Kenji Sora
1
The monk arrived just before dusk. The hill curved like a sleeping body, and at its crown stood the monastery: walls made of ancient cypress, dark with age, unpainted, without embellishment. It was said to be built by those who had forgotten the need for bricks. But the strange thing was that there was no gate. Not even a crack. Taro walked the perimeter twice. He touched the wood. It was warm, breathing, as though the wall itself was waiting. There was no sound from within, no chanting, no footsteps. Only the wind and the monk’s breathing, slow and precise.
He sat.
Three days passed. No one came. His rice was finished, his tea leaves nearly dust. Each night he slept on the moss beneath the eastern wall, wrapped in his robe, listening to the rustle of stars. Each morning he bowed toward the wall and said nothing. On the third morning, as the mist curled low and blue across the grass, a child appeared. She had no shoes, her kimono torn and ink-stained, her hair tied with twine. She carried a small clay cup, steam rising from it. Without a word, she offered it.
Taro accepted the tea. It tasted like rainwater and burnt pine.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I seek the master who teaches without speaking,” Taro said.
The child blinked. “He doesn’t live here. He lives in the space behind your questions.”
Taro bowed. “Then this wall is his lesson.”
She nodded. “Most monks leave. You stayed. Why?”
He looked at the wall. “Because it was not the wall that stopped me. It was my need for a door.”
The child smiled like water breaking sunlight. “Then come in.”
She turned and walked straight through the wall. Not around it. Through it.
Taro stood and stepped forward. His foot pressed against the wood. It was solid. Still warm. Still breathing. He closed his eyes. Took one breath. Two. Three. And walked.
There was no resistance, only a shimmer, like walking into smoke.
Inside was silence. Not emptiness — fullness without weight. The courtyard was still, stones raked in spirals, a pond with no ripples, a plum tree shedding its last bloom. At the far end, beneath the open rafters of a veranda, an old man sat — cross-legged, still, not blinking.
Taro bowed deeply. “Master.”
The old man said nothing.
Taro waited.
Hours passed.
When the moon rose, the old man finally spoke, “Why did you wait outside?”
“There was no door,” Taro said.
The master smiled. “There was also no lock.”
That night, Taro swept the courtyard. He felt no joy, no pride, no clarity. Just stillness. That was enough. The child had disappeared. No one mentioned her. When Taro asked, the others — few and silent — shook their heads. “There are no children here,” one whispered, eyes lowered.
Taro cleaned the incense bowls, folded the robes, scrubbed the floorboards that smelled of cedar. The next morning, the master handed him a single plum. “Today,” he said, “your task is to eat this.”
Taro bowed. “How?”
The master pointed at the sun. “First, learn what hunger is.”
Taro fasted all day, sitting in the shade of the bare plum tree. He watched ants climb its bark. Watched the shadow shift along the ground. Listened to the bell that never rang. Near sunset, the sky turned a shade of brass, and Taro peeled the plum slowly. Its skin was tight and tender. The flesh inside — soft as memory. He chewed. Swallowed. Closed his eyes.
When he returned to the master, he simply said, “Thank you.”
The master nodded. “Did you taste it?”
Taro replied, “It tasted like the absence of desire.”
The days that followed dissolved into a rhythm without clockwork: waking with the crows, sweeping, sitting, watching leaves fall. No one gave instructions. No one corrected. When he asked questions, no one answered. He once dropped a bowl. It shattered. He bent to pick up the pieces. Another monk stopped him and said, “Let it lie.” The broken porcelain stayed on the floor for three days before someone swept it away. On the fourth day, a flower bloomed in its place — a small violet, rooted in the crack of the wood.
Taro began to understand.
Weeks later, as snow arrived in quiet spirals, the master handed him a blank scroll.
“This is your koan,” he said. “Meditate on it until you see the words.”
“But… there are none.”
The master raised a brow. “Exactly.”
