By Umiyuri Katsuyama - Translated by Toshiya Kamei
The old woman in her indigo cotton jacket dragged her bent body into the garden shrouded in early morning mist. She spotted a gray piece of paper among the tiger lilies. With her boney, age-stained fingers, she picked up the dew-wet paper. It was a miniature parachute with a piece of wood tied to the end of its string. School Starts, the piece of wood read. On Monday in the Square, continued on the back. Her village had no school when she was a young girl. How she wished she could have gone to school!
“Oh, it’s today!” She leaped up, slipped into her rubber-soled cloth shoes, and ran. A smile flashed across her face as her knees and back no longer ached, spots dotting her skin like plum-blossoms.
In her youth, she savored the freedom of walking on unbound feet. She could go anywhere without fear. During one of her outings, she bumped into the man who would become her husband.
As she grew up deep in the mountains, her husband was the first human she had met. He was kind to the strange girl who had wandered into the village. She fell in love, shed the fur she had worn all her life, and married him—it seemed the most natural and sensible thing to do. After all, none of the village girls wore fur.
The newlyweds settled in a small house on the outskirts of the village. There she gave birth to their son and raised him. Despite their lack of material possessions, she didn’t want anything else. Her husband had a beautiful, soothing voice. In the evening, he entertained her by reading aloud old folktales and poems. He taught her some letters.
“Xiaoyu—small jade . . . This is your name.”
After her husband’s death, her heart had never skipped a beat. Until this morning.
Her son lived in town, but he came to check on the old woman once in a while. “Mother, don’t forget your medicine,” her son said, but no reply came.
“She must be in the garden,” he mumbled. When he glanced outside the window, the tiger lilies swayed beyond the stone-walled vegetable garden. A snow leopard took large strides and vanished from his view.
About the Author
Umiyuri Katsuyama
Umiyuri Katsuyama is a multiple-award-winning writer of fantasy and horror, often based on Asian folklore motifs.
A native of Iwate in the far north of Japan, she later moved to Tokyo and studied at Seisen University.
In 2011, she won the Japan Fantasy Novel Award with her novel Sazanami no kuni.
Her most recent novel, Chuushi, ayashii nabe to tabi wo suru, was published in 2018.
Her short fiction has appeared in numerous horror anthologies in Japan.
About the Translator
Toshiya Kamei
Toshiya Kamei holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas.
His translations have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and World Literature Today.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Timothy Dwyer is an American science-fiction writer living in New Zealand.
Haneko Takayama is an award-winning Japanese writer. In 2009, her short story “Udon, Kitsune tsuki no” was a runner-up for the Sogen SF Short Story Award. 
Kerrie Noor was born in Melbourne Australia in 1960 but has spent most of her adult life in Scotland.
Amy Logan's first work was published on October 29, 1970. It has been a bit of a dry spell since, so she is very excited to have the opportunity to contribute to AntipodeanSF.
Keech has been writing fiction and poetry for 40 years, and is currently working on a speculative novel of the Afterlife, focusing on Victorian literature, though it is technically set in the near future.
Bruce is an older Australian, living in Adelaide, who enjoys reading and writing, especially short stories and flash fiction.
Myna Chang writes flash and short stories in a variety of genres.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
