🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Time & Reality | (31) TR-006-S
The boy arrived beneath the plum tree just before the rain.
He had no name in this hour, only the glint of a purpose he could not touch. His feet left no print on the moss, and the wooden gate had not creaked when he passed through it. Even the wind refused to answer his passage. The past does not suffer visitors, and it does not welcome them. But sometimes, once, it permits.
In the garden ahead, a woman knelt over a bowl of soaked rice. Her fingers moved as though remembering, not acting. She hummed a melody that did not belong to any time. The boy watched her hands. He had always remembered them as distant thunder: strong, soft, shaped like lullabies.
The sky was close and gray. A single bee orbited the old shrine roof, its flight mapping a logic older than questions.
He could not speak. This was the rule. To visit was to vanish from agency. No word, no touch, no mark. Just witness. Just once.
The woman stood. Her knees cracked faintly, like the shifting of wood in a temple wall. She paused. Looked up. Not at him, but through something. A thread of unease passed through her, like breath held too long. Then it passed, and she turned away.
He had come to see her in this precise moment, in the morning before everything. Before the letter. Before the fire. Before her silence had become final. He had always wondered what her face had looked like when she was still whole.
She did not look whole.
She looked tired, radiant in the way of dying stars. Not in body, but in spirit. Something already retreating behind her eyes. As if the years ahead had begun their slow erosion, and she could already feel the water rising in her sleep.
The boy stepped beneath the tree. The fruit above him were not yet ripe, but one had fallen. It rested in the grass, bruised slightly on one side. A small ant clambered across its skin. He watched it go.
From the house, a kettle shrieked. The woman startled, then moved toward the door. She glanced behind her, toward the tree. Toward him. No. Toward the tree itself. Her eyes fixed on the fallen plum.
She hesitated. A small frown. The sort that folds into memory without ever surfacing again. Then she turned, and disappeared inside.
The boy remained. The garden smelled of damp soil and burnt air. The storm was waiting just beyond the hills.
He had come with no plan. Only ache.
He wandered the path of stones she had laid decades ago. The round ones for balance. The flat ones for guidance. She used to speak of walking as prayer. He stepped carefully, though it changed nothing.
A sparrow landed on the fence, ruffled its wings, and blinked toward him. For a moment he felt seen. Then the bird vanished upward, startled by a wind he could not feel.
There were many things he could have said. He had imagined them all. A whisper of love. A warning. A sobbed apology. A child’s question finally given voice. But the rules were older than want.
Only once.
Only silence.
The sun slipped behind a curtain of ash-colored cloud.
He turned back toward the tree. The fruit was gone. A plum-sized gap in the grass, as if it had never been.
The boy felt his time thinning. His outline fraying at the edges. The world no longer held him fully.
The past had tolerated his visit. Now it began to close.
He stood beneath the boughs and looked to the window, where the woman moved behind steamed glass. Her silhouette poured tea into a cracked cup. She looked older now, as if the act itself had folded time forward. Or perhaps he had stayed too long.
One last glance.
He pressed his palms together, not in ritual but in longing. His lips shaped a word he could never give her.
Then he vanished.
And in the house, the woman paused mid-sip. She frowned again, this time deeper. Her fingers trembled slightly.
She could not explain it.
But something in her body knew it had once been seen.