The Last Gift

Meri was considering having a bowl of ice cream to celebrate her birthday, despite having just finished breakfast, when the knock came at the door. 

Beau barked, tail wagging, nails clicking across the hardwood floor, then gave a soft whuff when Meri opened the door and nobody was there. 

Just a cedar crate set upon the porch.

It was about the size of a sewing machine case, reinforced with black iron corners and wrapped with faded blue ribbon instead of packing tape. There was no shipping label. No postage. Just a cream-colored envelope underneath the ribbon with her name written on it.

Happy Birthday, Merideth.

“Oh, Nana!” Her breath caught. Her grandmother had been gone six months, yet the looping handwriting was unmistakable.

Beau sniffed the crate and sneezed.

“What, you’re not impressed?”

Meri lifted the box, and whatever rested inside shifted ever so slightly, as though settling more comfortably into its journey's end. She carried it down the hallway to Nana’s room.  

It’d been the guest room once, but after Nana began spending a week with her every spring and autumn, it quietly became hers. Even now, Meri couldn't bring herself to change it.

She placed the crate on Nana’s old writing desk, beside the other gifts her grandmother had given her over the years, and lowered herself into the old chair. It creaked exactly as it always had when Nana settled into it with a cup of tea and a notebook balanced on her knee.

She picked up the brass key that had been the first present Nana had gifted her on Meri’s eighth birthday. “You’ll know what it opens when you’re ready,” Nana had promised, in her mysterious, mischievous way. 

“I’ve stopped wondering if I’ll ever be ready,” she murmured, setting the key back on the desk. 

Then there was the tarnished compass Nana had given on her twelve birthday. "Trust the needle," Nana had said. "It will take you where you’re most needed." 

 

Meri hadn't believed her until the compass had grown warm in her pocket one day a few years ago. She followed it off the trail she’d been hiking down to a creek where she’d found a soaked golden retriever puppy trapped among fallen branches and thorny blackberry vines, too exhausted to free himself. Meri had searched for his family for weeks, and when no one claimed him, Beau quietly became part of hers.

 

Then there was the music box, carved from cherry wood and inlaid with tiny stars. Her mother heard Chopin. Her father heard jazz. Meri used to hear the lullaby Nana hummed while baking bread, until the music changed after Nana’s funeral. On impulse, Meri opened the box, and, immediately, the tinkle of Nana’s soft laughter filled the room. 

Beau wandered over and settled beneath the window with a sigh, resting his chin on his paws as he watched her.

"You miss her too, don't you?"

His tail thumped softly against the floor.

Meri smiled sadly, closing the music box and turning her attention back to the crate. The blue ribbon had faded almost to gray. She ran her thumb across the envelope exactly as Nana had always done before opening a letter. 

Her heart ached when she realized what she was doing.

“Every object has a story,” she whispered, repeating one of Nana’s favorite sayings.  “And every story knows where it wants to go.”

She untied the ribbon and opened the envelope. “Alright, Nana. Where does this story want to go?”

The paper was thick between her fingers, its edges softened by time. It smelled faintly of lilacs.

My dearest Meri,

If this has reached you, then I’ve either decided you’re ready for this gift, or I’ve simply run out of time. One never knows which will come first.

Inside the crate is a tool; it’s not a toy, though you may be tempted to treat it like one. But try to resist, at least for the first afternoon. You’ll find a set of instructions already waiting. Read every instruction before touching a key.

Some stories are far older than the people who write them. But, remember what I’ve always told you: Stories know where they want to go.

Love always, Nana.

“Well, that sounds interesting.”

She laid the letter carefully beside the music box, then lifted the lid off the crate and folded back the layers of velvet. 

Brass caught the afternoon light. 

The typewriter looked as though it belonged from another century, aged brass wrapped in copper filigree, blackened steel joints, exposed gears ticking softly beneath the carriage. Emeralds, rubies and sapphires glowed within its body, scattering colored reflections across circular glass keys. Steam curled through the mechanism, carrying the aroma of cedar and ink, and, surprisingly, of rain.

