Dad, fresh off a flight from Earth, didn’t know how to drink water anymore.
Not that he’d ever admit it. He’d been drinking water his whole fifty years just fine, thank you. But here, in our family’s one eight-tatami room aboard the station, the rules were different.
“I’m thirsty. Pour me a glass.”
Dad filled a cup from the tap. Beads of water bulged over the rim, trembling, refusing to stay put. He didn’t notice, or didn’t care, and tipped the cup back for a drink anyway.
“Whoa!”
That was Yu, sitting across the low table. A blob of water the size of a softball had slipped clean out of the cup and was now floating, slow and wobbling, toward the middle of the room.
“Hey—it’s spilling! It’s actually spilling!”
“Dad, don’t swat at it!”
Too late. He swatted. The big globe burst against his palm into a spray of smaller ones—seven, eight, ten, more than anyone could count—and they scattered in every direction across the room.
“Whoa, it’s raining! Sideways rain!” Yu was delighted.
“Don’t cheer. Wipe it up. Wipe it up!”
Mom hurled a towel at the mess. The towel didn’t fall either. It spun through the air, slipping right past the floating drops without touching a single one.
“Would you just—stay still!” Mom lunged for the towel, missed, and ended up pinned to the ceiling herself.
Dad turned on the fan. Back on Earth, a little moving air dries up a spill in no time. That was the plan, anyway. Instead, the water caught the breeze all at once and sprayed outward—onto the wall, the shelf, the lid of a teacup—glittering as it went, until the whole room looked like its own small galaxy.
“Grandma! Grandma, come quick!” Yu called out.
Grandma hadn’t moved from her cushion in the corner the entire time. Thirty years in this house, and she’d never once gotten worked up over water.
“There, there. Turn that fan off. Chase it and it runs. Water’s not something you hunt down—you just let it be.”
She pulled a drinking straw from the folds of her robe and brought the tip close to one of the drifting beads, slow and unhurried.
A tiny slurp. The drop vanished into the straw. Then the next one. Slurp. The one on the shelf. Slurp. The one stuck in the ceiling corner. Slurp.
Dad, Mom, and Yu all stood there, mouths open, eyes following the tip of that straw. In about ten minutes, every last trace of the little galaxy was gone from the room.
Grandma puffed the gathered water back out into an empty cup. Inside it, the water drew itself into a single trembling sphere—exactly one glassful.
“Here,” she said, holding the cup out to Dad. “This is all it ever was.”
Dad went quiet.
”…That’s it? That’s all there was?”
“Water doesn’t lose a single drop when it spills. What multiplies isn’t the water—it’s the fuss.”
This time, careful not to spill it, Dad pressed his lips right to the rim and drew the whole sphere in with one breath. He swallowed. He’d been thirsty this whole time, after all.
“Good.”
“Told you.”
Grandma wiped out the empty cup with a cloth and set it back, gently, on the high shelf—right next to the framed photo.
“Grandma, are you putting the cup away for good?” Yu asked.
“Nobody in this house drinks from a cup anymore except your father.” Grandma gave her straw a little wave. “The rest of us switched a long time ago.”
Dad looked up at the shelf. Next to the photo frame, the cup didn’t look much like something you’d drink from anymore. It looked more like a keepsake.
”…Tomorrow, I’ll use a straw.”
“Good call.”
Only Yu looked a little disappointed. She reached quietly for her own cup, tilting it toward the edge of the table—until Mom’s hand shot out and caught her wrist before she could finish the thought. Mom’s reflexes, these days, were faster than anyone’s.