Mr. Toda was a famously quiet man. Even after moving into this housing block on someone else’s planet, he barely spoke to anyone.
The block sits out near the far edge of the universe. Everyone living there was carried in once, long ago, by ship, and never went anywhere else since. The ship home, as a rule, doesn’t come.
Maybe that’s why, the moment Mr. Toda started putting something together in the corner of his garden on his day off, his neighbor Mrs. Masuda was the first one to notice.
“What’s that going to be?”
“A shed, I—” Before Mr. Toda could finish, he dropped a screw. By the time he’d picked it back up, Mrs. Masuda had already moved on to her next guess.
“Nothing but iron bones, and round like that… don’t tell me it’s a ship?”
“No.”
“It’s a ship!”
Mrs. Masuda sat at the exact center of the block’s gossip network. By that evening, the third floor and the fifth floor alike were buzzing with talk that Mr. Toda was building himself a spaceship.
By the following week, kids nobody recognized were gathered around the steel frame.
“Mister, where are you going?”
“Going… where, exactly?”
“Take me with you!” “My grandma too!”
It’s a shed, Mr. Toda tried to say. But the children’s faces were so bright. None of the kids born in this block had ever once seen past the sky. Mr. Toda shut his mouth and tightened another screw instead.
The rumor kept growing. The block’s bulletin board ran a headline: “Our Block’s Ship — Finished by Spring?” Where would it take everyone, once it was done? One by one, people loaded their own favorite destination onto Mr. Toda’s ship, without asking him.
The frame, meanwhile, never once came to look like a ship. Shelves went up. A door went in. However you looked at it, it was a shed.
One evening, Mr. Toda closed the last door. All that was left now was to set the roof on. And the shed would be finished.
Roof panel in hand, Mr. Toda stood still for a while. In the corner of the garden lay a single paper star, folded and left behind that afternoon by one of the kids.
The next day off, in front of a crowd that had gathered to watch, Mr. Toda did not put the roof on. Instead, he nailed a sign to one of the posts.
〈Spaceship — Under Construction〉
The crowd cheered louder than it ever had.
“I knew it was a ship!” “When’s it going to be done?” “We’ll be waiting, no matter what!”
Mr. Toda went back to the porch and sipped his tea. In the middle of the garden, the half-built ship caught the sunset and burned red, on and on, unfinished.