On the morning the house was to be emptied, Leah found a paper crown inside the bread tin. Its points had been folded down so the lid would close. Across the front, in the uncertain capitals of a child, someone had written KING OF RAIN.
“You can throw that out,” said her brother, Tomas, without looking up from the drawer he was sorting.
“You made it.”
“Then I have authority.”
But Leah set the crown on the table. They had come to divide their grandmother’s things into boxes marked KEEP, DONATE, and RUBBISH, and already the labels seemed to be multiplying questions instead of answering them. A chipped cup could be a cup, or the cup their grandmother used for tea after a difficult phone call. A bent spoon might be rubbish until Leah remembered the day Tomas had tried to dig a tunnel beneath the back step. The crown had no obvious use at all, which made it particularly hard to classify.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s your cutlery now.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
Leah opened the cupboard above the sink and found a row of old exercise books, swollen at the spines. Their grandmother had kept recipes in some of them. One contained the names of people who owed her money, most of the debts crossed out in thick blue ink. At the bottom of the stack lay a green book with no label. When Leah opened it, a strip of paper slipped onto the draining board.
It was a list of characters, each given a different color: a baker in red, a horse in yellow, a queen in blue. Beside the queen, their grandmother had written, Do not let Tomas be the horse again.
He came to stand behind Leah. For a moment neither of them spoke.
“I was an excellent horse,” Tomas said.
“You bit the furniture.”
“Method acting.”
The green book was not a storybook exactly. Its pages held pieces of several stories, copied in their grandmother’s hand and interrupted by notes in the margins. Some pages had been torn from magazines and pasted in crookedly. There were sketches of a bridge, a turnip, a person wearing a pot on their head. On one page, a sentence began in ink and ended in pencil, as though someone had called the writer away before she could decide how the sentence should finish.
Leah turned to the first page. Once there was a village where nobody could sleep because the moon had come too close.
She remembered the village at once, although she could not have said where it was or what happened there. She remembered the moon better: a round white plate held over a candle, making a glow on the kitchen wall. Their grandmother had tilted the plate toward them until Tomas ducked under the table.
“You were scared,” Leah said.
“I was participating.”
“You wouldn’t come out until she made the moon apologize.”
Tomas opened his mouth, then closed it again. “That does sound like me.”
Stories at the kitchen table
On winter evenings, when their mother worked late and the rain knocked against the windows, their grandmother had read to them at this table. Sometimes she read from books borrowed and returned so many times that Leah knew which pages had been mended with tape. Sometimes she read from the newspaper, changing the voices of the people quoted in it until a report about road repairs became an argument between two emperors. And sometimes she opened the green book.
She never simply read what was there. She read a line, looked up to see whether they were listening, and added whatever the room seemed to need. A dragon might become a worried aunt if Tomas was too frightened; a prince might lose his trousers if Leah had had a bad day. The stories had beginnings that could be trusted and middles that could not. Their endings depended on the hour and on whether anyone had remembered to put potatoes in the oven.
“Read it,” Tomas said.
“What, now?”
He gestured at the window. “We aren’t going anywhere until that stops.”
Leah sat down. She had not read aloud to anyone in years, apart from directions on her phone and the occasional message across a crowded room. The words on the page looked smaller than she remembered. She cleared her throat and began.
“Once there was a village where nobody could sleep because the moon had come too close.”
Her voice sounded formal and slightly cross. Tomas pulled out the chair opposite her. He did not interrupt, which was almost worse.
“It shone through the curtains and into the cupboards, and the milk went pale with fright.”
“Milk is already pale,” he said.
“That’s what you said then.”
“And was I wrong?”
Leah went on. The villagers sent a baker to ask the moon to move. The baker climbed a ladder made from loaves, but birds ate the lower rungs and left him stranded. At the foot of the page their grandmother had written, Ask children what happens next.
“Well?” Leah said.
Tomas leaned back. “The baker throws crumbs to the birds, so they carry him down.”
“That’s sensible.”
“I’m older now.”
She turned the page. The next sentence had been crossed out, and beneath it were three alternatives. In one, the baker jumped into a cloud. In another, the horse flew up and fetched him. The third was simply more ladder?
“She didn’t know either,” Leah said.
“Of course she did.”
“Look.”
He took the book and studied the page. “Maybe she knew all three.”
Leah was about to argue, then remembered their grandmother at the table, waiting while the two of them shouted suggestions over each other. She had seemed to know exactly where every story was going. Even when she paused, even when she asked for help, Leah had believed the answer was already safe in her head.
A knock came at the back door. Their neighbor, Mrs. Okafor, stood beneath an umbrella with her granddaughter tucked against her coat. She had brought a dish that had belonged to their grandmother and an apology for returning it so late.