She lifted the typewriter from the crate and settled it carefully onto the desk. 

A sheet of parchment was already rolled into the platen. The page was typewritten in elegant serif lettering. 

Magical Typewriter — Operating Instructions

“Oh Nana…” Meri laughed. “You’ve outdone yourself.”

She read aloud.

“One. Insert blank parchment and align with brass guides.

“That seems reasonable,” she said.

“Two. Prime the machine by pressing three keys of intention: noun, desire, and setting.

She located the three keys.

“Three. Engage the heart-lever until the gears hum.

“Heart-lever?” She found a brass handle shaped like an anatomical heart. “Of course there is!”

“Four. Type deliberately. Each word defines matter; each sentence establishes law.

“Okay…”

“Five. Allow ink to settle into form and substance.

“Now we’re settling matter?”

“Six. Avoid contradictions. Conflicting phrases may destabilize the constructed world.

“Oh dear.” She glanced towards Beau. “We’re constructing worlds? I don’t believe this!”

Beau yawned, and she continued.

“Seven. To animate life, use motion verbs and sensory language.

“Eight. Continue writing to sustain the world; cessation may cause collapse.

“That’s dramatic.”

“Nine. Remove the page only when the narrative breathes on its own.

She raised an eyebrow. “Breathes?”

“Ten. Store completed worlds carefully. Residual magic may persist in the margins.”

Meri folded her arms and regarded the typewriter for a long moment.

"Stories know where they want to go," Meri murmured. The words were so familiar she hadn't realized she'd spoken them aloud until Beau looked up at her.

“Okay. Let’s give it a try.” Inside a desk drawer, she found a stack of creamy parchment cut precisely to fit the platen. Removing the instructions, she slid a fresh sheet between the brass guides and read again.

“Noun, desire, setting.”

Lilacs. To bring beauty. Nana’s desk.

She pulled the heart-lever.

The gears hummed, sending a faint vibration through the desk and into her hands, like another heartbeat answering her own.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

She typed: A vase of freshly cut lilacs sits on Nana’s desk, their spring fragrance filling the room.

Nothing happened.

“Of course not.”

Then Beau’s nose lifted and Meri smelled it too.

Lilacs.

The ink had dried, and a glass vase now stood beside the typewriter, overflowing with pale lilacs and tender green leaves. Water droplets clung to the stems as though freshly gathered from a spring garden.

Meri touched a flower.  “This can’t be real.”

Her gaze returned to the instructions.

Avoid contradictions.

Meri had always liked a challenge. 

She typed: Outside, deep winter has held the garden frozen for months, where these lilacs were cut from this morning.

The typewriter shuddered. Gears screamed and the words on the page exploded, ink hanging suspended in black droplets while the typewriter shrieked like metal under strain.

Ice crystallized along the stems. The lilacs trembled between seasons, lush and fragrant one moment, stiff with frost the next. Frost raced across the windowpane and Beau scrambled backward as the room turned bitterly cold. 

Meri ripped the page from the platen and the typewriter went silent.

The snow vanished. Frost retreated from the windows. The lilacs remained, though they were slightly wilted now, one frozen petal melting slowly onto Nana’s desk. Meri stared at the damp spot it left behind, heart hammering in her chest. 

“Okay! Avoid contradictions.” 

She inserted another page.

“Noun.” Her fingers moved. Man.

“Desire.” She hesitated. To be known.

“Setting.” At the edge of a shifting coastline.

The typewriter hummed again as she pulled the heart-lever.

“Deliberate.” She pondered for a moment, then began typing. He stands where the sea forgets itself, where the tide retreats in long silver breaths across endless sand.

She paused, allowing the ink to settle, and read the instructions for the next step. 

“Motion verbs and sensory language.” Wind tangles his dark hair. Salt clings to his coat. He searches the horizon as though waiting for someone whose face he cannot remember.

