“…Oh, it’s snowing!”
Fuyumi stopped to look up at the single snowflake fluttering above her head. It was soon joined by more snowflakes falling from the night sky. All at once, the scene before her was one big mass of white.
“I did think it was pretty cold out… Wow, this must be the first snow of the season.”
She pulled her scarf around her neck a little tighter and smiled.
Fuyumi liked snow. Dancing in the air, the snowflakes looked like tiny white fairies. Who knows, maybe there was a real fairy mixed in with them somewhere. A visitor from a faraway land, hiding in plain sight. She liked to think that. These little fantasies always made her heart beat a bit faster.
Ever since she was small, Fuyumi had loved fairy tales, and that hadn’t changed even now that she was in junior high. Just the other day, she’d visited a bookstore on the edge of town and bought several picture books. That store was one of her favorites—it had a great selection of picture books, illustrated fairy tales, and fantasy novels. Whenever she got her allowance, she’d head to that store, full of anticipation for what she might find. It was one of the things she enjoyed most.
And today, she’d managed to get a hold of a very special book. It had a pale-pink cover that she remembered seeing in the library way back when she was in kindergarten. When she’d decided to try tracking down a copy of her own, it had ended up being out of print. She hadn’t even been able to find it in any used bookstores and had almost given up on ever seeing it again.
But it had recently been reprinted. Fuyumi hadn’t known that, so finding it at the store now had felt like suddenly being reunited with an old friend.
This book told the story of a mysterious cake stall. When spring arrived, it would appear under an old, old cherry tree. Its shelves were stacked with cherry-blossom mochi cakes and nothing else, but the quality was unlike any other. People who ate them would never forget the taste, and soon they were flocking from all over town to buy the cakes.
Then the stall would vanish without a trace once the old tree’s cherry blossoms began to fall, and it wouldn’t reappear until the next spring, when those same blossoms were in bloom.
The only person working at the stall was a middle-aged lady in a pale-pink apron. In fact, she wasn’t a human. This person who made such delicious sweets was actually the spirit of the old cherry tree.
“Ooh… A cherry-blossom spirit making cherry-blossom mochi cakes…”
Just thinking about the illustrations of those thick, plump cherry-blossom mochi cakes was enough to make Fuyumi swoon. If only she could try one herself… Cakes made by a spirit had to taste better than anything mere humans could make. Just one bite, and you’d melt away into pure bliss… Oh, if only she could find a magical stall selling magical sweets like in this book!
Fuyumi had drifted off into fantasies like that countless times before. But of course, she knew she couldn’t just go inside the world of a picture book. Believing that as a little kid was one thing, but now she was old enough to know the difference between fantasy and reality. Still, she couldn’t give up that sense of wonder. It was part of who she was.
“I wish there was a store like that right here, in real life…”
Her head had started to fill with thoughts of spring, but a cold northern wind brought her back to the present with a shiver.
“Brrr, it’s freezing… I should get home soon. It’s already nighttime, and I don’t want to catch a cold. The days are so much shorter in winter…,” Fuyumi murmured to herself as she started walking again.
But then she spotted a shadowy figure in the snow and darkness up ahead. There was a clack, clack as they got closer and closer.
Finally, the figure stepped into the bluish glow of a streetlight. It was a girl wheeling a large suitcase.
She was about Fuyumi’s age or maybe a little younger, with silver hair that really made her stand out against her dark surroundings. The girl—who had an eye patch over one eye—was pulling her suitcase along with one hand and holding an ice-cream cone in the other.
A young girl, out on her own after dark, eating ice cream in the snow. It was such an odd scene, Fuyumi couldn’t help but stop and stare.
The girl seemed to notice, and when she paused, the wheels of her suitcase fell silent. Beneath the bright, pale streetlight, the two girls’ gazes met.
Looking at Fuyumi with her one uncovered eye, the other girl smiled cheerfully. She licked her ice cream again without breaking eye contact.
“Um… Is that good?” Fuyumi asked, feeling as though she should say something to break the silence.
The girl smiled again and nodded. “Yeah! It’s really good. I got raspberry with chocolate chips.” She gave the ice cream another lick.
Fuyumi gulped.
Raspberry…? She’d thought for sure it was grape or some other flavor like that. Maybe the blue streetlight was making it look purple.