make my room upside down over andover.
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Besides, while my room was rolling, I hadn'tfallen from the bed.
The room was in dead silence and I lay still.
I realized it wasn't an earthquake and removed thefuton from my face.
The room was still spinning around me violentlyand finally I understood I was having massive vertigo.
Since I had hardly ever had vertigo in my life,fear engulfed me.
I wondered if I was dying now and this was how itfelt right before people died.
I asked myself if I had bumped my head onsomething earlier or eaten something bad, but Ihad no idea.
Long, terrifying minutes later, the spin stopped.
I felt queasy and went to the bathroom to feelbetter.
And then, the bathroom started spinning madly.
I held on to the wall desperately not to rollaround.
When it stopped, fierce nausea hit me.
I got back to my bed to lie down, and theincredible amount of sweat began to pour out ofme.
I had never sweated so much before.
It was as if every pore on my skin had spewedsweat all at once with all their force.
I saw my sweat dribble down onto the floor and wasfully convinced that I was dying.
The first thing that came to my mind was my newsong I've been working on.
I regretted not having finished it and thought Ishould have worked for it much faster.
It was near completion but never saw the light.
I even thought of booting up my computer andsetting the song up so that my partner could playit back as it was completed so far.
Instead, it occurred to me to leave a last note tohim.
I rummaged out a piece of paper and wrote down howand what time I died.
I also tried to leave some messages for him, butnothing came out but fear.
I just scribbled casual words and a weird doodleand went back to bed.
Feeling extremely scared, I alternated between dozing off and waking up by vertigo until morning.
I didn't die. Dizziness subsided and I was alive.
About a week ago, my partner told me that I mightdie soon because of my continuous lack of sleep.
I've exercised at the gym in the morning every dayfor over one year and regularly had to shorten mysleep for that.
I believed that one year exercising had made mephysically strong and healthy, and that some lackof sleep wouldn't do me any harm.
I was wrong. I think my lack of sleep contributedthat scary near-death experience.
Or, I was simply under hypnosis of my partner'sreproach.
As the school play of the drama club approached, Ihad prepared for my first role vigorously.
Once I remembered all the lines, acting itselfactually felt much easier than the backstage workI had done for three years.
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The difficult part was timing for some action.
In one scene, I threw a bowl at the heroine butshe had to show her back to me when it happened.
I sat with my back to her and couldn't see herpositions.
We made the sound of her knees tapping the stagefloor a signal that she had turned her back to me.
Because the sound was so subtle, I was afraid ofmissing it.
Near the end of the play, an evil stepmother, whowas played by me, killed the heroine with a poker.
It was a custom of the club that the club memberswould visit a shrine together to pray for safetybefore the play if it had a murder scene.
We did that after school, with me standing rightin front of the altar because I was the murderer.
Now, I had everything ready for my first play, andthe day had come.
Since it was a Japanese period play, I hadborrowed kimono from my grandmother as my costume.
My role was an old woman and I drew lines on myface and sprinkled talcum powder over my hair.
While I was waiting for the play to start in thewings, I got tensed up and my hands began to tremble.
There's an old trick in Japanese show business,that tracing a Chinese character that means humanon a palm with a finger three times
and pretending to swallow it removes tension whenyou're nervous.
I threw myself on the trick but it didn't work atall.
Suddenly I lost self-confidence and told one ofthe juniors that I was so nervous.
Although she would also appear in the play as abit part, she was surprisingly calm.
She suggested the trick placidly and said that shecouldn't help me because she had never beennervous in her entire life.
As I doubted if she was a human being, the playstarted.
Following a heroine's monologue, the curtain wasraised and I was standing in the center of thestage.
The unexpected happened, before I uttered a word,the hall got engulfed in an explosion of laughter.
The audience burst out laughing at the scene inwhich a stumpy girl was standing with old makeup.
Although the play was a serious drama, my firstever appearance was laughed away.
Where I grew up wasn't a good neighborhood.
To my mother, seeing her child go to a publicjunior high school was out of the question.
To get in a privileged private junior high, shemade me go to a supplementary private school afterthe classes of elementary school.
But even to get in the supplementary school, therewas an entrance examination because it was forselective kids.
As the public elementary school I attended was lowat the educational level,
my score of the exam was bad although I was thesmartest at school.
But the exam included an IQ test, which I hadnever taken before.
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In a three-way interview between the examiner, mymother and me after the exam,
the examiner told us that he had never seen thishigh IQ before.
I was supposed to fail the exam due to the lowmarks, but they let me pass as an exceptionconsidering my high IQ.
Since then, I've leaning on my IQ for my life.
My IQ is the only source of my confidence in mypathetic life, but it's the reason of my sufferingas well.
I've been unable to accept each and every failureof mine because I don't understand why my high IQcouldn't avoid it.
Why do I fail in so many things? Why am Iunsuccessful?
Will I end my life without making use of my IQ?
My partner compares me to a Formula One car.
Although it runs faster than any other cars on acircuit, it's completely useless on a regularstreet.
I'm looking for a circuit for me, butunfortunately, roads in the real world are allrugged with various obstacles.
I'm looking for a circuit for me, butunfortunately, roads in the real world are allrugged with various obstacles.