Cool salt air brushed Meri’s cheek. 

Before she could type more, ink began flowing smoothly across the parchment.

At last. She gave you the typewriter!

Meri blinked in surprise, touching the paper in wonder. The ink was wet. Warm. 

She typed: “Who are you?”

New words formed.

Don’t you know? I’m the last story your grandmother never finished.

Room for Another - Part 4

Room for Another

Alex stood very still, watching the painting as if stillness itself might help him understand it.

At first Magera just seemed a part of it: a dark-haired woman painted inside a copy of her studio, with the moonlit garden beyond the arch behind her. Elmer sat at her feet in the painting, his tail wrapped around his paws. Neither of them moved. They might have been ordinary brushwork, fixed and silent, if not for the eyes.

She seemed to be watching Magera in the studio she’d left behind, where the newest Magera was watching the last one.

The one who now walked through a seaside painting leaning on the side easel, its gauzy curtains stirring in a salt-bright wind, a small dark figure walking toward the beach house she had just finished painting.

No one spoke.

Then, beside him, the new Magera lifted the seaside canvas from the side easel with quiet care and carried it to the wall. Alex followed the motion automatically, though his attention kept pulling back to the first painting where Magera stood inside the studio-within-the-studio, still and intent. The new Magera leaned the finished canvas in place, where the painted sea continued to breathe and glitter in its frame.

Then she set a blank canvas onto the easel.

Inside the original painting, Magera moved. The shift was slight, but Alex saw it at once: not movement exactly, but awakening. Her gaze flicked from the new blank canvas in the real studio to the side easel inside her own painted studio. In her version of the studio, the canvas was still blank. 

Her laughter broke the illusion of paint at once. 

“Magera,” Alex said. But she didn’t answer. Instead, she picked up a brush. Elmer jumped lightly onto a stool beside her, accepting this new absurdity far more quickly than any human could.

Beside him, the newest Magera now stood with one hand resting lightly on the worktable, watching. Not denying what she saw. Her attention stayed fixed on the original Magera’s hands, as if she too were learning a new set of rules.

That frightened Alex more than if she had smiled.

Magera was painting now, painting inside a painting. The first strokes were pale structure and light. A tall window. Clean verticals. A suggestion of ironwork beyond. Then the image opened into something unmistakable: a small studio flooded with morning brightness, elegant and spare, with tall windows and the Eiffel Tower rising beyond them into a pearl-gray sky.

Paris.

Of course she would choose Paris. Hadn’t she always told him she wanted to go there, to paint the city of lights. Alex felt his throat tighten.

She painted quickly now. Every movement of her hand was certain. Beside him, the newest Magera watched in still concentration, saying nothing.

The air around him changed, charged. The scent of wet pavement, and something floral drifted in from an unseen window box. In the painted studio, a curtain stirred. And on the worktable beside him, a rag lifted at one corner though every window was shut.

Alex stepped back.

He’d seen Magera’s paintings spill before. Mist from a river. Music from a violinist. The breath of a storm-dark sky. But those had always felt like overflow, magic escaping its frame.

This moved with purpose.

Inside the painted studio, Magera added the last edge of the window frame. The Eiffel Tower sharpened into full, impossible recognition. Morning light poured into the room.

Then she set down the brush and Alex’s whole body locked.

She came to the veil one last time and placed her hand against it. He matched it without thinking, solid canvas against his palm, her fingers visible opposite his through the trembling shimmer.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though he didn’t know for what.

Then she turned. She crossed the painted studio, Elmer following behind, and stepped into the Paris canvas.

For one impossible second Alex saw her there, inside the painting in the painting, Elmer winding around her ankles on a pale wooden floor. Alex stood motionless in the real studio, his hand still pressed to the canvas.

Beside him, the newest Magera drew breath and when he turned, she was no longer watching the blank canvas.

Now she was watching him. Not coldly. Not cruelly. With dawning understanding, as if she had just learned enough to know what came next.

