He rolled onto his butt, legs now curled up, and lay still, strangely more proportionate in death. He continued to carve clouds into the earth. Having never seen a real cloud, he drew them according to his mother's pictures and stories. He made one soft, a circular lattice of hearts, another thin and thin like a tangled net, and in his current attempt, he gave up halfway with a mushroom-shaped ball, kicked the dirt on top, and stabbed the knife. into the earth as deep as it would go. The tip of the blade slammed into something below. “Raya, please,” her mother reportedly said. “Enough of this nonsense. Go back inside and put away your father's knife. Hurry, he's probably on his way home now.” Her mother was right, her father was probably returning home, but what was hidden under the rock absorbed her more. He dug eagerly, cutting yaw marks into the ground with his blade. He scraped at a small rock until he could lift it. Below he found a pod. “Mom, I found another one.” She dusted the dirt off its shell and took it in the palm of her hand as if it were a fairy. It was shaped like a pine cone with tiny red seeds inside. “It's large, maybe a tree of some kind, like a magnolia or a