Il faisait frais[e]

“My name’s Ed.” We shook hands. “Short for Editor.”

“I can guess what your mother wanted you to be.” I grinned.

“My mother? My mother had nothing to do with it. My father beat her to death with a stick and in the process discovered that she had given birth to me.”

The silhouette of a leprechaun, bowlegged and froglike…

As I briefly described once to someone who asked, "Il faisait fraise is the story of some friends who try to move the world so that it will never be winter and so they won’t ever have to be separated. It’s a sci-fi high school drama sequential doodle of mine."

Anyways, here is the beginning (and the end) of it:

The balloons bumped and squeaked against each other. The girl looked up at the floating bundle she held in her hand. Silver, pink, and robin’s egg blue bobbed against a pale grey sky.

"I can’t take you with me. I can’t take all of you with me. But how I wish I could. Actually—and you know this—I wish I could stay here with you." She waved to her friends in the distance. One or two saw her and waved back. She smiled.

Before going into the lobby, she stood out in the parking lot and relased the balloons into the sky one by one. She watched them float away, raising a hand to shield her eyes from the invisible sun.

Above, airplanes crisscrossed the dome of the world with white steam trails gradually diminishing in their wake.

"This is where our story ends."

Glass Garden Snail is a good-natured parody of Asian dramas. It started with a real life anecdote, and blossomed into romantic comedy…

"They were friends as children, and he had a little crush on her. There was a time when he stole a snail from a streetside vendor and ran into the girls’ bathroom to show her. ^^ One day, he bought her glass flowers from the aquarium in a crystal vase filled with scented sand. She accidentally broke them on her way home from school that day…

A serious car accident gave her a head injury.

Then, her family moved to America.

Now, 12 years later, She is a student of Princeton University studying overseas in Shanghai. He is a singer with a lot of promise. One chance encounter begins their new story…

She has forgotten him, but he remembers her. Together, they will gather all the shining pieces scattered through their past."

Well, no.  It certainly is not legit French but a pun on my misspelling of "il faisait frais" (meaning "it was cool out"). With an ‘e’ on the end, frais becomes fraise, which means "strawberry"…That’s where it all starts.