The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness

day of it.
    ‘Not for Rachel and Mei,’ Amanda said.
    ‘Rachel?’ George asked.
    ‘You remember,’ she said. ‘The girl from work who came to my birthday a few months back. Mei, too. Both pretty, both vaguely evil-seeming. Rachel more so.’
    ‘Yes,’ George said, bouncing a giggling JP up and down in his arms. ‘I think I remember them.’
    ‘We sit in the sun. We look at boys. We drink wine.’
    ‘Sounds nice.’
    ‘They hate me. And I think I hate them.’
    ‘I met someone,’ he said, so quickly it must have been obvious he’d been holding it in. ‘She’s called Kumiko.’
    Amanda’s face froze for a minute. ‘All right.’
    ‘Came into the shop. We’ve gone out the last two nights. And again tonight.’
    ‘Three nights in a row? Are you teenagers?’
    ‘I know, I know, it’s a lot all at once, but . . .’ He set JP down on the sofa, burying him in dusty, old cushions so that he’d have to escape, a game JP
loved.
    ‘But?’ Amanda asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ George shrugged. ‘Nothing. I’m just saying I met a nice lady.’
    ‘All right,’ Amanda said again, carefully. ‘I’ll pick him up before four.’
    ‘Good, because–’
    ‘Because you’ve got a date, gotcha.’
    But George wasn’t embarrassed, felt too full of sunshine to even be bashful. ‘And wait,’ he said, ‘just wait until I show you the dragon and the crane.’
    He kissed Kumiko that night. For a moment, she was definitely the one being kissed, but then she did kiss him back.
    His heart sang.
    ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said to her some time later, after they lay together under sheets he hadn’t even bothered changing, never imagining for a moment that anything like
this
was going to happen. ‘Who
are
you?’
    ‘Kumiko,’ she said. ‘And who are you?’
    ‘I’ll be honest,’ George said. ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea.’
    ‘Then I will tell you.’ She turned to him, taking his hand as if bestowing a blessing. ‘You are kind, George. The sort of man who would forgive.’
    ‘Forgive what?’ he asked.
    But she kissed him for an answer and the question was lost, lost, lost.

1 of 32
    She is born a breath of cloud.
    She sees neither her mother nor her father – her mother has died during the birth and not hung around; her father is the cloud itself, silent, weeping, consumed with grief – and so she stands alone, on legs unfamiliar.
    ‘Where have I come from?’ she asks.
    There is no answer.
    ‘Where am I to go?’
    There is no answer, even from the cloud, though he knows.
    ‘May I ask, at least, what I am called?’
    After a hesitant moment, the cloud whispers into her ear. She nods her head and understands.
    2 of 32
    She takes flight.
    3 of 32
    The world below her is young, too young to have quite grown together. It exists in islands of floating earth, some connected by rope bridges or bamboo walkways, others reached across expanses of sky by rowing boats made of paper, others to which she can only fly.
    She lands on an island that is mostly meadow, the grass bowing to her in the breeze. She pinches it between her fingertips and says, ‘Yes. Just so.’
    In the meadow, there is a lake. She goes to it, following the sand along its shores, until she reaches the river that flows from it. She stands on tiptoes and sees that the river empties over the edge of the island and into space in an outrage of angry water.
    Why does the water do so?
she thinks.
    4 of 32
    There is a fisherman on the far shore. She calls to him. ‘Why does the water do so? Will it not spend itself completely and leave only empty earth?’
    ‘This lake is sourced from the tears of children who have lost their parents, my lady,’ the fisherman replies. ‘As you see.’
    ‘Ah,’ she says, looking down to see tears falling from her own golden eyes into the water, sending out ringlets across the lake’s surface.
    ‘It makes the fish tender,’ the fisherman says, reeling in a specimen with shiny golden scales. ‘Though they