Then she glanced toward the kitchen door and back at him.

“I’m starving,”  she said, “aren’t you? Why don’t I make us some dinner?”

The General Rule (Part 3)

The General Rule (part 3)

The general rule in Magera’s studio had once been simple: finish the painting, survive the wonder, and trust that by morning the magic would sink into the walls, floor, and ceiling, leaving only paint behind. Then Elmer had leapt into a canvas, Magera stepped in after him to bring him back, and Alex found himself standing in lamplight in Magera’s studio, staring at the woman he loved trapped inside a painted copy of her studio.

Behind Magera, inside the canvas, was an archway into the garden where Elmer now sat, washing one gray paw with offensive calm.

“Magera,” Alex said, because he could think of nothing else to say.

“I’m here,” she answered.

Relief nearly buckled his knees. He went straight to the canvas and laid his hand against it. Cool. Solid. Ordinary linen stretched over frame. An exact replica of the studio he stood in, except her version had a garden, and his did not. 

“You’re all right?” he asked.

“I think so.”

It was such a Magera answer that he almost laughed. Instead he stared at her through the faint shimmer that seemed to hang over the image from her side but not from his. Her hair was half loose. One hand hovered near the veil as if she still expected touch to matter.

Then something moved behind him.

Alex turned.

A woman stood near the side easel with one hand resting lightly on the wood.

It was Magera. Except it couldn’t be. 

This was not a resemblance. Not a trick of posture or light. She had Magera’s face, Magera’s narrow shoulders, Magera’s paint-stained fingers. As if she had been there all along, and wasn’t really trapped in a painting after all.

For one impossible moment no one moved.

Then the woman looked at Alex with mild concern, as if she had found him in the middle of some small domestic distress.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

The gentleness of it unsettled him more than if she had screamed.

Behind the canvas, the original Magera stepped closer. “She sees me.”

Alex believed it instantly.

He looked from the woman in the painting to the woman in the studio. “Who are you?”

The new Magera’s expression didn’t change. She looked at him with quiet reassurance, almost tenderly, and said, “Alex… are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

He stared at her.

Not because of the words, but because she said them in Magera’s voice. The same warmth. The same cadence. The same small pause before his name.

“No,” he said. “No, don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That.” He pointed toward the painted canvas. “Pretend you don’t see her.”

The new Magera followed the gesture only halfway, then returned her attention to him as though humoring a feverish child. “You’re overtired.”

From inside the painting came Magera’s incredulous voice. “Oh, she is not.”

Alex almost laughed from the sheer strain of it. Instead he crossed the room in two steps.

“She’s right there.”

The new Magera’s gaze flicked to the painted arch, to Elmer, to the fireflies. Then back to Alex.

Cold moved through him. He had proof now, if proof meant anything in a room where general laws had already failed.

Elmer rose and padded to the edge of the veil. Alex dropped into a crouch beside the canvas, grateful for the cat’s blunt honesty.

“Elmer,” he said softly. “Come on, then.”

The cat sat on the other side of the boundary and gave a soft mrrow.

Alex pressed his palm to the painting.

From Magera’s side, the veil trembled like silk stretched over water. She stepped close at once and lifted her own hand to meet his. He could see where her fingers should have touched.

But the canvas under his hand was solid.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Can’t you come back?”

“It’s not working.”

“There has to be a way.”

Her hand remained opposite his, divided from his by a surface that refused to behave like anything but painted cloth. He wanted, absurdly, to apologize for not being able to do something as simple as reach her.

Behind him, the new Magera moved.

Alex stood.

She had gone to the side easel and lifted a brush.

“What are you doing?” he asked, though it was obvious.

At first the painting was only brightness and line: pale beams, the angle of a roof, the broad suggestion of open structure. Then it gathered into something unmistakable. A covered outdoor studio washed in sea light. Gauze curtains. Weathered boards. Dunes and sea grass. Beyond them, a beach house and a blade of blue water.

“A destination,” Magera whispered from the garden.

