I was in the middle of cooking, and my son started calling to me. “Mommy, fish!” I was focused on the food and not really paying attention, so I just said, “Ooh, neat.” He always figures out I’m busy and gives up when I do that. But that day, he tugged at my clothes. “Mommy, come here, there’s fish outside.” But of course that’s impossible, you know? We were on the thirty- eighth floor. Still, he’s almost never this pushy, so I went over to the window with him. “Where are the fish?” I asked, and he pointed at the narrow concrete ledge just outside the window. I looked closer, but all I saw was the rain splashing up. But my son kept asking. “Did you see them?” “Huh?” I said. “Look closer,” he said. “At the raindrops.” And I got this chill—I was a little scared, but I stared at the spray from the rain until I felt like I was falling into it. And then—I saw little fish, like killifish, in among the raindrops! Gave me goose bumps all over. …No, they weren’t actually fish; they were just rain. Just clear water shaped like tiny fish. But the way they hit the wall and jumped, it was like they were alive. That window is fixed, though, so I couldn’t open it, and when I watched them closely, they started to look like plain old raindrops. My son noticed, too. “Huh?” he said. “They went bye-bye…” That’s right; that’s why I said earlier that I only felt like I’d seen them, before. It truly doesn’t feel important enough to tell people about. My husband didn’t believe us at all. “That’s gestaltzerfall,” he said. “Sometimes words stop looking like words to me, too.” He sounded so proud of himself, even though this was something completely different. It’s a bit of a relief to have been able to talk to you about it. …Would you like to come over and have a girls’ night in with us sometime? Eyewitness Account B— Y_jiro (age 13), middle schooler, resident of Taitou Ward, Tokyo You sure you want to hear about it? I mean, obviously I don’t mind telling you; I’d been wanting to tell somebody anyway. The thing is, I’m not all that Page 48 Goldenagato | mp4directs.com