Ever since he was a little boy, Jinhai Huang knew that his Uncle Bai was unusual, to say the least. As a kid, Jinhai would watch as his uncle left the house, fishing gear in hand, and then return home soaking wet with a large sum of money and no fishing rods in sight. This was a weekly occurrence, and it baffled Jin. When he would ask his uncle what happened to the fishing gear or why he was soaked, he always got the same puzzling answer.

“Sky fishing.” Uncle Bai would say before depositing half of the money he had into a jar labeled “Fishing Fund.” The rest made its way into Nai Nai’s hands for bills.

When Jin asked his mother and his grandma about what Uncle Bai did all day, they told him that he goes fishing. But that didn’t make sense to Jin. How could his uncle bring home all of that money from fishing? As far as he knew, the closest body of water to their abode was a day’s drive away. His uncle was never gone for more than a few hours. Things just didn’t add up.

Eventually, Jin stopped trying to figure things out. He was content to just go to school and focus on himself. Being a high-school student was stressful enough without worrying what his crazy old uncle was doing in his spare time. He had exams to study for, friends to hang out with, and his future to plan. He had had an interview at a local eatery near his home recently, and it had gone well. His life felt full. So when he came home from school a few days later, he was overwhelmed by the suggestion that his mother gave him.

“You need me to do what?” Jin asked, the anxiety showing on his face.

“You heard me, Jin.” Mā said as she expertly minced an array of vegetables and pork for their dinner. “I need you to go fishing with your uncle next Saturday. He needs the extra pair of hands.”

It was nearly impossible to keep the groan out of his voice as he replied, “But Mā, I have to study. He’s never needed help before, why does he need me now?”

The look his mother gave him was hard as stone, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to talk himself out of this situation. That was made abundantly clear when his grandmother entered the room. Nai Nai was the sweetest old lady that ever was, but if you got on her bad side, she would become your worst nightmare. Jin had never been on the receiving end of that, but he had seen someone who was. He decided then and there that that would never happen to him.

“Hello, Nai Nai,” Jin said to her as she approached him.

“You’re such a good boy, Jin,” Nai Nai said as she patted his cheek with her wrinkled hand. “You’re Uncle Bai is going to be so happy to have your help.”

Those were the words that had sealed his fate. He glared at his mother, who had surely told Nai Nai that he was going to help out long before she ever mentioned it to him. He was going to have to talk to her about it more later. For now, he rolled his sleeves up, washed his hands, and helped his mother fill the wrappers for dumplings. It could wait until after dinner.

They were just setting the table when the front door opened and in came Uncle Bai. As usual, he was soaked from head to toe. A scowl was planted on his face today, and Jin was surprised to realize that the same scowl had been there for a few days now. Usually, his uncle was always smiling, even when he was shivering from his soiled clothes. Mā went straight to him and took his jacket from him. She hung it up to dry on the line outside the window. Uncle Bai went straight to his room.

“Is he okay?” Jin asked. He couldn’t help it: he gave his mother a look that said she was as crazy as his uncle if she was going to make him do this.

“The big one must’ve gotten away from him again,” Mā said, ignoring the look.

“He’ll get it soon,” Nai Nai replied, serving herself a full plate of food. “Then he will be back to his smiling self.”

As Mā sat beside him, she said, “That’s why you are going to help him.”

Jin was deflated, feeling the full weight of the situation on his shoulders. It wasn’t that helping his uncle was a bad thing. He liked his uncle, even if they never had anything in common. It was more that he knew how the day would go. He would leave with his uncle in the morning, go to wherever it was that his uncle “went fishing,” and he would end up losing a whole day’s worth of studying. If worse came to worse, he would also come home soaked through.

How did his uncle always get so soaked? He frowned at the thought. That was a question that always bugged him. He was fairly certain that his uncle couldn’t actually be fishing, so that ruled out the possibility of his boat getting turned over. Perhaps it was all a ruse? Maybe he would jump in a pool or ask a neighbor to hose him down before he came home. Jin wrinkled his nose at the thought. How did he end up getting stuck in this mess?

