The Destined Path of Water Chapter 4: Chapter 4: A New Ceiling

Read chapter 4 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Rika | Age 9 The water stain in the corner was definitely a bird. I had been looking at it long enough to be certain. The body was too round and the wings were uneven but it was a bird, or it had been trying to be one when the water came through the ceiling and left it there. I wondered how long it had been there. I wondered if the people who lived here had noticed it or if you stopped seeing things after a while, the way you stop hearing a sound that is always present. The curtains were moving. Someone had opened the window while I slept. Outside was the sound of morning birds first, then a dog somewhere, then the particular quality of light that came just after sunrise when everything was still deciding what kind of day it was going to be. The festival drums were gone. The night was gone. Whatever had happened in the river was on the other side of sleep now, softer at the edges, like something I had dreamed except for the necklace on the table beside me which I had not dreamed. I picked it up and held it in both hands. The bead was smooth and cool now, the warmth of last night gone out of it. I turned it slowly. The colour was hard to name in the morning light- blue, but with something else underneath, something that shifted when I moved it. I had never owned anything like this colour before. I had never owned much of anything. I put it on. The thread was soft against the back of my neck. The woman, Hina, she had told me her name last night, though last night felt far away, came in a little while later with a glass of water and set it on the table without making a production of it. She looked at the necklace but did not ask about it. I appreciated that more than I could have explained. "How did you sleep," she said. "Fine," I said. Then, because it was true and I was not used to things being true in a good direction, I said, "Better than usual." She nodded like that was a reasonable thing to say. She straightened the curtain that did not need straightening and looked out the window for a moment. "Ken is making breakfast," she said. "You do not have to come down if you are not ready. But there is food when you want it." She left without waiting for an answer. I listened to her footsteps go down the stairs, unhurried, and then the low sound of voices in the kitchen below, a man and a woman talking about something ordinary, and then the smell of something cooking came up through the floor. I sat with all of that for a while. The house was small. I could tell from the sounds of it the way the voices carried, the way the floorboards talked when someone moved across them, the way the window looked out onto a lane close enough to touch. A small house in a village I did not recognise, because the river had carried me further than I had known rivers could carry a person, into a valley I had not seen before, green and quiet and entirely unfamiliar. I should have been frightened. I kept waiting for the fear to arrive and it kept not arriving. Instead there was just this strange stillness, like the morning after heavy rain when everything is washed and quiet and the world has not yet remembered how to be loud again. I got up. My clothes from last night were gone, replaced by something clean that was slightly too big for me. I did not know when that had happened. I went to the window and looked out. The lane below was narrow, old stones, a cat sitting on a wall in a square of sunlight with the absolute certainty of a creature that has decided this is its spot and does not expect to be challenged. Beyond the lane the village opened up, hills on every side, green the way hills here were always green, the deep patient green of things that have been growing for a very long time. And through a gap between two houses, just visible, the silver line of a river. A different river than the one I had walked into last night. Slower, it looked like, from here. Quieter. I watched it for a while. Then I went downstairs. The kitchen was warm. Ken was at