made of a cucumber and an ox made of eggplant, with thin bamboo-strip legs. Almost unconsciously, she put her hands together. Then she made her fervent wish: Let the rain stop. She slowly closed her eyes, then walked through the torii gate. Let Mom wake up and let us walk under clear skies together. As soon as she passed under the gate, the air changed. The sound of the rain suddenly cut out. When she opened her eyes—there was blue sky all around her. She was floating high, high above the earth, in the midst of a powerful wind. No—she was falling. Wind coiled around her, moaning lower and deeper than she’d ever heard it. With every exhalation, her breath turned white and froze, sparkling in the deep blue. Even so, she felt no fear. It was an odd sensation, like a waking dream. When she looked down at her feet, she saw a multitude of cumulonimbus clouds formed like enormous heads of cauliflower. Each of them must have been miles wide, forming a magnificent sky forest. Suddenly, she realized that the color of one cloud was changing. On the flat top created by the atmospheric boundary, patches of green were beginning to appear. She stared. It was almost like a grassland. On the top of the cloud, invisible to anyone on the surface of the earth, rustling greenery was appearing and vanishing. Around it, she noticed swarms of some small creature. “…Fish?” The swarms indeed resembled schools of fish, undulating in a leisurely way, sketching geometric spirals. As she fell, she watched them intently. Uncountable numbers of them were swimming over the cloud-top plain… Suddenly, something brushed her fingertips. Startled, she looked at her hand. She was right; they were fish. Their transparent little bodies slipped through her fingers and hair like wind given weight. Some had long fins trailing behind them, others were as round as jellyfish, and still others were thin, like killifish. The sun streamed through all their many shapes, making them shine like prisms. Before she knew it, she was surrounded. The endless blue, the white clouds, the rustling greenery, the fish shining in all the colors of the rainbow—she was in a strange, beautiful sky world, one she’d never heard of or imagined. Before long, the rain clouds blanketing the world below her unraveled and melted away, and the never-ending streets Page 5 Goldenagato | mp4directs.com