Ivy and the Moon's Missing Lullaby

Willowmere slept in the crook of an old, listening willow that leaned its branches over the river like a mother humming over a crib. Lanterns hung from the limbs, glass globes warmed by tiny bees of light. Their glow pooled along cobbled lanes and in the mouths of mailboxes. Ivy walked those lanes as she had every evening since she could remember, barefoot on cool stones, a wicker basket hooked over her arm. In the basket the glass jars sat upright and snug, lids down like lids on small islands. Each jar held a portion of the town’s night: a sliver of starlight, a sigh of wind, a soft hum that rolled like bread dough through sleeping rooms and smoothed the edges of worry.

Her grandmother called it the Night Garden. Grandmother stitched the jars' cloth covers with little moons and vines and taught Ivy how to tilt a jar to let a lullaby out. "Not too quick," she would say, voice low and exact. "Songs are like seeds. You coax them, not crack them." Ivy's hands were callused in places that pleased her—small thickets where palms caught on repeated work. She knew the weight of a lullaby; she learned how to carry hush without breaking it.

Tonight the river smelled of wet wood and lavender. Ivy smelled it first and smiled because scent was always the first sign of something true in Willowmere. Children’s curtains rustled like soft wings. A dog on Maris Lane gave a single, contented sigh and then slept. Ivy moved from door to door with the slow, respectful steps of someone who entered while other people were dreaming. She tilted a jar for the Miller boy and watched the thread of humming light unspool across the threshold. It glowed upon his eyelashes and tucked itself into the angles of his mouth. He did not twitch; he sank deeper into sleep like a stone easing under water.

At the corner where the path divides toward the old clocktower and the willow’s trunk, Ivy paused. The air felt thinner there, as if someone had taken a breath and left a hollow. The nearest jar in her basket—one wrapped in blue linen and stitched with a tiny silver star—gave a faint shiver, but when she tilted it nothing came out. Not a whisper, not a thread. The jar sat mute in her hand, glass cool and stupid, and the absence inside it made her ears ring. She set the basket down with a soft thunk, and for a moment all she could hear was the river’s small teeth on pebbles.