Taro sat on a bed in one of the spare rooms on the second floor, flipping absentmindedly through a book he’d picked randomly off the shelf while trying unsuccessfully to drown out Elijah’s cheerful yapping.

“I think I need a wife or something,” he said jokingly, trying to clear dust off the exposed surfaces of each piece of furniture in the room. “I mean, I built this house really big to hold all my inventions, but I’ve been getting a lot of dead-ends lately, and stuff is just piling up, as you can see…” He jumped back as a pile of books slid off the top of the desk he’d been cleaning, and quickly began to pick them up. “But I’ve been building this one thing lately…it’s coming along really well. Can’t wait to show it to you, Taro.”

“Eli,” Taro said calmly, flipping even more quickly now through the book’s pages. “Shut up.”

“Oh, am I bugging ya? Okay, I’ll leave you alone.” He made for the door, a stack of books teetering dangerously in his arms. “Hey, just don’t go in Celia’s room without her permission.”

“What makes you think I’d do that?” Taro said furiously, looking ready to throw the book he held at Elijah.

The man shrugged and turned to leave. “Just making sure.”

“Hmph.” Taro scowled to himself and went back to the book, which he hadn’t truly been interested with in the first place, but had only used in order to block out Elijah’s chatter. Now that he was alone however, he had nothing better to do than look at it, and flipped through the pages more slowly before getting a strange sense of déjà vu. The book seemed extremely familiar to him for some reason…at least the past few pages he’d been looking at.

“Must be my imagination,” he mumbled, still flipping uninterestedly through the pages. He’d been to Elijah’s house a few times before, sure, but he wasn’t really interested in books, especially not the kind Elijah usually kept lying around. They were mostly academic-type tomes, or books showing how to build things or work with wood or metal. This particular volume attempted to instruct the user on the finer points of glass-blowing, which Taro also found rather boring.

Flipping through the pages near the end of the book, he unexpectedly found a piece of folded-up paper tucked neatly within the crease. This caught his attention, and he removed the piece of paper, unfolding it carefully to make sure it didn’t tear. Once it was spread out, Taro instantly recognized what it was – a crayon drawing, specifically, a drawing done by him when he was much younger.

It was badly drawn, as most children’s drawings are, but it was earnest and simple. It comprised of three stick figures, one much smaller than the other two, but each with pointed ears and a tail. A bright yellow ball hung above the trio, presumably the sun, and they stood on a thick carpet of carefully scribbled grass. The stick figures all had wide smiles upon their round faces, and the smaller stick figure stood between the two larger ones, its hands connected to theirs. At the bottom of the page was a painstakingly written name in large block letters: TARO.

Taro couldn’t help but smile a little at the picture, although he couldn’t remember exactly when he’d drawn it. Out of curiosity he turned the paper over to the other side, and noticed something else; in thin, scrawled handwriting were the words “by Taro” and a date. “Eleven years?” Taro said with some surprise; apparently the drawing had been done when he was five. “Wasn’t that when…”

He stopped, staring blankly at the drawing for a moment, and lightly tossed it aside along with the book before turning to his side and pulling up the covers. “Doesn’t matter anymore,” he told himself, sinking as far under the sheets as he could get. “It’s over…and I don’t even remember it anyway.”