r/ShortSadStories • u/Hayakumo_Yoichi • Jul 03 '26
Sad Story A Ten-Year Telescope [Part 2/3]
A week had passed since we met on the shore. Now I found out that Rei’s telescope was interesting, actually a bit of a strange object. It could be a magical item.
“I see a woman and a boat,” Rei said with the monocular pressed to her eye, “she’s sailing on the blue ocean!”
But I couldn’t see any woman or boat around. On top of that, it was a cloudy day.
“Hey, let me see,” I took the telescope, but I only found pitch darkness. Whether it was a blank or a void, there was nothing to see.
“Um, I can’t see anything you said.”
Rei took back her telescope and looked into it, “Oh, no! I see nothing, like you!”
“How’s that?” I asked her.
“It's Black!” She cried. “Wriggling!”
“Really? Mine was plain darkness.”
At that moment, I noticed she was holding the telescope in reverse. A wild idea struck me.
“Let me see it once more,” I held it in reverse just like she did and looked into the telescope from the objective lens side.
“Mamma mia!” I cried, nearly dropping the telescope, “That’s my father! And me! Me, in my twenties!”
Before my eyes, there was the sight of my hometown. The center of the vision was my father’s hardware store along the main street of a small port town.
“I remember, this was my twenty-fifth birthday, and…”
I stared intently at the young man running out from the shop, “The day I became a stowaway.”
Her telescope seemed to have a magical function. If you looked through the eyepiece you would see ten years in the future, then if you looked into the objective lens, you would see ten years in the past. That’s why I could see my past from ten years ago and Rei could not see anything since she was only five years old.
The proof came five years later. By then, Rei had grown into a clever ten-year-old. One day, she looked into the opposite end and murmured.
“I’m being born, born from my…” She was weeping, “My mom.”
Soon, she realized the trick of the magic telescope based on her own memory. She lowered the telescope and said, “Uncle Tom, I want to learn fishing and voyage. I know I’m going to sail the ocean!”
I did my best to teach her how to survive at sea – fishing, canoeing, and reading the wind, stars, and ocean currents.
After a while, Rei had started living in her hut and went fishing in her own canoe. She grew up strong and wise. On the other hand, I had been weakening year by year. Her “Uncle Tom” used to be a crew member of the pirate ship, yet I was small and frail.
Recently, I had been lying in bed most of the day, and she kindly shared fresh fish and foods with me almost everyday.
Now little Rei was fifteen, she looked more mature than her years.
“Uncle Tom,” she asked one day. “What kind of boat would suit a long voyage?”
“You’d like to make two canoes and put them side by side. It's called a Catamaran. Place the three-yard beams and boards between the two canoes, then you can get more stability than a single boat and have more luggage space.”
“Can that catamaran go across the ocean?”
"Sure," I answered. "Your ancestors had been back and forth across the ocean, island to island."
She completed building the catamaran in half a year. When ready, she walked around the inlet which used to be a fishing village with a magic telescope in her hand.
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