That night, Taro sat before the scroll. For hours. Then days. The others went about their silence. One nodded at him. Another left him a bowl of soup. But no one interrupted. On the fifth morning, just before dawn, Taro dipped a brush in ink. On the scroll, he wrote:
“The gate has no door. But your feet still pause.”
He laid the scroll at the master’s feet.
The master read it and said nothing. Then he reached out and set the scroll on fire. The ashes scattered into the wind. Taro did not flinch.
“You may go now,” said the master. “Your lesson is done.”
Taro bowed. “Where shall I go?”
The master said, “Where the wall leads.”
“There is no wall.”
The master smiled.
“Exactly.”
Taro turned and left. No door. No footsteps. Just snow, and sky, and the quiet space between.
2
The path south was long and narrow, bordered by fields half-harvested and hills that curved like the folds of an old man’s robe. Taro walked without haste, without map, without reason. Each morning he bowed to the sun. Each night he slept wherever the stars would watch him. He ate little. Drank from streams. Carried silence like a robe across his shoulders.
One afternoon, the sky bruised into cloud, and the wind began to speak in low, guttural tones. The storm came quickly, as they often do in late autumn. He found shelter beneath a grove of bamboo — tall, green, hollow, ancient. Their trunks swayed but did not break, no matter how fiercely the wind clawed at them. Taro watched them bend, bow, straighten. He breathed with them. In. Out.
Then the soldier came.
He was young, soaked in blood not his own, sword dragging behind him like a wounded dog. His face was dirt-streaked, eyes sunken, lips pale. He collapsed beside Taro without formality, without permission, without words. Only when his breath returned did he speak.
“Are you a monk?”
Taro nodded once.
The soldier spat. “Then tell me what the point is. Of all this.” His hand swept across the valley, the storm, the sky, the ache in his ribs. “Tell me why men scream when they die. Why the ones who survive feel worse.”
Taro said nothing.
“I’ve killed twelve men,” the soldier said. “I remember their faces. Their mouths open. Their eyes didn’t close.” His voice cracked. “Why didn’t their eyes close?”
Taro looked at the bamboo. It bent again in the wind, slow, deliberate. He gestured toward it. “Watch.”
The soldier frowned. “It’s just grass.”
“No,” Taro said. “It is the lesson.”
The storm raged louder, rain slicing sideways, the bamboo groaning like old bones. The two men sat in silence, soaked. The soldier cursed. Taro remained still. Eventually the wind softened, the rain thinned, and light crept through the breaks in cloud like forgiveness. Taro stood and walked to a broken stalk of bamboo, one whose center had cracked open from age. He pressed his ear to it and listened.
“There’s nothing,” the soldier said.
“There is everything,” Taro replied.
The soldier stared. “Why don’t you speak clearly?”
“Because truth doesn’t arrive in words.”
The soldier stood. His body swayed. “I don’t want riddles. I want peace.”
“Then sit again.”
They sat.
“You say you want peace,” Taro said. “But your hands are still clenched.”
The soldier opened his fists.
“You say you want clarity,” Taro continued. “But your ears are still full of screams.”
The soldier’s face twitched.
“You say you want answers,” said Taro, “but your questions come like weapons.”
The soldier stood suddenly. “I should kill you. You say nothing. You act like a god. But you’re just a man with empty bowls.”
Taro didn’t move. “Yes. Empty.”
The soldier drew his blade. It was chipped, bloodstained. He pointed it at Taro’s chest. “I have killed twelve monks. You would be the thirteenth.”
Taro nodded. “Then do it.”
The blade wavered.
Taro’s voice was calm. “Strike now, or sit down. Both are the path.”
The sword fell from the soldier’s hand. He collapsed again, this time not from exhaustion, but from something deeper — a breaking.
He wept.
Later, the rain stopped. The sky turned silver. The scent of mud and split bamboo lingered in the air like a memory not yet finished. The soldier leaned against a stalk, eyes closed.
Taro boiled tea over a small fire. He offered the cup wordlessly. The soldier took it.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“No one.”
