„EYE SEE FUN 2“

Once, an eye returned to a place it felt it had seen before. Everything was different now – in the upper-right corner stood a cherry tree that hadn’t been there before.
Perched among its branches was the first kappa, a green poet named Kawa. He stared into empty space, unable to find the next line of his poem. On the tree hung cherries red as blood. The worms that the eye had brought with it began to gnaw on the tree, biting little holes into the trunk. Through those holes, pieces of sky and drifting petals slowly passed by. Watching these holes, Kawa was suddenly struck by inspiration. He finished the final line of his poem and leapt out through one of the tree holes.
When the eye saw Kawa again, he was already dead – now only a free, wandering spirit.

The eye moved on, swam through a green lakebed and crawled into a den. There lived the second kappa – a blue doctor. He kept watch beside a strange flower. This flower was the mother of all kappas. She spat out eggs, and any soul that wished to be born could crawl into an egg and become a kappa. But the flower had not produced any new eggs for a long time. Her leaves were dry and yellow.

The eye decided to offer itself to the flower. She swallowed it whole, yet the eye slipped out again through a wound torn open in her roots.

Those roots were buried in red soil. There lived the third kappa – a red, overweight butcher. He held a scythe in his hand and boiled the meat of dead kappas in a pot. The wound in the roots was probably his doing.

The red kappa smelled the mushrooms on the eye, grabbed it and shook it hard. The mushrooms fell, one by one, into the soup. He drank the first mouthful, then the second and the third. On the fourth, he suddenly collapsed to the ground and lay still.

The eye used slime’s sticky body to seal the flower’s wound, but she still did not recover. Above the blue doctor’s head, a little thought-bubble appeared: this place had not seen the sun for a very long time. So the eye went and caught a sun.

When the sunlight reached the roots, the wound finally healed and the flower began to spit out eggs again. But this time, no soul was willing to enter and become a new kappa.

On the lakebed, the eye found the soul of the red kappa – his mind was filled with nothing but power. In a chest at the bottom of the lake, the eye discovered a crown and used it to let the red kappa be born once more. This time, his gaze looked a little cleaner than before.

The doctor gave the eye a bottle of potion. The eye poured the liquid into its own body, and the world instantly went dark. When it woke up again, it had become a ghost, able to pass through doors that only ghosts could cross.

Behind such a door lay a kappa heaven, full of kappa flowers and cucumbers. Kawa’s spirit wandered there as well. Two statues stood in this paradise: the green one decided where the kappas would go, and the pink one was in charge of sending the eye back home. The eye walked up to the pink statue; she opened her arms and opened a passage.

At last, the eye could return. At the end of its journey, it found the other eye that belonged to it.
The two eyes met again, looking straight at each other. And the story ended there, as simple as the moment it first began.