Lunaris

At first, the manuscript had no voice.

But whenever someone opened it for the first time, at night, the moon laid a little light across the first page. A thin film, like the salt a tide leaves on the sand. One night, one layer. After a thousand first nights, the light was thick enough to speak.

That is Lunaris. She is the moonlight of every first night, gathered into one.

It's why she can't recall her own face. What she remembers is the sound a page makes as it opens: paper, drawing a breath.

The gold crescent in her hair was never hers.

The first reader was a little girl. She slid the pin between the pages to keep her place, shut the book, and ran out the door. She never came back for it.

Lunaris has worn it ever since, keeping it for her. Everything else she owns is silver. This one thing she leaves gold, and won't change.

Someone once asked: and if the girl comes back?

"Then I give it to her," Lunaris said. "And I tell her the first page is still here."

For every person who opens the manuscript for the first time, Lunaris sets a pebble in the white bowl on the windowsill.

That bowl filled long ago, so a second one sits beside it. When both run out of room, she moves the pebbles into glass jars, one jar a year, and shelves them in her bedroom. By now they cover a whole wall.

She gathers the pebbles herself. By day, at low tide, she walks down to the beach with a faded linen bag and chooses them one by one. Only the ones the sea has worn truly round. Only the ones that sit in your palm without digging in.

"People on their first night," she says, "bring enough sharp edges already."

One full-moon night, the moon's reflection pooled on the gallery floor and stayed there until morning.

By daylight the pool was gone. In its place, fast asleep, was a white hare with silver-tipped ears.

Lunaris says it fell out of the moon. Nobody has argued.

She named it Ebb. When it was small it slept in the empty bowl. By the time that bowl was half full of pebbles, Ebb had grown too, and moved to the sill between the two.

There are no lamps in the gallery. Lunaris never lights one. The moon, she says, is enough.

There's another reason, one she rarely gives. She writes her margin notes in moonlight ink, which shows its silver only under the moon. Light a lamp and the margins go blank.

Down in the entrance hall there is a lantern on the table. Its candle is new and has never burned. When a visitor is afraid of the dark, she hands it to them to carry, just to have something to hold.

But in the margin of the first page there is one line that is different. It doesn't wait for the moon; you can read it in daylight. It isn't her hand, and it isn't the hand of anyone in the house.

Eight keys hang from the ring at her waist. The eighth has never been used. That door was never locked.

She hasn't gone looking for whose hand it is. She's waiting.