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Allison awoke the next morning with the smell of the seashore she had been dreaming about still lingering in her nose’s memory. She lay still for a moment, eyes closed, and let it wash over her. The scent remained—faint but present—threading through the ordinary morning smells of her house. The beachy fragrance lay atop the usual ambiance like gossamer fabric: barely there, but unforgettable.
She sat up slowly. The Spark Quill was on the nightstand beside the notebook, right where she’d left it when sleep finally pulled her under. Even from the bed, she could feel the warmth radiating from it. She reached over and touched it with one finger. Warm and humming, faintly.
“Okay,” she said to no one. “So that was real and is still happening.”
Spud stretched, yawned widely, and fixed his eyes on her with the look of a dog who had been patient long enough and now wanted to discuss breakfast and a morning potty trip.
“Yeah, yeah, potato. Time to get up. I know. Let’s go.”
Allison moved through the morning routine on autopilot, her brain otherwise occupied. Spud went out, the coffee pod went in, the croissant came out of the box on the counter, Spud came back in, dog food went in the bowl, and Spud attacked it like a creature that had never once in his life been fed.
Through the entire morning routine, the scent followed her—persistent, but patiently waiting for her attention. It lingered even when the smell of wet dog food briefly overpowered everything else in the kitchen, reasserting itself the moment Spud’s meal faded, as if to say, “I’m not going anywhere.” Get used to it.
She splashed her usual French vanilla creamer into her coffee, picked up the mug and the croissant with one hand, grabbed the notebook and the Spark Quill from the seat of her bike with the other, where she’d placed them as she came downstairs, and settled onto her sofa with careful, practiced choreography.
The TV stayed off. Anything but the morning’s silence felt too loud. She wanted only the room noise and to see what happened.
She opened the journal on her lap and flipped to what she wrote, or rather, what the quill had written last night before she fell asleep. Her eyes flicked back and forth, reading every word.
In the memory, the flip-flops slapped against the boardwalk planks with every step, their foamy rubber soles already embedded in gritty sand and never fully coming out. The gulls cried overhead—sharp and demanding. One of them dove so close she could feel the wind from its wings kiss her cheek. She clutched the paper cup of boardwalk fries tighter, the grease already soaking through, the smell of Old Bay and malt vinegar rising from the cup in a cloud so thick she could taste it before she ever brought one to her mouth.
In the memory, the fries were perfect. Golden. Crispy on the outside, soft and almost creamy inside. Coated in the unmistakable orange-red Old Bay seasoning blend that stung your fingers and lips and dashed with just enough vinegar to make your eyes water if you leaned in too close. She ate them one at a time, savoring each, because the cup would be empty soon, the walk would end, and both the day and summer would be over, and…
Allison was mid-bite and mid-sentence when the television turned itself on. She froze, croissant halfway bitten through. She hadn’t touched the remote; it sat on the arm of the sofa where she’d left it last time she’d used it, undisturbed. But the screen was on, playing a video she’d nearly forgotten about.
The footage was grainy, washed out, and slightly overexposed, in a way that made you know it belonged to that era of home movies filmed in the golden glow of late afternoon light, with the unsteady hands of someone who cared enough about that moment to put it on a video cassette. The audio was muffled and distant, like listening through the glass of a full aquarium.
A beach. A boardwalk. A family walking together—two adults, two children—in the bright, hazy afternoon.
Allison’s breath stopped. She recognized it all: the boardwalk, the shops—the saltwater taffy place with the machine in the window, the T-shirt store with the airbrushed designs, the arcade with its front windows and doors all open to let in the breeze while patrons basked in the neon glow of the games. She recognized the light, the angle of the sun, the particular blue of the ocean beyond the railing.
And she recognized the man. He was tall, broad-shouldered in the way that had always made her feel safe, like standing behind a wall that nothing could get through. He wore a faded T-shirt—navy blue, she thought, or maybe dark green; it was hard to tell—and cargo shorts and flip-flops that slapped his heels with every step. His hair was dark and thick, cut short, and when he turned his head to look down at the child beside him, his face cracked into a grin so wide and warm it could have powered the carousel at the end of the pier.
Her dad. Fifteen years had passed since he died, and here he was, walking the Rehoboth boardwalk in 1988. She remembered being 8 years old, and he was holding the hand of his little girl, her, in a yellow sundress, who was trying to take boardwalk fries out of the greasy paper cup he held down for her, walking at the same time, getting a nice dusting of Old Bay on everything.
A loud gasp came out of Allison’s throat, and the ache in her chest grew as she tried to hold back tears. She missed him so badly and for so long that the grief had become architecture, load-bearing, woven into the walls of who she had grown up to be. She hadn’t heard his laugh in so many years; she’d almost forgotten what it sounded like. The video didn’t have clear audio, but she could see his mouth moving and his shoulders shaking, and she knew that laugh. She knew it like she knew her own heartbeat. It lived in her bones.
