Poppy and the Pocket of Daydreams

From the very first morning Poppy woke in the little blue house at the end of a cobbled lane, people said she carried a pocket that remembered. It was not a pocket on the outside where coins clink or stones go missing, but a hidden fold sewn into the lining of an old coat her grandmother had mended for her. The coat smelled faintly of warm sugar and clean cloth, and the pocket lived close to Poppy’s heart. When she slipped her hand into that soft fold she sometimes felt a tiny, warm hum, like a bird’s wing brushing the inside of a hat. It did not keep ordinary things. It kept daydreams. Small, gentle things that felt like a secret breeze.

Poppy liked to find them as if they were shells on a seashore. A laugh left behind by someone who had forgotten to tuck it away, a cloud shaped like a boat that drifted too slowly to reach the sky, the sweet nonsense of a child imagining trees made of candy—each one could fit on the pad of a fingertip if it liked, and each one would glow a little when she cupped it and put it into the pocket. After that the pocket would hum and the blue of her coat would hold a little more sparkle. Button, her round, striped cat, agreed with everything that made Poppy smile, and he particularly approved of the pebbles. He would curl on the step and blink slowly while Poppy reached into the seam and set a tiny shine inside, then he would pat at the air as if to say, “Yes, keep that.”

On ordinary mornings Poppy gathered two or three pebbles and kept them safe, the way other children kept marbles or badges. She knew which pebble had the memory of a summer’s kite and which one kept the secret of a red mitten left in a snowdrift. Each pebble had a small face in its light, as if it remembered the thing it had been, and Poppy could tell them apart by the sort of warmth they gave. Some made the coat smell faintly of oranges, some made Button purr louder, and some seemed to remember music without any sound at all.

That morning was the kind where the sun was still soft enough to be measured by shadows and the apple tree in Poppy’s garden held a few stiff pink leaves. Poppy zipped her coat and slipped her hand into the secret pocket to make sure everything was still there. Her fingers brushed the familiar hum, and then stopped. One of the pebbles was gone. The pocket felt lighter, so light that Poppy could almost hear it breathe. Button’s whiskers twitched. A thin trail of grey dust had been left across the porch boards, as if something small and sleepy had walked away and dragged color from the air with it. Where a strip of marigolds flared the day before, one tiny corner of the garden looked paler, like a watercolor someone had forgotten to finish. Poppy’s heart gave a small, loud thump when she realized the pebble that had been keeping that brightness had vanished.