“Then why are you here?”
“To learn what silence says.”
The soldier drank. “Do you think I can be forgiven?”
Taro shook his head. “There’s no one left to forgive you.”
The soldier stared. “Then I’m damned.”
“No,” said Taro. “You’re free.”
The soldier didn’t understand. Not then. Perhaps not even later. But something loosened in him — not like a knot being untied, but like the hand holding the rope finally letting go. He leaned his head back against the stalk and listened. The bamboo made no sound, yet the silence between the wind spoke.
Taro stood.
“Where are you going?” the soldier asked.
“Nowhere.”
“Will I see you again?”
“No.”
“Then what should I do?”
Taro looked up. “Watch the bamboo. When it bends, it teaches. When it breaks, it is already forgiven.”
He walked on. The soldier stayed.
The next village was quiet. Burnt roofs, empty wells, chickens scratching among broken sandals. A child waved. Taro bowed. He slept beneath an overturned cart, woke with frost on his eyebrows, ate a handful of millet, and continued walking.
At the edge of a frozen pond, he saw his reflection. It looked back without judgment. Without name.
He whispered to it, “Twelve men. One sword. One weeping boy.” The reflection rippled. “Bamboo doesn’t speak. And yet.”
In the next spring, years later, villagers would tell stories of a silent man who came from the mountain and built a small hut among the bamboo. A former soldier, they said. He would sit for hours with children, teaching nothing. Yet somehow, they said, they left understanding more.
When asked where he learned his wisdom, he only smiled and said, “I met a man who listened to the grass.”
3
The town was small, a bend in the river with no name, where the air smelled of roasted barley and wet earth. Taro arrived just before noon, his robe dark with dust, his sandals worn smooth. He entered through a stone archway, carved with birds no one remembered carving. The people didn’t greet him. They never did. They watched quietly from doorways, heads tilted, as if trying to decide whether he was lost or had simply forgotten he belonged elsewhere.
There was a teahouse by the water. Old, leaning to one side like a bowed back. Its windows were always open, even in rain. The owner, a thin woman with quiet hands, served no menu. One simply sat, and she chose your tea. Taro entered, bowed, and sat cross-legged on the floor near the door. The air was heavy with steam and the scent of jasmine.
A few minutes later, a man entered — broad-shouldered, rings on every finger, silk robe creased but expensive. A merchant. His eyes were tired. His hands trembled as he removed his shoes. He sat across from Taro without greeting.
The woman served them both tea. Taro’s was green, bitter. The merchant’s was golden, sweet.
They drank in silence.
After a while, the merchant leaned forward.
“You’re a monk?”
Taro nodded.
“I have everything,” the merchant said. “Silks from China. Gold from the South. Horses that run without reins. Yet I wake each morning feeling hollow.”
Taro said nothing.
The merchant poured himself more tea. “They say monks understand peace.”
Taro glanced at his cup. “Peace is not something to understand.”
The merchant frowned. “Then how do I get it?”
Taro took the teapot and poured until the merchant’s cup overflowed, hot tea spilling onto the table. The merchant jumped back. “What are you doing?”
Taro set the pot down. “You came with a full cup.”
The merchant wiped his sleeve. “You wasted the tea.”
“No,” Taro said. “I showed you what you brought.”
Outside, the river moved without sound. The wind stirred nothing. Time folded inward.
The merchant stared at the steaming cup. “Then how do I empty it?”
Taro replied, “You must taste the sky.”
The merchant laughed bitterly. “You speak like poets. I asked a simple question.”
“There is no such thing,” Taro said. “Only simple silence.”
That evening, as the sky softened into bronze, the merchant returned. His rings were gone. His robe was plain. He carried a small wooden bowl and nothing else. He knelt beside Taro in the garden behind the teahouse.
“I am empty now,” he said.
Taro shook his head. “No. You are hungry.”
The merchant waited. A bird sang somewhere in the trees.
