The bottle missed the dog and broke on the street. I got a milk bottle out of the fridge and ran toward Lynn and threw the bottle at the dog. When I got to the house, I turned around and saw the dog tearing at Lynn's pants as she huddled over into a ball. Lynn pulled at the dog's tail and shouted at me, 'Run, Katie, run!' I ran, hearing the dog growling and Lynnie grunting. As I pulled away, the dog ripped my pants and his cold teeth touched my skin. The dog burst from the field suddenly, growling and snarling. That's how I learned about eyes, sky, and ocean: the three special, deep, colored, see-through things. I said, 'The ocean and people's eyes are special too.' She turned her head toward me and waited. 'The ocean is like that too, and people's eyes.' Lynn said, 'The blue of the sky is one of the most special colors in the world, because the color is deep but see-through both at the same time. We could have lain on our backs all day and never got hit. Some days nobody at all drove down our little road. We lay on our backs in the middle of the road and stared at the blue sky. She just laughed and hugged me and said, 'You're the best little sister in the world!' I liked it when she said that, so I stopped crying. Somehow or other, Lynn got behind me and said, 'Boo!' and I cried some more. We weren't that far from our house, but I felt scared.

Officially, I stayed all day with a lady from down the road, but unofficially, Lynn was the one who took care of me.Īfter Lynn ran into the field, I couldn't see anything but corn. When she wasn't in school, she stayed with me constantly. I felt a brief fear as Lynn disappeared into the cornstalks. Her long black hair disappeared into the corn as she chased the dog. A dirty gray dog ran out of the field near us, and then he ran back in. Fields of tall corn stretched into the distance wherever you looked. We were playing on the empty road near our house. I was almost five, and she was almost nine. For instance, one of my earliest memories is the day Lynn saved my life. I like to see how her memories were the same as mine, but also different. Today I keep her diary in a drawer next to my bed. I know a lot about when I was a little girl, because my sister used to keep a diary. I didn't care where she sent me, so long as Lynn came along. She was dismayed over how un-Japanese we were and vowed to send us to Japan one day. My mother said we were misusing the word you could not call a Kleenex kira-kira. Lynn told me that when I was a baby, she used to take me onto our empty road at night, where we would lie on our backs and look at the stars while she said over and over, 'Katie, say ' kira-kira, kira-kira.'' I loved that word! When I grew older, I used kira-kira to describe everything I liked: the beautiful blue sky puppies kittens butterflies colored Kleenex.

Kira-kira means 'glittering' in Japanese. I pronounced it ka-a-ahhh, but she knew what I meant. My sister, Lynn, taught me my first word: kira-kira.

Kira kira by cynthia kadohata