3. There is an award ceremony today & you are being given a very special award. You arrive at the address where the award ceremony is to be held, but it is a lake. Fish as large as horses swim around the surface of the lake & one of them gestures to you with a nod of its head. It wants you to ride it. You take a saddle you find beside the lake & strap it onto the fish. Hold your breath, the fish says & then dives down into the water. You pass out of the surface level of the lake. The other horse-sized fish wave to you as you dive down. You hold tightly to the saddle, the water rushing all around you. You dive deeper into the darker regions of the lake, past vast forests of seaweed & past mysterious cave emitting strange blue light. You dive down until the lake becomes a city of glass, buildings & streets & churches & parks all made of glass. The fish brings you to a great hall of glass & stops at the front door. Though you have been holding your breath for a very long time, you do not need to breathe. You unstrap the saddle from the fishes back, so it won’t have to swim around with a saddle needlessly, & walk inside. Ah! a woman says from the stage. Just in time! Our final award goes to YOU! She reaches an arm out to you in a broad gesture & points directly at you. The crowd turns toward you & applauds. You walk to the stage, delighted & excited & full of joy. The woman hands you a shiny black stone with a hole through its center. The award is the hole, the woman says. We just had to include the stone part to give the hole something to be a hole into.

6. You are in a school that entirely focuses on teaching Japanese language skills. The students in the class range from children much younger than you to adults & retured people. You ask the teacher if you can go to your locker. She says you have to take the hall pass & opens her drawer. The hall pass is a large desert tortoise. You take the tortoise & hold it under one arm like a football & walk to your locker. You turn the spinning lock back & forth, plugging in your combination code, but the lock won’t open. You keep messing with the locker, trying to open it. You try putting the numbers in quickly. You try slowly. You try sneaking up on the numbers. It still won’t open. Finally, you give up, but as you look up you realize it isn’t actually your locker, it was the one next to it. You go to this locker & spin the dial to your combination numbers & it opens. Inside there are six desert tortoises—the space inside the locker is very large, much larger than a normal locker. The tortoises all blink slowly at the light. How long have they been trapped in here? You decide to take them back to the class room, but you cannot carry all of them. So you attach yellow balloons to the tortoises until they float & walk along the hall guiding the floating tortoises by yellow ribbons.