Taro reached down, scooped a handful of pond water into the merchant’s bowl, and whispered, “This is the sky.”
The merchant stared at the water. It reflected the first stars.
For days, he remained — doing nothing. He did not ask questions. He swept the steps, wiped the tables, trimmed the garden where weeds grew like forgiveness. He did not speak of business. Taro never asked his name.
On the fourth morning, the merchant found Taro seated near the edge of the river, holding two cups.
“I’ve made tea,” Taro said. “From boiled silence.”
They drank. It tasted like stone and cloud.
Before leaving, the merchant placed his empty bowl on the window ledge of the teahouse. The woman didn’t touch it.
As he walked away, he bowed toward the sun, toward the street, toward a stray dog licking its paws.
And finally, toward himself.
That night, the woman asked Taro, “Do you think he’ll return to his old life?”
Taro sipped his tea. “He’ll return to his life. Whether it is old or not is up to him.”
She smiled. “You never give answers.”
“I give room,” Taro said. “Answers grow like moss — slowly, where it’s quiet.”
He stayed one more night. In the early morning, just before first light, he left a note by the empty bowl.
It read: “When the cup overflows, let it rain.”
He walked east.
The birds followed.
4
The mountains curved like folded thoughts, the sky stretched thin, and the air was cold with the hush of untouched things. Taro walked slowly now. His breath left visible trails behind him. He hadn’t spoken in three days. Not out of silence, but because words had become too large. The village was at the edge of the slope — just three homes, a shrine, and a shed filled with empty baskets.
He came not because he was called, but because he had dreamed of a bell that did not ring. When he awoke, his feet turned west.
The villagers pointed him toward a hut behind the shrine.
“There’s a sculptor there,” they said. “He carves the Buddha’s face from memory.”
Taro knocked softly.
“Enter,” a voice called.
Inside, the scent of cedar, incense, and oil. Wood shavings curled across the floor like shed petals. In the center of the room sat a man, face lined like tree bark, eyes closed. Beside him stood a half-finished statue — serene, silent, almost breathing.
Taro bowed. “I heard you carve without sight.”
The sculptor smiled faintly. “Sight has never helped me see.”
Taro waited.
After a while, the sculptor gestured. “You may sit. But do not ask questions. Not yet.”
For three days, Taro observed. The sculptor never opened his eyes. He moved his fingers slowly across the grain, touching the forehead, the curve of the lip, the hollow of the collarbone. He never corrected. Never paused. Only once did he whisper, “Too much sadness in the eyes,” and chisel a single line smoother.
Taro watched the wood surrender. Each shaving a breath. Each stroke a memory being unlearned.
On the fourth day, Taro finally asked, “How do you know what the Buddha looks like?”
The sculptor didn’t answer immediately. He reached out and touched Taro’s face.
“You frown when you speak.”
Taro blinked.
The sculptor withdrew his hand. “The Buddha’s face is not a face. It is the absence of one.”
That night, Taro dreamed of a mirror that showed nothing. In the dream, he stood before it for hours. Behind him, people came and went, spoke, wept, laughed, grew old. But the mirror remained blank. Only when he stopped expecting did it begin to shine — not with image, but with presence.
He awoke and wrote: “To carve a face, forget the face.”
He folded the paper and left it near the sculptor’s tools.
In the morning, the sculptor handed Taro a lump of raw wood.
“Try,” he said.
“I’ve never carved,” Taro replied.
“Exactly,” the sculptor smiled. “Begin.”
Taro picked up the chisel. He stared at the wood, its knots and lines, its dense stubbornness. He touched it. Waited. Then began.
He did not try to shape a nose or mouth. He carved wind. The space between sounds. A single raised curve like a question that had stopped asking.
When he finished, it looked like nothing.
The sculptor touched it, slowly. Then nodded.
“You have made something honest.”
The villagers asked if he would stay. The sculptor said nothing. Just placed the carving on the shrine — not beside the Buddha, but behind him, hidden.