“We were going to put it in a box,” Tomas said.
“You may still,” Mrs. Okafor replied, handing it over. “But I thought I should wash it first.”
The girl peered around her grandmother. She was perhaps seven, with rain caught in the ends of her braids. Her name was Nia, and she had brought a small plastic dinosaur in her pocket. The dinosaur’s tail had broken off.
“Can you fix him?” she asked Tomas.
“I can try.”
Mrs. Okafor’s usual arrangement for Nia had fallen through. Leah offered to keep her for an hour, and Tomas promised to look for glue. Once Mrs. Okafor had gone, Nia watched him search through three drawers. Leah moved the green book aside to make space for the dinosaur operation. Nia saw the drawing of the person with a pot on their head.
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet,” Leah said.
“Maybe it’s a helmet.”
“Maybe. Shall we find out?”
Nia climbed onto a chair, and Leah began again at the start of the moon story. This time she gave the moon a low, slow voice. It came out sounding like a drainpipe, and Nia laughed so hard that Leah had to wait. Tomas found the glue and sat down with the dinosaur, its broken tail, and a sheet of newspaper to protect the table.
When they reached the stranded baker, Nia did not want birds or a flying horse. She wanted the baker to eat his way down the ladder.
“Wouldn’t he fall?” Leah asked.
“He starts at the bottom.”
“He can’t reach the bottom.”
Nia considered this. “He has very long arms.”
“How long?”
“All the way.”
Tomas, holding the dinosaur’s tail in place, nodded gravely. “That should do it.”
So the baker ate the ladder from the bottom up, stretching his arms farther and farther until he resembled a pair of curtains hanging from the sky. Leah described him eating rye bread, then rolls, then a loaf full of olives, which Nia declared disgusting. The villagers caught him in a blanket when he finally fell. The moon watched all this without moving an inch.
“It needs a reason,” Nia said.
“A reason for what?”
“For coming close.”
Leah looked down at the page. Their grandmother had given the moon no reason that she could find. It was simply there, too bright and too near, making everyone miserable.
“What do you think?”
“It’s looking for its baby.”
Tomas stopped pressing the tail against the dinosaur. “What does a baby moon look like?”
“Like the big one, only small.” Nia regarded him with patience. “And it can’t talk yet.”
Tomas found a cloudy white marble caught in a fold of the paper crown and placed it in Nia’s palm.
“That’s it,” she said.
“Where should they look?” Leah asked.
“In the sky,” Tomas said, speaking for the horse.
“That’s where they’d already looked,” Leah said.
“He’s a horse,” Tomas said. “Give him a chance.”
In their story, the villagers searched everywhere.
In the end, Nia decided the baby moon had rolled into the village pond. The villagers could see it there but could not reach it, because every hand that touched the water broke its reflection into pieces. Nia frowned over this difficulty. Leah almost supplied an answer, but she held back.
“They have to wait,” Nia said at last. “The water will go still.”
So they waited. Leah described the baker sitting on the bank with flour on his knees, the queen taking off her crown, the horse flicking a fly from its ear. The moon leaned close enough to see the little white face in the pond. Then, as the water settled, the baby moon rose out of it and went home.
Nia opened her hand and rolled the marble across the table. It struck the bread tin with a bright, small sound.
“Again,” she said.
They told it again until Mrs. Okafor returned. This time the dinosaur guarded the pond, and the moon acquired three cousins.
After the visitors left, the kitchen was quiet in a different way. The rain had eased to a patter. Tomas gathered the scraps of newspaper and put the glue away, while Leah opened the green book to a blank page near the back.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Writing it down before I forget.”
She wrote about the baby moon and the pond, and about the baker with arms long enough to reach the bottom of his own ladder. She left out the moon’s cousins because she could remember only two of their names. In the margin she added, Ask what the dinosaur is keeping the pond for.
Tomas read over her shoulder. “You’ve spelled dinosaur wrong.”
“Then you write the next bit.”
He took the pencil. For a while he stood with its point against the paper, looking as uncertain as she had felt when she first began to read. Then he drew a small horse in the margin. Its legs were different lengths, and its head looked rather like a shoe.
“Excellent horse,” Leah said.
He put the book in the KEEP box. Leah added the crown and the marble, and they went back to the cupboards. There was still a great deal to sort, and the house would not be theirs much longer. From time to time one of them found something that needed a story: a jar of buttons, a broken clock key, a photograph with a stranger at its edge. They did not stop for every object. But when they did, they sat at the table and took turns remembering, and when memory failed them, they said so.
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