Forgotten Dreams of Eternity: Lost Odyssey: Thousand Years of Dreams

(Short Story -XXII.) *Bright Rain*

That the language of the island is of no use in the other country.

That the people of the other country look on the islanders with cold eyes. That the only way for them to meet people with the same brown skin, the same language, and the same birthplace is to head for the island people's ghetto in town.

The first words the boy was certain to learn in the other country's language would be the ones the people of the other country used for people like him; illegal alien.

By the time he learned it, he would be tumbling down the hill in the ghetto.

The boy gallops away from the beach and returns a few minutes later with an overflowing armload of fruit. He says they grow where the wind from the ocean meets the wind from the mountains.

"They're at their best on nights when the moon is full. Go ahead -have a taste."

He wipes a piece of fruit against his worn-out shirt and hands it to Kaim.

"What do you call this?" Kaim asks.

"You're going to laugh, they pinned such a fancy name on it: 'Grain of Happiness'."

"That's a nice name."

Kaim bites into a Grain of Happiness. It is shaped like an apple from the other country. But it is some two sizes smaller and just that much more packed with juicy sweetness.

"This is great." Kaim says.

"You really like it? I'm glad." the boy says with smile, but he is soon hanging his head again and sighing.

"I like them a lot too." the boy says, "but I bet the other country has all kinds of stuff that's way better than this, right?"

Kaim does not answer him but takes another bite of a Grain of Happiness.

The boy is right: there are lots of foods in the other country far more delicious than these Grains of Happiness.

Or, more precisely, there were.

Now, however, the other country has been transformed into a battlefield.

The war started six months ago.

That was when the boy began seeing the 'bright rain' every night.

The prosperity of the "other country" is extreme. The most glittering happiness is available there to anyone with enough money, and money is available there without restriction to anyone with enough power.

Might makes right.

Wealth makes goodness.

Those who are neither mighty nor wealthy obtain right and goodness by finding others who are both weaker and poorer than themselves and ridiculing, despising and persecuting them.

The island people, whose language and skin color are different from those in the other country, are seen as the other country's shadow.

This is not a shadow, however, that forms because there is light.

The very existence of the shadow is what makes the light all the brighter.

This is the only way that inhabitants of the other country know how to think about things.

Eventually, however, strength reaches a saturation point, wealth that has run its course begins to stagnate, and expansion is the only course left open.

Desires can only be fulfilled through a continual bloating.

In order for the other country to remain strong and for the wealthy to stay wealthy, the leaders of the other country made war on a neighboring country.