The paper boat gathers a layer of ash as it drifts downstream, disappearing around a bend. The girl lets out another heartbreaking cough. She stands, her movements shaky and weak.
Quickly, I rush over, reaching out my hands to steady her. “Wait! Let me help you.”
She passes right through me, as if I were made of air. I turn around. As she walks away, her body slowly begins to fade.
It’s as if the memory she and I exist in can only hold this one moment as she knelt beside the water’s edge. For that’s where I must be—inside her memory. That moment in time when she poured all her soul and hope into a paper boat. A wish for the gods.
The air grows thick with ashes. They fall from the sky, choking me. I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in ashes. They bury me, weighing me down, until I’m blind and cold and aching.
“Mina!” a voice calls to me from out of the darkness.
In my mind, I see them all. I see my grandmother performing ancestral rites to honor first her son and daughter-in-law, then her husband. I see my sister-in-law, weeping beside the grave of her child. And lastly, I see this girl, a stranger to me, but just as familiar as the rest, for in her grief I recognize my own.
Why must everything we love be taken from us? Why can’t we hold what we love forever in our hands, safe and warm and whole?
“Mina!” the voice persists. “It’s not real. You need to wake up.”
A pressure on my forehead, a burning warmth, and then—light.
I open my eyes, gasping in the fresh, lotus-scented air. I look up, not to clouds of gray and darkness, but to Shin, sweat plastered to his brow as if he’d run a great distance.
“Breathe, Mina. You’ll be all right.”
We’re in the garden. The bright colors of the trees and the sky are almost blinding after the white and gray of the memory.
“What is this place?”
“The Sea God’s garden. This pond is called the Pond of Paper Boats.”
“All of those boats,” I whisper. “They’re prayers that were never answered.”
Shin nods slowly.
“Why? Why have they have been abandoned?”
“They’re just prayers, Mina.”
I sit up. “Just prayers? They’re the precious wishes of humans!”
Shin hesitates, then says coldly, “I don’t care about the wishes of humans.”
I stare at him, a tight feeling in my chest. His eyes are blank of expression, as if they hold no light at all. I’m the first to turn away.
“You left the house though I forbade it,” he says. “Didn’t you hear what the fox goddess said? My life is tied to yours. If you die, so shall I. You may not care for my life, but you should at least have a care for your own. There are many things in this realm that could kill a weak human like yourself.”
“That might be true, but there are many things in my realm that could kill me, too. Drought. Famine.” My eyes travel to the paper boat, where I dropped it on the grass. “A broken heart.”
“There is nothing you can do.”
Shin is right. Like he said, I’m but a weak human. How could I hope to help that girl? Even if I could find her, I have nothing to give her, nothing to offer but my own tears, and she’s had enough of those to last a hundred lifetimes. She’d been at the end of her hope; all she had left was this one last prayer …
One last wish to the gods.
I scramble to my feet. “There is something I can do. That we can do. If you’ll help me.” Hurriedly, I grab the paper boat off the grass, turning to Shin. “I’ll go back with you willingly, and I won’t leave the grounds of Lotus House for the whole month, not without your permission, but first we must grant her wish.”
“Mina…” Shin looks skeptical.
“This boat was meant for the gods, yet it never reached them. We just have to deliver the boat to whomever it was intended for.”
Shin nods slowly, seeming to come to a decision. “What sort of wish was it? It should have been written on the paper.” His eyes drop to the boat. It’s half-unfolded. The inked characters are smudged from the water, rendering them illegible. I curse in frustration.
“It doesn’t matter,” Shin says, his calm, level voice surprisingly reassuring. “When you picked up the boat, you visited the moment the wish was made. Can you describe what you saw?”
“I saw a young woman.” Her bare knees in the muddy bank. Tears slipping down her face as she kissed the paper boat. “She was with child.”