Short Story: Paper Boat

Short Story: Paper Boat

This piece has not been edited by the ShortbreadStories team.

Paper boat makes me smile.

It has become part of my life. Has become part of life of many children, either. When we were children we usually fold used piece of paper to make one and let it float inside a basin with water. Then we blow air to make it sail round its limited ocean until it soaks and slowly sinks and then we could not make it move anymore. Again, we build another one until we give up thrusting it with the air from our lungs.

So when rainy days came, I was so merry.

Before the heavy downpour, I would tell Ayan, my playmate and neighbour, to wait for my boat to sail past him. He would agree and his tarred and damaged front teeth showed up. He had nothing to disagree for. The rainwater run along the passageway down our doorway to Ayan's doorway.

Now, up there in the overcast heavens roared a deafening clamour and quickly stroke a shimmering sword. Afraid of them, I sprinted off to the corner of our four-cornered house and cupped my ears as Ma shut the windows and the door.

I waited for the invisible giant up in the sky to drain his heavy tears out and to quit on knocking the floor over the sky.

Once I had been told the legend of a furious giant who lives up in the sky and once in a while knocks the floor with huge hammer and pierces the clouds with his bright and swiftly-vanishing sword because of his never-expiring desperation to have his lost princess who is believed to have been hiding in the forests over the mountains ahead the town.

His tears had fallen and dipped the forests and the soil that held them.

In the middle of his outburst, I ran excitedly to my closet. I rummaged for used pieces of papers. I always chose past test paper results, those with low scores. I head to the area near the door. By that time, the giant's fury had diminished. And I also began to fold the papers, one by one, until I could make as many paper boats as I could.

When the giant calmed down, I rushed open the door, sat down at the sill, my feet touching the bamboo steps lowering to the ankle-high flood.

The flood hurried through the worn-out-of-grasses way leading to Ayan's doorway. Ayan had been crouching up on the three-step stairs of the door.

He hollered against the drizzle. "Set them out, Pou!"

I had gently put the paper boats on the floor at my side. I had made seven. I held one. Then I bent to reach the flood and readied as I mentally counted up to five.

I let the first boat go. It drifted away along with the current, but I had no worry. Ayan had been waiting for it while he showed his teeth, shouted in merriment, raised up his hands as if cheering in a race.

As the boat was coming to him, Ayan settled down at the middle step and stooped the way I did when I sailed the paper boat. He blocked the boat through his little hand and snatched it up. He glanced at me and smiled and he let the boat be taken again by the little deluge.

We did the same to the other paper boats. They sailed one at a time, under the soft drizzle in a half-muddy current. Some of them bumped over little mounds and rocks or hit the wet grasses flanked along the way and they overturned. Then as they neared Ayan, he set them up again, ready for the final journey waiting ahead. When the last piece to sail had been all set, the last few tiny raindrops still kept on falling. But they could not totally wet her. She was the last boat, made from thicker paper.

We knew where the boats would finally settle up. Down the creek, behind the backyard of Ayan's house. We thought some of them would wander off for a time. But surely others would sink earlier. The water would splash at them, soaking their weak structure, enabling the current beneath to easily pull them down.

Ayan is one of my paper boats, drifted away from me for years because of his dream, went with the flow of life, and wandered about the complicated ripples of the city. One thing he differs from them. He never sinks. He has gotten on his dream. He is a successful marine engineer now. It made me smile to think of it, just like how the paper boat makes me smile.