Taro understood.
“Reflection is not about seeing,” he said to a child who followed him down the path.
The child asked, “Then what is it?”
Taro looked at the mountain, the river far below, the wide open breath of the valley.
“Reflection is when the world forgets your name and still bows to you.”
He left with nothing. Not even the carving. His hands smelled of cedar. His mind, of still water.
Far from the hut, he stopped by a pool and looked in.
His reflection wasn’t there.
Only the sky.
5
The village had no road, only a suggestion of one — a path flattened by feet, goats, and time. Taro followed it at dusk, past scattered rice fields and trees bent from wind that had long since forgotten its name. Children pointed from rooftops. Old women watched without speaking. In this village, gossip arrived before strangers did, and it traveled faster than the river.
By the time he reached the center, the tea stall boy was already whispering to the blacksmith, “He’s the one the cat follows.”
Taro didn’t notice at first. The cat was quiet, all shadow and stillness, with fur like wet ink and eyes that held no question. It walked a few paces behind, then sat when Taro sat, curled when he stopped, blinked when he turned.
In the evening, as Taro lit incense by the river, the cat sat beside him. Neither moved. The flame swayed but never went out.
A man in a fisherman’s robe approached. “That cat,” he said, “belonged to a monk who lived here many years ago. He meditated every morning by the old fig tree. One day, he simply vanished. No farewell. No death. Just… gone.”
Taro nodded.
“The cat stayed,” the man added. “Never left. Not until today.”
That night, Taro slept beneath the fig tree. The cat curled beside him, purring without sound. When Taro opened his eyes just before dawn, the cat was already awake, staring east.
He sat up, folded his robe around him, and assumed the lotus posture. The cat adjusted its tail and mimicked him exactly. They sat like that for hours. Villagers passed by slowly, whispering.
By noon, a boy approached and asked, “Is the cat learning from you?”
Taro shook his head. “I am learning from the cat.”
The boy frowned. “But it doesn’t speak.”
Taro replied, “That’s why it’s wise.”
A monk from a nearby shrine visited, curious. He watched the cat meditate beside Taro for a full hour, then said, “This is not ordinary. The animal is possessed.”
Taro looked up. “So are most people.”
The monk scowled. “Animals have no souls.”
Taro gestured to the cat, now sleeping on its side, belly rising with each breath. “Perhaps that’s why they’re free.”
The monk left. The cat did not.
Over days, more villagers began to sit beside them. First a child, then a woman who lost her husband in the floods, then the village priest — quietly, without robes.
They said nothing. They didn’t know what they were waiting for. They only knew that the silence beneath the fig tree felt different — heavier, cleaner, like the stillness before snow.
Taro spoke once.
He said, “When the cat stops meditating, so should you.”
Then he closed his eyes again.
One morning, the cat didn’t arrive. Taro searched the fig tree, the river, the alleys. He found it on the roof of the tea stall, stretched out, blinking at the clouds.
He climbed up, slowly. Sat beside it.
The cat leaned into him. He felt its weight — soft, real, finite.
“Will you leave again?” he whispered.
The cat yawned.
That night, it didn’t return.
The villagers looked, but no one found it. Some said it went into the forest. Others said it followed the spirit of the old monk into the hills. One child claimed it turned into a leaf and floated away.
Taro said nothing.
He folded his mat. Bowed to the fig tree. And left.
A year later, pilgrims still came. To sit. To listen. To wait beside the fig tree where a man and a cat had once breathed in time together.
When asked what had happened there, the villagers only shrugged.
“Nothing,” they said. “But it changed us.”
6
The monastery stood on the edge of a cliff, built from white stone that shimmered like old bone under the moon. Few travelers climbed this high, and fewer stayed. Taro arrived in winter. His breath came out in short, glassy trails. The wind carried no birdsong. Only the faint clang of a bell — but no one could say where it hung.
A monk met him at the entrance, old as bark, thin as a shadow. His name was Master Gen, though no one used it. Most called him “the Silence.”
