The Night Sky

"The moonlight is over there, right at the corner of the room… so the place furthest from the light is that far corner."

Keeping hold of his bucket and brush, Vihal walked to the corner furthest from the moon and came to a halt.

"If I paint clouds in a place with no moon, clouds that would look beautiful if they were passing over the moon… that should do it."

He set the bucket down and took up the brush.

Ordinarily, he would have painted in a way that scattered the cloud across the whole room.

But now Vihal decided to gather all thirty percent of the cloud into that one place.

What made the night sky difficult was this: even if one painted with white paint, the color melted into the night as it dried, changing into a dimmer shade.

That moment of change was fascinating every time he saw it; but it made it harder to judge exactly how deep a tone he had laid down, and with every stroke Vihal thought how grateful he was that there had been no difficult special instruction today.

At last, somehow, he finished the cloud.

"All right…!"

He slung the brush onto his back, gripped the bucket firmly so as not to kick it over, stood in the middle of the room gazing up at the moon, then turned and looked at the clouds he had painted.

And then it seemed to him that the moon he had been looking at all this while had overlapped with his painted cloud.

"…………"

He shook his head, as if to chide himself—for there was still the greedy voice inside him that wanted to do more, and the imagining mind that said *if I shaped this part that way, perhaps an angel delayed on the road home might still be able to return by a moonlit Ladder of Angels.*

Then he stepped out through the door and checked the time.

The clock floating at the center of the atrium, beyond the railing, pointed to fifteen minutes before the end of his shift.

"I finished much earlier than usual…!"

Even with a sky that called for only thirty percent cloud, he had never finished this quickly before.

But thinking back, he realized that he was always slowing himself from the very beginning by cluttering his mind with things like *the balance of the whole sky* and all the rest of it.

And because he kept checking in order to scatter the cloud evenly across the whole expanse, he used up still more time and made the work harder for himself.

"Maybe this… means I've grown after all…"

A night sky, first thing in the morning, suddenly assigned to him out of nowhere.

There had been no difficult special instruction, certainly—but even on a daytime sky he had always been running out of time, and now all he had done was gather the cloud together as much as possible, relying on the faint light of the moon, and he had cleared it easily.

He did not think everything he had done until now had been wrong. But he had come to see that it had been too advanced for the Vihal he was now.

Could this realization, too, be a kind of growth? With a little wry smile, he murmured,

"Perhaps what I need to practice is not chasing impossible ideals…"

Once more he opened the door and peered in at the clouds in the night sky he had painted.

A great dark mass of cloud set against a field of stars. Here and there he had thinned it, and though only a little, he had put in small drifting fragments around the edges.

The adjustment of light and dark had not gone quite the way he wanted, and the balance still was not anything he could truly be satisfied with—but he felt, from the bottom of his heart, that next time he wanted to paint it better.

Not out of panic, this time—but simply because he wanted to.

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