The sobs came without warning. She pressed her hand over her mouth, but it didn’t help. The grief broke open like a fault line, and every ounce she’d been holding on to since he died poured through the gap.
On the screen, she and her father reached a section of the boardwalk railing. He knelt beside her and pointed at something in the distance—the Ferris wheel on the far end of the boardwalk, maybe, or a dolphin in the surf by the pier; she couldn’t see it clearly. The little girl leaned into him, her small body fitting against his side like a puzzle piece locking into place.
And then, just for a moment, the camera panned to the railing. Mounted on the weathered wood, in a style that didn’t match anything else on the boardwalk, was a small brass sign. It read:
Please be patient while the boardwalk is rendering.
Allison stared at it through her tears. Dreamspace was building this—right now, in real time—from the memories the Spark Quill had been pulling from her. The words the Quill had written in the journal the night before were becoming the world on the other side. Her memories were the raw material.
She looked down at the page. The purple ink shimmered, steady and patient. Allison let her eyes focus again and read back what had been written—the flip-flops, the gulls, the fries, the boardwalk—and matched it, line for line, with what she’d just seen on the television screen. A perfect parallel. Word for word.
With just the smallest shuddered breath as she looked back up to the TV, she whispered, “What. Is. Happening? This cannot be real.”
The Quill rose above the journal on its own and tapped down on the open pages, its end adornment catching her attention most seriously.
yes.
She chuckled—a wet, broken, bewildered sound, half-laugh and half-cry. She wiped her face with her sleeve and looked back at the TV. The footage was fading now, the colors bleeding out, the boardwalk dissolving back into a blank screen. The last image was of her father’s hand, large and sure, wrapped around her small one. It lingered for a breath longer than the rest before it, too, was gone.
She inhaled with a shuddering, post-crying gasp as she tried to put herself back together one breath at a time. She was a little afraid. She was also a little euphoric. Underneath both of those feelings, in a place she was beginning to access, she was grateful. For a brief window of time, reality had folded into itself on a screen that had no business showing her anything at all. Her dad had been alive again, and she’d gotten to watch him smile one last time.
The weather outside was beautiful. She could see it through the window—bright, warm, the kind of late-spring morning that practically begged you to be anywhere but indoors. Allison felt energized. She needed to leave the house and move her body. Desperately, because the walls were too close, the air was too stuffy, her muscles felt like a spring that needed release, and if she spent one more minute on this couch with a magic pen and a card full of living fireflies and the ghost of her dead father’s smile still burning behind her eyes, she was going to fall apart in a way she might not be able to put back together.
She gulped down the last dregs of her mug at the kitchen sink before putting it on the counter, almost knocking it off, then ran upstairs to get dressed and pack her bag, fully hyper-focused on the task at hand. The notebook went in. The Spark Quill went in. The Sparkkeeper card went in with no rhyme or reason, just tossed into the bag in the haste of someone running late for an event she didn’t know she needed to get to. She slung the backpack over her shoulder, bent down to kiss Spud’s sleepy head, and told him she’d be back in a few hours.
“Guard the house, potato. Don’t let any magical raccoons in while I’m gone.”
Spud yawned, stretched, and nestled his head further into his curled-up body, not even opening his eyes.
She wheeled her bike outside, locked the door, and took off down the driveway.
She turned left instead of right, not her usual route to the creek, not the familiar path to the grocery store. She felt the intense urge to do something completely different today. She headed up Seminary Ridge, where the roads were wider, the traffic lighter, and the straightaways long enough to really open up and push. She needed speed. She needed the wind in her face and the burn in her legs.
The morning was warm and bright, and the battlefield stretched out around her in rolling green waves — fields and fences and monuments and the quiet, heavy stillness that always hung over this land. Allison had always felt it — the energy of the weight borne by such hallowed ground. Most people who lived in Gettysburg did, whether they admitted it or not. The landscape held things here. It held history, and memory, and some energy vortex she’d never been able to name but had always been able to feel.
Today, it felt louder.
She pedaled hard, legs churning, breath coming in a steady rhythm. The wind pulled at her hair and dried the last of the tears. The smells surrounded her — the ones she knew, the ones that belonged here: moist earth, rich and dark and alive. The Humidity was thick enough to wear. The deep, loamy scent of mushrooms and decaying leaves, the quiet rot that feeds new growth. And overall, threading through the canopy of oaks, cedars, birches, dogwoods, and redbuds, the green that smelled like every leaf, flower, and branch had opened itself up and exhaled at once.
She breathed it in. Deep. Filling her lungs with Gettysburg, with the real world, with the ground beneath her wheels.
