Kazu’s lantern tree is still no bigger than his thumb.
At night, the tiny sapling gives off a faint glow—about as much light as a firefly. Kazu checked on it every evening. He wanted to catch up with the great tree on the far island, at least a little, before the Lantern Festival. So he watered it morning and night. Sometimes he’d sneak a tug on a leaf, hoping to stretch it taller. Not that pulling on a leaf ever made a tree grow.
A lantern tree takes three generations—grandfather, father, and son—to go from sapling to something big enough to light a whole house. You water it, and you wait. That’s all there was to it.
“Staring at that thing again?”
Ken peered over Kazu’s shoulder with a snort, then tipped his chin toward the darkness beyond.
“Look over there. The one that’s just naturally huge. Nobody waters it, nobody does a thing to it. It’s just… there. Been that way since the start.”
It was out past the sea—past the sky, really. In the pitch black, a single island floated alone. On it stood a lantern tree of impossible size, lighting the town below like daylight, every branch already fully formed.
“You’ll be dead of old age before you ever catch up to that.”
Ken laughed and wandered off.
Everyone said the same thing: that tree had been that size since the day it was born. No one had ever seen it as a sapling. People had simply noticed it standing there one day, already grown.
Kazu looked at his thumb-sized sapling, then at the great tree across the water. Watering it suddenly felt pointless. He reached for the little bell tied around it, meaning to take it off.
“Don’t take that off.”
A voice came from behind him. It was Tome, from next door. Her house had kept its shutters closed for decades. Around town, she was known simply as the woman who’d given up growing a tree. Nobody seemed to know exactly why.
“That bell’s there so the tree won’t get lonely at night. Your father tied one on his, too, way back when.”
“Grandma Tome. I want to catch up to that big tree. But how am I supposed to catch something that was already huge when it was born?”
Tome looked out at the dark tree for a long moment.
“You can’t catch up to it. That much is true.”
“I knew it—”
“That’s not what I mean. There’s no one left to race.”
“No one… left?”
“What you’re looking at is so far away, it isn’t even that tree anymore. The light from when it was small passed through here long before your grandfather was born. What you’re seeing now is the light from the night it finally grew up.”
“So right now, it’s…”
“Who knows. Nobody’s seen it yet—not as it is now. Some kid in this town will see it, a few hundred years from now.”
Tome pulled something small from the fold of her robe. An old bell, rusted brown.
“A dead branch washed up from that island once, a long time ago. When I split it open, I found this buried deep in the heart of the wood. A little kid’s bell.”
Kazu looked back and forth between the rusted bell and the still-shiny one on his own sapling.
Even the tree that seemed born full-grown had once been a sapling. Some child, somewhere, had tied on a bell so it wouldn’t feel lonely. And that kid had probably been laughed at too, by someone just like Ken.
Catching up, being caught—none of it meant anything across a distance like that. And that’s when it hit Kazu: this scraggly thumb of a sapling would look like a “tree born full-grown,” too, someday, to some child not even born yet, impossibly far away. Whatever was awkward or unfinished about growing up would be too far away for anyone to ever see.
Kazu tied the half-loosened bell back on, snug.
Tome watched him do it. Then, as though she’d finally made up her mind about something, she walked slowly toward her own house.
The shutters that had stayed closed for so long creaked open.
In the corner of the shut-up yard stood a single stump—what was left of the lantern tree Tome had given up on and cut down, long ago. Beside it, a shoot thinner than a thumb had grown up without anyone noticing. Its tip glowed even fainter than a firefly. It seemed Tome had been hiding it behind those shutters the whole time.
The light wouldn’t arrive for hundreds of years. And on the night it finally did, some child on that distant island would surely point up at the dark sky and say: “Oh—there’s another one being born.”
The small light in Tome’s yard streamed straight out into the darkness beyond.