It was the morning I was meeting my fiancée’s parents for the first time. All I wanted was for them to like me. Then Toki said, casually, like it was nothing:

“So, our house is kind of near a hole.”

It wasn’t kind of near. Toki’s family home sat right beside the scariest thing in the universe: a black hole. Fall in, and you never come back. Not even light comes back out. And there it was, gaping open just past the garden hedge.

With a hole like that at your back, you forget how to smile. Toki’s father, Gou, was a big man. Meeting your future father-in-law is intimidating enough on its own. Add a black hole behind him, and it gets a lot worse.

The moment I stepped inside, my legs locked up. The floor tilted, ever so slightly, toward the hole. Along the edge of each tatami mat ran a thin wooden strip — apparently there to stop things from sliding downhill on their own.

“Oh, that? You get used to it. Actually pretty handy.”

Gou pointed at the kitchen. There was no sink. Dirty water just ran along a groove in the floor, out through the low doorway, down the slope, and straight into the hole. Food scraps went the same way — Gou flicked a fish bone off the porch toward the low side, and it slid down the slope and vanished, just like that.

“See? Gone. Don’t even need a trash bin.”

My smile froze on my face. As far as I could tell, this village had no garbage collection, and probably no ambulance service either — anything heading this way would hit the hole first. And everyone just smiled and called it convenient. Meanwhile I felt like I was barely holding myself together, though nobody else seemed bothered in the least.

All day and into the night, a cold sweat ran down my back — mine alone, it seemed. I ate the simmered vegetables Toki’s mother, Mine, had made, gripping the plate with both hands. Back home, Toki turned a little more like a kid again. “Relax, would you,” she laughed.

Slowly, I started to come around. Maybe it really was fine. These people understood the hole and had simply learned to live alongside it. Maybe I was the one who’d been overreacting all along.

Fully at ease now, I reached to pour some tea. Without thinking, I set Mine’s ladle down on the tilted counter.

The ladle started to slide. Toward the low side.

That was the moment.

“THE LADLE!”

The whole house screamed in unison. Mine, who a moment ago had been all smiles, came flying at me with a look like a demon. Toki flung her plate aside. Gou — the same man who’d tossed garbage into the void without so much as blinking — threw himself flat on the sloped floor, jammed his arm into the groove, and caught the ladle’s handle with the tips of his fingers, right at the very edge of the hole.

Chest heaving, Gou glared at me and shouted.

“That’s DANGEROUS, you idiot!”

Beyond the hedge, the hole went on quietly gaping, same as always. Nobody was looking at it at all.