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| New Planet by Konstantine Yuon |
It was always the same. The story in the picture book The Mountains of Tibet told of an old man in Tibet who died and was then asked to decide how he wanted to live his next life. And when the mother read the story to her child, the boy would always carefully study the watercolor illustrations that showed the old man’s visions, the visions that guided him back through all the galaxies in the universe, to be born again as a child on Earth, in the mountains of Tibet. The boy followed the old man’s journey quietly, from the great milky splash that is our galaxy, all the way to the page that showed the creatures of Earth. On that page, it was always necessary to linger for a quite long time, to ponder, to discuss, to choose. Although the old man decided to live life again as a child, the boy would always select a different animal, pointing to its vivid, painted image on the page—a dolphin, a tiger, an eagle—“I think I’ll be that one.”
Except tonight.
The boy’s mother had had a hard day. There had been work, of course, and then in the afternoon, they had all left the office to go to a funeral. The husband of a woman they worked with had died suddenly of cancer. The couple was young, had been married only two years, and had just recently conceived a baby. In the six weeks that it took him to die, her friend’s husband had helped his wife choose a name for the baby; but he would never see his daughter.
This is the beginning of a full-length short story. To read the entire story (or print it out), go to See You On Saturn
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