Alex looked over his shoulder at her, then back to the woman painting. She worked with Magera’s same calm certainty, turning the brush between her fingers the same way, leaning back to judge balance with the same slight tilt of the head. Not copying Magera. Being her, in some general and dreadful sense.

“Stop,” he said, but of course she didn’t.

The air changed.

In the painting, the pale curtains lifted with a sea breeze, and in the next moment, a rag on the worktable beside Alex stirred though every window was shut.

Alex stepped back.

He had seen Magera’s paintings spill before. Mist from a river. Music from a violinist. The breath of a storm-dark sky. But those had always felt like overflow. Magic escaping its frame.

This felt different.

A gull pierced the silence. The sound rang through the studio with painful clarity.

“It’s happening again,” he said.

The new Magera laid down another stroke. The sea brightened. The smell of salt and sun-warmed wood deepened. Light gathered across the painted boards until even Alex felt warmth touch his face.

Then, just before she moved, she looked at him.

Her expression held that same soft concern. As if she regretted distressing him. As if he were the one failing to keep hold of reason.

And then she stepped into the painting.

Alex lunged too late.

The beach studio took her whole. The gauze curtains swung once in her wake.

The room went still.

Not silent, for he could hear the fountain in the garden where Elmer gave a small impatient mrrow; but empty in the way a room feels after someone has just left them forever.

He turned toward the canvas where Magera stood rigid beneath the arch, one hand pressed to her mouth, eyes wide with shock.

“What is it?” he asked.

Then, at the edge of his vision, he saw what she had seen.

Another woman now stood near the side easel.

Alex closed his eyes once, hard, then opened them again. She remained. Same face. Same loosened dark hair. Same paint-stained hands. Real.

She looked at the beach painting, then at the garden where Magera stood with Elmer at her feet, then finally at Alex.

He backed up until the worktable pressed against his legs. His hand found its edge and gripped hard.

Behind the veil, Magera’s voice came small and steady at once.

“Alex?”

He could not look away from the newest woman.

“I’m here,” he said.

She tilted her head, studying him. Thinking. Then, with terrible calm, she asked, “What’s the matter?”

The Way Through (Part 2)

Magera was adding the last white gleam to the water when Elmer gave a sudden mrrrow.

 

“Don’t do it,” Magera murmured, sparing a glance in his direction. “If you jump on the table again, you’ll wear Naples yellow for a week.”

 

Elmer, who had never respected boundaries of any kind, sat on the stool by the north wall with his tail wrapped around his paws and watched her with grave Persian disapproval.

 

The painting on the easel was nearly finished: an old stone pathway disappearing beneath a weathered arch draped with jasmine, a small courtyard opening around a round stone fountain. Water overflowed the lip and fell in bright threads into the basin below. Fireflies hovered over the fountain like bits of living gold. 

 

It was one of the most beautiful things she had painted in months.

 

Water had begun dripping from the painted fountain onto the floorboards in bright, impossible drops. Magera paused with her brush suspended and listened.

 

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

 

“There,” she whispered to Elmer, half delighted and half unnerved. “Tell me again I’m imagining things.”

 

Fireflies buzzed faintly around the painted basin. One strayed past the frame, circled once in the dim studio air, and winked out.

 

Elmer rose.

 

“No,” Magera said at once. “You absolutely may not chase the miracles.”

 

But the cat had already gathered himself. In one fluid gray arc he leapt straight at the canvas.

And disappeared inside.

 

For an instant shock stopped her heart. The brush fell from her hand. She made a sound that was little more than a breath and lunged forward, both hands catching the sides of the easel.

She had learned to expect elements from her paintings to spill off the canvas and into the studio, but this… This was new.

 

“Elmer?”

 

He stood just beyond the archway on the painted path, his long gray coat catching the painted moonlight, his golden eyes turned toward her in mild surprise, as though he himself didn’t understand how he had gotten there.

 

Magera stared.

 

The painted fountain went on dripping into the studio.

