SNOW AS IT FALLS, by Patricia Correll 7/10
A week passed, then a month. When next Yoko looked up from her work she had been Shigeru’s wife for a year. She often woke early, to gaze at his face as he slept beside her. In sleep the lines that gathered around his eyes smoothed out. There had been more of those wrinkles in the past months. Yoko thought it was because she had not yet given him a child. She wanted to ask, but as a human she was still very young, and she did not know how. Instead she tried always to smile, to have his tea ready and the yard swept clean when he returned from the fields. One of the village women was teaching her to sew, and Yoko practiced making a robe out of scraps of cloth while Shigeru was away.
One evening as she boiled rice for their dinner, Shigeru sat by the fire, gazing silently into the flames. His face was so sad that she felt a swelling of anguish in her own breast.
“My love,” she cried, dropping the spoon she used to stir the rice. “Why do you look so sad? Are you angry with me? Are you sorry we have no son? Am I a bad wife?”
Shigeru stared at her a moment, then seized her hands in his. “Yoko, don’t say that! You’ve been nothing but a loving wife to me. The Reborn Emperor himself could never be as happy as you make me. And I should like children, but …I’m afraid we couldn’t afford to feed them. I wish I could buy you a fine house and beautiful robes and a thousand other things to make you happy. It’s our poverty that grieves me.”
“I am already happy.” Yoko said in a small voice, but Shigeru had clasped her in his arms and she didn’t think he heard her.
Yoko didn’t sleep at all that night. She lay awake, her head on her husband’s chest. His head beat strong and steady. She wanted nothing more than to make him happy. But she had no money and no way of getting any. She prayed for the second time in her life.
The gods sent her a solution in the late hour when night crosses over to day. The answer they sent frightened her, but Yoko had learned never to shun a gift from the gods.
As soon as Shigeru left for the fields, Yoko took out her needle and thread. She sat before the patchwork robe she practiced her sewing on, and waited. When nothing happened she began to weep. Truly she was a useless wife!
Her tears fell on the robe, and the robe began to change. Waves of color spread over the ugly, patched fabric. Blue, red, green…Yoko’s tears dried on her cheeks as she watched the robe transform into the loveliest cloth she had ever seen. When the change was complete she timidly reached out to touch the robe, and froze in shock. Her human hand was gone. In its place was a wing, covered in white feathers. She had been so transfixed by the robe’s transformation that she had not noticed her own.
The crane stretched her wings and her neck, reveling in the lightness of her body. But she soon stopped, hanging her head in guilt, as if she were deceiving her human husband. She touched the robe with her foot, wincing as the fabric scraped her long toes. It was beautiful, but far too rough for human skin. The craned gazed at the robe with her sharp bird eyes, and all at once she understood what she had to do.
[previous] . 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7 . 8 . 9 . 10 . [next]