The next few days were filled with a sort of anxiety that loomed over his head like a personal rain cloud. He couldn’t concentrate at school and ended up failing the pop quiz his physics teacher gave them. His friends noticed that he was distracted, and when he told them why, they all laughed. They had all seen how crazy his uncle was at least once. It had become a running joke within their friend group to call crazy acts “Bai-antics.” Jin realized later in the week that he had missed a callback from the eatery he interviewed at, but he couldn’t bring himself to pick up the phone and call them back. His mind was focused only on the weekend and what sort of ridiculous, awful things he would experience.

Finally, the morning he was dreading came. The sunlight shone through his window and puddled on the floor, and he awoke to the familiar sound of footsteps in the hallway. Usually, they would walk right past his door, but this morning, they stopped, and he heard a tapping sound on his door. He gave serious thought to pretending to be sick, but he knew that his mother would not approve of that. He sighed and got out of bed.

“I’m getting dressed, Uncle,” he called out.

Apparently satisfied with Jin’s greeting, his uncle continued down the hallway. With a lot of reluctance and some existential dread, he got dressed and made his way to the kitchen. Mā was just setting a plate of food down in front of his uncle. She gave him a smile that said she was proud of him and then went to get him a plate. Jin sat across from his uncle and fidgeted with his hands. He didn’t know why he felt so much dread about today, but he did. Somewhere in his mind, he knew he was going to finally get the answers that he had been wanting to know his whole life. But the thought seemed scary in a way that he couldn’t explain. When Mā came back with a plate of food for him, he just stared at it. He was too anxious to eat.

“Jinhai, eat,” Uncle Bai said. “You’ll need it.”

Jin gulped and took a few tentative bites. His mother’s cooking was the best, but he felt his stomach churning. As soon as his uncle finished his whole plate, Jin stood to take it and his own plate to the kitchen. Mā patted his back and gave him an encouraging smile.

“Be good, Jin,” she said. “Bai is very excited about taking you today.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Jin muttered. He never knew how his uncle felt about anything. He was always so quiet.

When they left the house, Jin felt his anxiety growing, but it seemed different than it had all week. A bit of excitement and anticipation built up inside him. His uncle rented an electric bike for them. It had a sidecar, and that is where Jin sat with the fishing poles and a tackle box. His uncle drove them far into the outer area that surrounded their small town. There was practically nothing out there. Nothing except an old junkyard which ended up being where they stopped. Jin was more confused by the second as his uncle, who hadn’t answered him when he asked what they were doing here, strapped himself into an enormous pile of junk that all seemed to be welded together.

“The fishing pole, please,” his uncle said, gesturing to the sidecar.

“What are we doing here?” Jin asked him again, not understanding what was going on. “I thought we were going fishing?”

“The pole please,” his uncle said in response, ignoring his nephew’s questions.

When Jin threw him a pole, he took his time inspecting it. He looked at it from every angle, and apparently satisfied with it, gestured to the tackle box. Jin sighed, feeling like this whole day was a bigger mess than he expected, and grabbed the tackle box. He started climbing the tower of junk, finding it to be a lot harder to climb than his uncle had made it look moments before. When he got to the top, he found that a bench from an old car was where his uncle sat. There was a spot for him on the other side, and he had to climb over his uncle to sit in it.

“Buckle up, Jinhai,” Uncle Bai told him as he dug through the tackle box.

With a resigned sigh, he found the seatbelt and strapped himself into the seat. What on earth were they doing here? It wasn’t until his uncle cast his line into the air that Jinhai had realized what was going on. A giant fluffy cloud was in the sky above them, and the end of his uncle’s line landed directly in it. How it had stayed up there was a mystery to Jin. He knew, logically, that it should have fallen to the ground, but it didn’t.

It only took a few moments before his uncle’s expression had turned from a stoic set of calm into a determined smirk. Was that excitement in his eyes? Jin couldn’t be sure, but then he heard his uncle mutter, “Got it!”

Jin didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. His mind was full of questions that kept circling about like vultures circling their prey. But then, it suddenly dawned on him that something was happening. Something magic. Something impossible, even. He cast his gaze back up to the clouds. In an attempt to make sense of the day, he squinted at the shadow that seemed to be moving rapidly in the cloud. His mind tried to give him a logical answer as to what he was seeing, but he knew it wasn’t a plane. Planes didn’t move like that.