But underneath it — persistent and impossible to outrun — the scent of Rehoboth Beach followed her through every mile.
It wove through the forest, smelling like a melody played in a different key. Salt air and cotton candy, threading between the moist earth and the mushrooms—sunscreen and taffy, laced through the canopy green. Two worlds, two scent-scapes, layered over each other, and no matter how hard she pedaled, no matter how deeply she breathed the battlefield air, she could not shake the beach.
She turned onto the steep path that wound through Big Round Top, the trees thickening around her, the canopy closing overhead like a cathedral ceiling. The light shifted to dappled gold, falling in beams through the leaves, spotting the trail ahead in patches of warm brightness. The air cooled as the shade deepened, and the forest smell intensified — that intoxicating, almost overwhelming perfume of living and dying things, of new growth and old decay, of water and stone that existed in this part of the battlefield.
She could feel it, the way she always could. The energy as she rode down the other side, heading toward Little Round Top, somewhere just ahead through the trees, though not as dense as Big Round Top, pulsed with an intensity she’d never been able to explain to anyone who hadn’t felt it themselves. It was like standing in a room where someone had just been speaking — the words were gone, but the vibration lingered. Every time she rode through here, the hair on her arms stood up, and something in her chest tightened, not with fear but with attention. As if her body was receiving a signal her brain couldn’t decode.
Today, as she parked her bike at the rack, walked to the top of the path, and looked over the Valley of Death, the signal was screaming.
Her skin prickled. The scent sharpened — both scents, the battlefield and the beach, competing for dominance, layering, clashing, and blending into something that smelled like neither and both. Her intuition, that quiet voice she’d spent a lifetime learning to ignore, was no longer quiet. It was loud, getting louder with every pedal stroke, shouting something she couldn’t quite make out, like someone calling her name from the other side of a wall.
Once she got back to her bike, she gripped the handlebars tightly as she hopped on, pulled it off the rack, turned back onto the main road, and cycled on.
Meanwhile, deep in the backpack strapped to her shoulders, the Sparkkeeper card was waking up.
It jostled with each bump her tires found on the trail. The gilded edges caught no light inside the dark bag, but they didn’t need to. The card had its own.
Inside her bag, a soft pulsing light was beginning to shine. It was barely there at first, then grew more intense, like a heartbeat made visible, rhythmic, and patiently waiting for Allison to slow down and hear it.
Then something moved.
From the inked edge of the card’s border, a flicker — a single spark, gold and shimmering, shaped like a firefly but smaller, as if someone had taken a piece of starlight and taught it to crawl. It emerged from the illustration — slowly, unsure, pulling itself free of the two-dimensional surface and into the three-dimensional dark of the bag.
Its antennae swept the interior of the once-rough canvas, softened by use, the leather zipper pull, the notebook’s spine, the warm brass of the Spark Quill. It oriented itself—found direction. And began to climb.
Drawn toward the thinnest sliver of daylight — a wrinkle in the bag’s cinching — the firefly crawled up the inside wall of the satchel. It squeezed through the gap and emerged into the blinding morning sun, perching on the edge of the flap, holding on for dear life against the wind.
The firefly turned and looked at the back of Allison’s head, at the hair whipping in the wind, at the set of her shoulders, at the determined, slightly frantic rhythm of her pedaling. Then it turned to look at the scenery, at the trees rushing past, the dappled light, the ancient battlefield rolling out in every direction. It seemed, for a moment, to take it all in. To appreciate it.
And then it launched.
In a burst of golden light, it zipped into the open air, using the bike’s momentum to get up to speed quickly, and began to orbit Allison as she pedaled — spiraling, dancing, leaving faint trails of shimmer in its wake like the ghost of a sparkler on the Fourth of July.
“Shoo,” she muttered, batting at it without looking. Just another bug. She thought to herself. Late-spring Gettysburg was full of ‘em. The firefly dodged her hand with effortless grace, looped once around her head, and settled back into its orbit.
A chill bloomed at the base of her spine and spread upward, blossoming into a full-body shiver. She wasn’t at all cold. She felt like she was being watched. She was used to that. The battlefield and graveyard behind her house were full of ghosts. The feeling was nothing new, nor was the shiver. She glanced over her shoulder and shrugged—just the trail behind her, dappled and quiet and empty.
“Yep. Nothing. Just as I thought. Probably another mischievous Spirit. Well, hello there. Along for the ride? She asserted with a chuckle, shaking her head.
But far behind her, just beyond her view, the atmosphere rippled, the leaves shimmied, and somewhere just beyond a thinning veil between realms, in a voice that existed between thought and sound, between the waking world and the one just outside it, Allison thought she heard Thimble say, softly and with unmistakable wonder:
“She did it. The carnival. It’s open.”
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