iv
Yukiko boarded a train headed to Magnolia. Recently, new technology had shortened the trip to get there by a third, making it now only take a few hours to arrive at. She checked once again the contents of her wallet. Despite her desire to travel all over, her budget was limited. Babysitting and occasional part-time job money would only get her so far before she ran out. Unless she got a job on the road…
Yukiko shook her head at the thought. It was just a temporary trip, she reminded herself.
To distract herself, she gazed out the window at the rapidly changing scenery. Trees, houses, whole stretches of land buzzed past. Yukiko let her eyes glaze over. Nerves keeping her up last night made her sleepy. She could almost make the landscape entirely blur together; nature becoming a single vague, green mass–
The green suddenly gave way to dazzling blue. Yukiko's eyes immediately refocused. A river. The young woman watched with renewed interest. There was something about large bodies of water that captivated her. Even her name seemed to suggest this, "Yuki" meaning "snow" in another language. She always thought it must have been divine fate to feel so connected to water. When she was small she distinctly remembered a sense of awe at the enormity of something like the ocean. Her dad always joked that she could get deadly serious at the oddest of times. Yukiko had floated in the ocean for what felt like hours the one time Mikan House took a trip there. She could still recall the calming feeling of floating atop something much larger, grander than herself. Maybe she should have been terrified, instead, it was refreshing. One thing was for certain, she always felt at ease near the water.
Soothed from the memory, Yukiko's tired body slowly lost concentration on the river, and her eyes closed. Her head next to the train window as the river ended.
A/N: "Yuki" can mean either snow or happiness in Japanese. The full name "Yukiko" could mean many different things depending on how the kanji is broken up. One other thing of note is that the "ko" can mean "child" as a kanji specifically to indicate children.