The Sky They Finished Together

Before Vihal's allotted hours were over, Edwin had drawn a splendid cloud out of the spilled paint and finished the sky for that time.

"Pheeew—! How's that?"

His work done, wiping the sweat from his brow with his own forearm, Edwin turned to Vihal.

"Amazing! That's amazing, Edwin…!"

Vihal, shouldering the brush now grown dry, clapped with his eyes shining.

The sky spread out below their feet was finer than the ideal Vihal had carried, and he felt he could look down at it forever.

"You know… this is what I'm actually good at.

Taking a sky someone else painted… and carrying on from it, without breaking it. That kind of thing?"

Edwin's face showed a touch of difficulty at how to put it, with Vihal gazing at him in glittering admiration. He looked out over the whole of the finished sky below them as he spoke.

What did he mean? Vihal tilted his head and looked at him—and in his eyes, Edwin's profile as he gazed straight down at the sky, and the deep indigo of those eyes, seemed to waver.

"This is a sky that only got finished because the clouds you painted, Vihal, were good. It's a sky *we* finished. The two of us."

Praised by the senior he revered, who was also his friend, and told that the two of them had finished it together, Vihal felt a warm, ticklish happiness—and he looked out over the sky the same way.

And then his heart, which had been clouded over, was carried off by the wind just like the sky below him, and a beautiful stretch of clear weather showed through, and the words slipped out of his mouth without his noticing.

"It's beautiful…"

"…Yeah!"

The sky their two pairs of eyes held was, in the world below, a life of a single instant.

Before long, every cloud painted in this space would vanish, and only the blue canvas—the bare sky—would remain. And then the next angel on duty would have to paint the next *instant* of sky.

Down on the earth, meanwhile, the clouds never stopped moving toward that next instant.

The angels who worked here never saw that moving sky with their own eyes. And yet they took pride in their work, and day by day they joined sky to sky.

"Right. I've got the next sky to paint, so I'm off to fetch fresh paint. Vihal, you go and make your report."

"…Yes…"

The report. He had to go to God, report the end of his work, and write a letter of explanation besides—and at that, Vihal's heart clouded over again. ---