 

“Elmer,” she said again, louder now. “Elmer, come here.”

 

He turned his head. Behind him, fireflies drifted over the fountain in slow gold spirals.

 

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”

 

She looked wildly around the room, as if she might find him beneath a chair or under the worktable, as if some sensible version of reality had only briefly slipped. But the stool by the wall was empty. The floor was empty. The room smelled of linseed oil, turpentine, damp stone. Jasmine from the painted archway.

 

She put one trembling hand into the spill of cold water beneath the easel and closed her eyes.

The water was real.

 

By the time she found her phone, her hands were shaking so hard she nearly dropped it.

 

Alex answered on the second ring. “Magera?”

 

“Can you come over?”

 

There was a pause. “Now?”

 

“Yes. Please. Right now.”

 

Something in her voice must have reached him, because his own sharpened at once. “I’m on my way.”

 

-_-

 

Alex arrived twenty minutes later, breathless from taking the stairs two at a time. He was still in his work clothes, dark coat unbuttoned, hair windblown, worry all over his handsome face.

 

“What happened?”

 

Magera stepped aside without speaking and pointed at the canvas.

 

He looked from her to the painting, then back again.

 

The studio was dim except for the lamps around the easel. Water still dripped from the painted fountain, making a dark crescent on the floorboards. Fireflies pulsed lazily in the garden beyond the arch. And there, seated beside the fountain, tail curled around himself, was Elmer.

 

Alex went very still. He crouched and touched the wet floor. “You’ve told me this happens, but I have to admit, I never really believed you.”

 

Magera pressed a hand to her mouth. “It’s not the water, Alex. It’s Elmer!”

 

“Elmer?” He looked around the studio, as if searching for the cat. “What about him?”

 

 “He jumped. He jumped and he… he just…” She made a helpless gesture toward the canvas. “What do I do?”

 

Alex studied the painting again. Elmer, annoyingly serene, blinked at them both.

 

Magera pressed a hand to her mouth. “I thought I’d gone mad for one second. Only one second, but it was a very bad second.”

 

He straightened. “You haven’t gone mad. Or if you have, then I have too”

 

“But, what do I do?”

 

Alex studied the painting again. “What if you repaint it?” he suggested. “Paint him coming out.”

 

“I can’t paint over him.”

 

“No?”

 

She looked horrified. “No. He’s in there.”

 

“That’s fair,” Alex said softly. 

 

He let go of her shoulders and turned back to the easel, thinking. He was humoring her, she knew. Not because he thought she was foolish, but because he had one foot in the world of reason and could not yet bring the other across. The magic he could see; the logic of it he could not.

 

Then he glanced at the blank canvases stacked against the wall.

 

“Paint another one,” he said.

 

Magera stared at him.

 

“A way out,” Alex said. “Maybe he needs a door to get back into the studio.”

 

She looked at the painting again, at Elmer beside the fountain, at the archway behind him.

 

“Yes,” she said, almost to herself. “Yes. Of course.”

 

She painted the studio as seen from inside a shadowy corridor: the stool by the north wall, the hanging rags, the scarred worktable, the lamp glowing warmly beside the easel. When the painting was finished, warm lamplight spilled from the painted studio opening onto the real floorboards. The scent of beeswax deepened in the room.

 

And then Elmer appeared. Sitting at the mouth of the corridor, looking straight at the painted studio she had made for him.

 

And then he turned away. 

 

Magera’s throat tightened. “No. No, Elmer. Come home.”

 

She painted another, this one showing the studio doorway open to twilight, with the old chaise and the worktable visible inside. Night air spilled from the canvas, cool and fragrant with jasmine. Elmer sat in the threshold, inspected it, and turned away again.

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

Alex leaned against the table, arms folded. He had moved, over the last day and a half, from patient skepticism to the kind of awe that made him speak quietly. He still looked for reason. He still wanted one. But he’d stopped pretending magic was hypothetical.

