That’s where it all happened.
The blinding sun abruptly caused his eyes to darken. Robert felt light-headed and his ears clogged. He blinked and then glanced around with a look of bewilderment. Next to him sat a stranger. He was telling him something, but Robert couldn’t understand a thing, whether from surprise or the constant ringing in his ears, he could not be certain. In fact, he did not even try to understand the language of the strange boy. It seemed as though he was seeing everything for the first time, everything was odd, unfamiliar and incomprehensible. Robert’s face exhibited genuine surprise.
He did not understand where he was, on whose roof he sat, or what he was doing there. Robert stood up and inspected his clothes. He was stunned – the clothes were new, as was the barn and, ultimately, the whole yard.
Robert could not understand what was happening to him. Everything around him was completely unfamiliar. With eyes wide from bewilderment, Robert looked up at the sky.
There, the horse with a fish tail was still floating proudly with his mane spread across the sky. Rays of sun broke like long threads through it and disappeared again. The horse appeared to be smiling.
The first thought that came to Robert was that he was delirious. He knew that sunstroke could cause a loss of consciousness, but he could not comprehend how such hallucinations could at once seem so real and unreal. His heart was threatening to burst from his chest. A primal fear was starting to overwhelm him.
The boy could not help but think that this was some mysterious, fantastic, but strikingly realistic dream. He kept looking around with an open mouth and wide eyes. He wanted to flee that roof to the ground, and without thinking he took a step. The hot roof burned his bare heel like when he was on the beach in Pattaya several days earlier, where his father had taken him and his mother to see the Gulf of Thailand. The sea had been teeming with jellyfish and Robert accidentally stepped on one.
“Jellyfish. It’s just jellyfish, nothing to worry about,” the doctor had said calmly at the local hospital where the boy was taken with the burning foot. To the child, the word jellyfish meant a sudden stinging pain. The throbbing foot was covered with bright red marks.
It lasted for just a moment. Feeling a sharp pain, Robert squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath.
“Jellyfish! It doesn’t look like a horse-fish at all!” Jovan sat next to him laughing loudly. “Look, Robbie, see – there’s the head and there’s some tentacles. Like the one in our biology textbook."
The snapshots of a distant, hot country disappeared abruptly without a trace, like the surprise Robert’s face bore just a few minutes prior.
Robert smiled at Jovan and looked at the sky.
And yet, it was a horse that was floating in the sky, not a jellyfish, he thought.
Jovan and Robert, two inseparable friends, continued to enjoy looking at the clouds.
Meanwhile, the horse with a long fish tail continued to float across the sky, smiling.
