“Every absence is just a presence seen from another side.”— fragment found in a dream
Liora had always known that her garden was larger than it looked. It wasn’t the kind of largeness you could measure in steps or fences; it was the sort that unfolded when you stopped trying to find the edge.
One twilight, as the air thickened with the scent of jasmine and rain, she noticed a ripple in the air by the old stone wall — as if the evening itself had blinked. Out of the ripple stepped a cat.
Its fur shimmered like a mirage — neither striped nor spotted, neither wholly there nor wholly not. When Liora tried to focus, it seemed to rearrange itself in her gaze.
“Are you lost?” she asked softly.
The cat smiled — not with its mouth, but with the space around it.
“Lost? That depends,” it said. “Do you mean in your world, or mine?”
Liora frowned. “Is there a difference?”
“Of course,” said the cat. “In your world, things stay where you leave them. In mine, they wait until you stop looking and then decide whether to exist.”
The air quivered. The cat flickered. Liora reached out, but her hand passed through something that wasn’t quite absence.
“Careful,” said the cat. “Touching is a kind of choosing.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then the garden keeps both of us in its secret.”
Somewhere beyond the wall, thunder rolled like a slow exhale. Liora thought of the dream she’d had weeks ago — the one with endless corridors and mirrors that looked back with other people’s eyes. She had followed a sound then too: a whispering hum, halfway between purring and remembering.
The cat tilted its head. “You’ve been here before.”
“Here?”
“Between.”
Liora hesitated. “Am I dreaming again?”
The cat’s grin deepened. “Does it matter which of us is?”
The jasmine trembled. The garden darkened. And just before everything dissolved into silver light, Liora felt the faintest brush of fur against her palm — a promise, or perhaps a question, left half-unanswered.
When she woke the next morning, the ripple by the wall was gone. But in the dewdrops on the leaves, for an instant, she thought she saw a smile — wide, impossible, and fading with the dawn.
Afterword
From the Liora Cycle: Tales from the Threshold of Meaning
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