Festival day

The village festival wants a tea stall, and there is only one candidate. Mutjo prepares for two days straight. The Matji prepare too: flags are made; a queue system is designed; ranks are assigned, insisted upon, and immediately forgotten.

Festival morning is chaos of the very best kind — lanterns, music, a dragon that is probably a costume. Probably. The queue for matcha wraps the square twice.

Crowd control is handled by six persons barely three centimetres tall, and handled badly, and nobody minds in the least: the queue becomes a party, the party becomes the festival, and the festival drinks the stall dry by sundown.

Mutjo whisks the last bowl for the knight — a regular now — as the lanterns come down. In the empty square, the Matji do their quiet little bounce. Home, as the family says in its one word, is where the foam stands up properly.