I don’t know about other people, but Claire wasn’t the kind of person who could just shrug off the sight of an inexistent hat. It weighed on her, this mirror enigma, so much more because of the proscription that accompanied it; what could possibly be so unusual about an object that her grandmother simply refused to talk about it?

The constant churning of her mind didn’t let her sleep, that and the giant moon which shone through her window, full and round and barely touching the tops of the oak trees. It bathed the whole room in silver light, strong enough to reveal the shapes, but not the colors of things. 

Old memories of sitting on the porch to watch its glitter on the surface of the little pond in their back yard called out to her and she longed to relive those happy moments. Back then her world extended only to the edge of the property and she knew it very well - every rock, every blade of grass, every tree - and felt protected by it, just as she felt protected by her grandparents. The property felt much smaller now, but then it was vast and wondrous, her little enchanted realm filled with birds and flowers where her imagination roamed free. 

She walked down the stairs as quietly as she could, remembering to skip the fifth step, the one with the creak, so that she would not wake up her grandparents, and sneaked out on the porch to enjoy the beauty of the night and take in big gulps of its cool fragrance. Its darkness was humid and vibrated with the songs of the tree frogs. The waterlilies stretched their necks like periscopes with movements almost fast enough to notice, eager to take in as much of the silver radiance as they could before the moon hid behind the treetops again. 

Read the rest of the chapter at frosenfeld.fika.bar.

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