 

“Maybe he doesn’t understand the painting as the studio,” he suggested.

 

“It has the stool.”

 

“I know.”

 

 “It has the chipped blue mug he always drinks out of.”

 

“That’s very compelling, yes.”

 

She laughed in spite of herself, then nearly cried because Elmer still wouldn’t come.

 

Alex brought her tea she forgot to drink.

 

“What am I missing?” she asked into her hands.

 

He looked around at the painted studio entrances, all the versions of home she’d offered. “Maybe nothing.”

 

“That’s not helpful.”

 

“No, listen.” He crouched beside her. “Cats never come when they’re called. Not once in the history of cats.”

 

She let out a muffled, miserable laugh.

 

“I mean it,” he said. “Maybe Elmer’s waiting for you to come get him.”

 

The room went silent.

 

Magera turned slowly toward the first painting, the archway and fountain where it had begun. The cat was no longer visible in that painting. She found him, instead, sipping water from the painting with chipped blue mug, golden eyes fixed directly on her. 

 

She stood up so quickly the tea sloshed over Alex’s hand.

 

“Ow! Magera…”

 

But she was already moving toward the largest blank canvas in the studio.

 

She painted through the long gold of afternoon and into the violet hush of evening.

 

This time she did not paint only the studio.

 

She painted the garden, the stone arch, the fountain, the fireflies, the mossy bench where Elmer now sat in the original canvas. Beyond the bench she painted an opening straight into her studio: the worktable, the lamp, the stool, the easel, all exactly as they stood. A seamless joining. Garden to studio. Painting to room. A way for one world to step into the other.

 

Alex said little now. He only watched.

 

The fountain in the painted garden began to drip more strongly. Fireflies drifted out and buzzed at the lampshades. The room smelled of water and wet stone, of linseed oil and jasmine.

 

When she painted the last edge of the opening, Elmer rose from the bench inside the canvas.

The cat looked at the studio Magera had painted and for the first time, he gave an excited mrrow.

 

Her heart lurched.

 

Alex took one involuntary step toward her. “Magera.”

 

She turned to him. He’d gone pale.

 

“If I don’t do this,” she said, “he’ll stay there.”

 

“And if you do?”

 

She looked back at the living canvas, at Elmer waiting just inside it, at the painted studio beyond him mirroring the real one at her back.

 

“Then I suppose I trust the magic to solve this for me.”

 

He reached for her hand and squeezed hard. “Come back.”

 

“I’ll try.”

 

Magera stepped forward, put her hand through the painted opening, and walked into the canvas.

Coolness wrapped her first, like passing through a curtain of rain. Then scent. Jasmine, stone, wet moss. The hush of water.

 

She stood in the painted garden beneath the old arch, her own studio visible beyond the open joining she had made. Fireflies drifted around her in soft golden spirals.

 

“Elmer?”

 

He bounded from the bench at once, gave an indignant cry, and wound himself around her legs with such force and fervor she nearly dropped to her knees laughing.

 

“Oh, you awful creature,” she whispered, scooping him up. “You wonderful, impossible beast.”

 

He purred so hard his whole body shook.

 

The fountain sang. Water trickled over stone. Somewhere behind her, leaves stirred in a painted breeze. It was beautiful. More beautiful than it had any right to be.

 

Then Magera lifted her head.

 

Through the hazy curtain of reality, beyond the opening she had painted into the studio, she could see the room she knew, the lamps, the table, the chipped mug. Alex standing motionless with one hand half raised.

 

And standing near the easel, gazing into the painted garden with a stillness that made Magera’s blood turn cold, was herself.

 

Not a reflection. Not a trick of light.

 

Another woman stood in the studio, a vision of Magera. One hand rested lightly on the edge of the easel, watching through the thin trembling veil between the painted world and the real one.

 

Magera’s breath left her in a hush.

 

Elmer purred, oblivious, heavy and warm in her arms.

 

And through the hazy curtain of reality, the woman in the studio picked up a paint brush and turned away.