“Jin! Be ready with the net!” His uncle said.

It took Jin a moment to find a net in the tackle box. It was folded up. As he unfolded the net, he felt one drop of cool liquid splash against his cheek. Another drop hit his hand, but he couldn’t bring himself to look up at the sky again. This net was taking longer to unfold than he thought it would take. It was growing larger by the moment. In fact, Jin wasn’t sure how his uncle had even gotten it folded up in the first place. It ended up being as big, if not bigger, than the apartment building they lived in.

Moments later, the water from the cloud above came crashing down onto them like a hurricane. Jin tried to cover his face, keeping his hands up to shield his eyes. The rain had come on so unexpectedly that Jin hadn’t noticed that the line his uncle had cast was now taught until his uncle was elbowing him in the side as he tried reeling in the line.

The increasing adrenaline of the moment was making his jumbled thoughts clear. He spread his fingers out and gasped at the sight before him. Coming from out of the clouds was a giant creature. The writhing body was making the whole structure that they were strapped into move. The gray scales reflected the sunlight, blinding him, and the fierce yellow eyes that stared him down were as menacing as death’s presence. The creature’s fanged teeth looked sharper than any blade Jin had seen before, and he felt a sense of terror rip through him. It was a dragon.

Jinhai Huang would never forget that moment. The dragon’s intense stare had felt like a weight crashing down on him. When his uncle had yelled at him to throw the net, it had taken Jin almost too long to act. Once the net had been thrown, the creature gave up. It stopped writhing, and Jin found that he was now being crushed by the weight of its body instead of its glare. The scales were rough, but not hard like one would have imagined.

Jin was shaking uncontrollably in his seat. His breaths were coming in hard and ragged. What on earth had just happened? He tried hard to make himself wake up, thinking and knowing that this couldn’t be real. He couldn’t have just helped his uncle go “fishing” for a dragon. But no matter how hard he tried to make reality come back to him, he couldn’t. This was real. It took him a long time to realize that the rain had stopped and that his uncle was now securing the net. The net that now seemed to be made of a different material than it had before. Jin could have sworn that the net was made of rope, but now that rope looked and felt like gold.

“What…what is–” Jin started, trying to find words to accurately describe what he was thinking.

Bai laughed and gave him that crooked grin that usually sat on his face. He gestured at the dragon, and Jin couldn’t do anything but watch as the dragon transformed into the biggest koi fish he had ever seen. His questions only grew. Seeing the confusion and wonder that was written on Jin’s face, his uncle said, “Help me get this on the bike, and I will tell you everything when we are home.”

Feeling like he couldn’t even move, let alone put a giant, flying dragon-koi-thing on a tiny bike, Jin gave him a wary look. The idea of getting answers was enough, however, to get his legs working. The promise of going home and processing everything with all the answers was enough to make him hold all of his questions and thoughts back so he could get this done. After somehow securing the 30 foot dragon-koi to the bike, they ended up taking it and leaving it with a man in the warehouse that was only a two minute drive from where they were now. The man gave his uncle a huge wad of cash, and the two talked for several minutes while Jin tried to stay dissociated from the day’s events.

At home, his uncle told him everything. Apparently, the Huang family line had a secret familial business that had been around for centuries. The magic that passed down the line from male to male was used to catch magical creatures that were going extinct. The giant dragon they caught was going to be sent to a place where it could stay hidden from the real world and where it would be safe. The job was going to be his one day. Jin thought about how this story was similar to one that his mother used to tell him when he was little. Had she been trying to tell him?

Instead of asking how any of this was possible, Jin asked, “Why did you show me this today? You didn’t even need my help.”

Bai answered, “I’ve been trying to catch that one for weeks. Never could get the net out in time to catch it.”

Jin nodded as if that was a reasonable answer. It was going to take him some time to process this. Lots of time. That didn’t stop him, however, when his uncle asked if he wanted to come again the next weekend. His immediate answer was, “Absolutely.”