The Philosophy of Puddles | Short-Short

On an evening just after summer vacation had begun, a boy sat alone in the park's sandbox, a bucket and shovel in his hands.
While everyone in his class was obsessed with collecting insects or observing plants, his interest lay in the "other world" reflected in the puddles left after the rain.

A mysterious world always unfolds within a puddle. The sky, the clouds, and occasionally a crow perched on a power line are reflected upside down. The boy loved to gaze at them.
But suddenly, he wondered.

"Does the world inside this puddle move at the same speed as the real world?"

He came up with an experiment.
First, he made a puddle about 50 centimeters in diameter in the sandbox. Next, he floated a small leaf in the middle of the puddle.
When the wind blew, the leaf slowly crossed the water's surface.

"Alright, next is this."
The boy took out the flashlight he had brought with him.
He shone the light onto the puddle and observed the moment the leaf reflected it. Then, he tried shaking the flashlight's beam across the water's surface in a complex pattern.
The leaf swayed irregularly, yet surely, in time with the movement of the light. The boy continued this for several hours.

Stars began to twinkle in the night sky, and the sound of insects could be heard from the surroundings. He gazed blankly at the starry sky reflected at the bottom of the puddle.

From that day on, the boy went to the park every day. And he continued his strange experiment of making puddles and shaking leaves with the light of a flashlight.

His family had a strange family motto passed down from long ago: "Wait for time. But do not resist the flow of time."

The boy had never thought deeply about the meaning of those words. However, in the time he spent facing the puddle, he felt that it was somehow like an invisible wall separating the world on the water's surface from the other world reflected within it.

Summer vacation ended, and the new semester began.
During a science class, the teacher suddenly pointed out the window. "Look, there's a big cloud over there. Can you see its shape moving?"

While everyone else looked out the window, the boy turned his eyes to the microscope slide on his desk.
A micro-world trapped within a water droplet was unfolding there. The light from the source was flickering ever so slightly, yet surely, just like a leaf floating in a puddle. And he realized that the flickering of that light was moving at the exact same speed and in the exact same way as the flickering of the fluorescent light on the ceiling.

The boy suddenly remembered the day he had shaken his flashlight in complex patterns. What if, at that moment, someone in the world above the puddle had been shining a flashlight on it? What if, at that moment, the world reflected inside the puddle had been shaken by the flashlight he was holding?

The teacher called out to him, but the boy stared only at the light of the microscope as if he hadn't heard. What he had done that summer vacation was not an observation of water ripples.
He had been the flashlight operator for the world he lived in.
And there is someone shaking this world.
The boy could only wait quietly for that existence to notice his flashlight's beam someday and shake it back.

It's hot every day, isn't it? 💦
Since it's August and the height of summer, I decided to write with the theme of summer vacation.
When I was a child, I used to look at puddles after the rain without much thought. I felt a mysterious charm in the world reflected there. What if that water surface wasn't just a reflection, but was connected to this world?
There was a story like that in a Doraemon movie, too.
I hope you can feel, even just a little, the "philosophy" of us living in an uncertain world that might be controlled by someone else.

#ShinichiHoshi #ShortShort #SummerVacation