“Coward,” he muttered.
Then, after a pause, with the air of someone rehearsing excuses: “Just careful.”
He listened.
Cornstalks ticked against one another out in the fields, drying toward winter. A cart creaked two roads away, its iron-hooped wheel humming a complaint. Somewhere behind him, a child yelled the name of a friend and received no answer, the game paused on the knife‑edge between panic and triumph. The world was loud with little lives. The mist was not.
He reached into his pocket and found the thing he always carried but never confessed to anyone: a piece of glass so old it had learned to curve. Sea glass, someone might have called it, though there was no sea for hours, even if you had a ride and permission. It was milky and green‑blooded, smoothed into a tear by patient hands he did not remember. When he held it to the sun, it turned the world into drowned gardens.
It kept warmth longer than it should—pocket-warm even when the morning bit—and when he tilted it, a faint, dry chime touched the inside of his ear, a single note that felt remembered rather than heard.
He held it up now. The mist bent inside it.
On some mornings, looking through that softened shard made the veil thin; it would ripple, and shadows would take the suggestion of limbs. On others, nothing happened, and he felt like a boy pretending to conjure, which was worse than being simply a boy. Today, something did happen. The breath in front of him gathered itself and drew back, as if the glass had reminded it of a shape it once wore.
A path appeared—not a clear one, but a suggestion of darker gray inside the pale. He tried to tell himself it was the breeze.