Taro bowed. “I’ve come to learn.”
Master Gen studied him for a moment, then handed him a bell.
It was made of nothing.
No metal, no wood, no weight. Just air. An invisible shape resting in his palm.
“This is your gift,” the master said. “Ring it when you doubt.”
Taro blinked. “But there’s no sound.”
Master Gen smiled. “Exactly.”
Taro stayed in a small stone cell without doors. He woke with the wind, swept the snow from the walkways, and shared warm rice with the crows that gathered without reason. He did not speak unless spoken to. He watched the mountain more than he watched his own hands.
One morning, the mist rolled in so thick he could no longer see his own feet. He wandered from the monastery, following a feeling instead of a path. Hours passed. The cold deepened. His fingers grew pale. Still he walked.
At last, he collapsed beside a dead tree — twisted, blackened, a ruin of once-growth. He curled inward and waited. For sleep. For death. For something unnamed.
He remembered the bell.
His hands trembled as he cupped the air before him, as if holding it again.
“I doubt,” he whispered.
He rang the bell.
There was no sound.
But everything stopped.
The wind paused. The cold softened. His heartbeat slowed. Even his thoughts — those endless birds — grew still.
He looked up.
The mist parted slightly, enough to show the face of the tree.
From its blackened limbs hung a single frost-covered blossom.
It had bloomed in silence.
Later, the monks found him walking back toward the gates. He said nothing. They didn’t ask. Master Gen met him with a bowl of hot barley broth.
Taro took it, bowed, drank.
Then he said, “I heard the bell.”
The master smiled. “And what did it say?”
“It said everything.”
That evening, a novice asked Taro, “Does it really ring?”
Taro replied, “When the world is loud, you will not hear it. When the world is still, you won’t need to.”
Years passed. Taro remained. He taught no lessons, gave no sermons. But whenever a monk wept at night, or sat trembling with questions that had no words, Taro would walk by slowly, pause, and raise his hands as if holding a bell.
The monk would bow. And silence would descend.
One day, Master Gen called Taro to his chamber. He was dying, though he said it like one might mention the weather. Calmly. Without nostalgia.
“I have one request,” he said.
Taro waited.
“When I pass,” the master whispered, “don’t ring any bell. Just hold it. Let the others feel the shape of its silence.”
Taro nodded. “Yes, Master.”
When Gen died, the sky did not change.
But every monk, without instruction, gathered in the courtyard. Taro stood before them. Raised empty hands.
They bowed. No bell rang.
Yet everyone heard it.
Years later, they would say: “That was the day the wind paused. The day even the snow fell silently.”
Taro never spoke of the bell again. But every morning, he cupped the air and bowed.
7
He had not meant to arrive there. The valley unfolded like a forgotten page, and he simply followed the crease. It was a place untouched by paths or names, the sort of hollow where even the sky whispered more quietly. Taro had walked for days without intention, and now he stood at the edge of something he could not explain.
There, in the center of the valley, grew a tree.
It grew upside down.
Its roots stretched toward the sky, bare and branching like black veins against the blue. Its leaves brushed the earth — delicate, slow-moving, as if caressing what most trees turned away from. No birds perched on its roots. No squirrels in its limbs. Only wind moved through it, as if unsure which way was forward.
Taro sat beneath it.
He did not ask questions.
The days passed without shape. He drank from a spring that emerged from stone. Ate wild yams and bitter greens. At night, stars pressed close, as though curious about his silence.
He noticed the tree never shed a leaf. Not even in wind. He tried not to name it. Tried not to imagine what it was trying to become. He failed.
One morning, he asked aloud, “What does it mean to forget the sky?”
The tree said nothing.
But its roots caught the light in a way he hadn’t seen before — like hands turned outward, offering not to receive, but to release.
A traveler passed through — the first face Taro had seen in two weeks. A woman, tall, with grey eyes and scars like rivers across her arms. She stopped beside him and gazed up at the roots.
“I thought it was a hallucination,” she said.
Taro bowed slightly.
“Have you named it?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He looked at the leaves swaying just above the earth. “Some truths don’t want to be owned.”
She sat beside him. For a while, they simply listened — to the wind, the rustle, the breath of a world that had not been measured.
Then she said, “I’ve been running.”
“From?”
“From myself,” she said. “But this place… it doesn’t chase.”
“No,” said Taro. “It waits.”
She stayed three days. On the morning of the fourth, she carved a small mark into the bark of the tree — not a word, not a symbol, just a line. Then she turned to Taro and said, “I think I remember who I was before I was afraid.”
Taro nodded. “Then leave now. Before you forget again.”
She smiled. “Will you come down from this place?”
“No,” he said. “I have roots here.”
She looked once more at the tree, then at him. “Maybe it’s not growing upside down,” she said. “Maybe it’s us.”
After she left, the wind returned. Not fierce, but with presence. The kind of breeze that feels like a conversation just beginning.
Taro stood and touched one of the leaves. It was warm.
He remembered a koan: If a tree grows downward and no one sees it, is the sky still the sky?
He whispered: “Yes. And more.”
In the final days of summer, a storm came. The valley flooded. Taro sheltered beneath a hollow in the rocks, watching as the tree swayed violently — but never uprooted.
Its roots, reaching upward, anchored it.
When the waters receded, he stepped out and found that not a single leaf had fallen.
He sat beneath it once more. This time he closed his eyes and whispered:
“To grow against the world is not defiance. It is return.”
When he finally rose to leave, he did not bow.
He simply looked up — not at the sky, but at the roots suspended in it.
And for the first time, he saw that they moved with breath.
8
The forest was neither thick nor thin, neither near nor far. It simply was. Taro walked its spine like one might walk the edge of memory — careful not to disturb what wasn’t his. He had been walking for years now, or perhaps no time at all. Some places don’t mark time in minutes, but in silences returned.
He knew this forest. Not from sight — that had changed — but from the way it breathed. From the way the trees curved just so. From the scent of soil that had once held his childhood footsteps. The way the wind turned, soft and crooked.
This was where it began.
There was an old path, long abandoned. His feet found it without thinking. Moss grew over the stones. Roots crept across the way like veins under skin. No birds called. Even the sky seemed to wait.
And then he saw it.
The tree.
It stood by the stream, older than memory, gnarled and reaching. He had sat beneath it once, as a child. Before robes. Before silence. Before he had a name worth forgetting.
He approached slowly. Sat beneath it once more.
And waited.
The leaf fell without warning.
Not with drama. Not with music. It drifted downward like a sentence no longer needing punctuation. It turned twice. Slowed. Spun.
And landed on his open palm.
Taro did not move.
He did not look around to see if anyone had witnessed it. No one had. That was the point.
He studied it — the thin veins, the faded gold edges, the tiny tear near the stem. It was perfect because it did not try to be.
He whispered, “That was the answer.”
It had taken him years to find a question small enough to carry.
Now he saw: the leaf had not fallen. It had returned.
He rose and walked to the stream. The water moved like breath. He placed the leaf on its surface and watched as it floated away, no resistance, no goodbye.
Then he sat again.
And breathed.
A boy found him days later. Wide-eyed, carrying a fishing pole too large for his hands.
“Mister,” he said. “Are you a monk?”
Taro opened his eyes.
“No,” he said. “I am a leaf.”
The boy frowned. “But leaves fall.”
Taro smiled. “Only when they’re ready.”
That night, the wind rose gently, the trees spoke in creaks, and a single ripple crossed the surface of the stream.
No one marked the moment.
But far off, in a village whose name had been forgotten, a cat looked up.
And sat very still.
The next morning, there was no trace of him beneath the tree.
Only the shape of where someone had once sat in silence.
And above, a branch slightly lighter, slightly emptier.
As if something sacred had returned to sky.
THE END
