If not for the tempting lure of cake, her brother would already be out the gate and gone, off to join what sounds like a far better party. As if to add insult to injury, the sound of laughter drifts over the fence from a neighbor’s yard, where half a dozen children from Katherine’s school have gathered to play. There is Katherine, and there is her brother, who has somehow already gotten frosting on the tip of his nose, and that is where it stops.

There are so many things that it would be easy to miss what should be obvious: to miss what isn’t here. There are so many things here, paper streamers and smiling parents and the distant scent of bonfires burning in the fields. There is her brother, twelve years old and eyeing the cake with a pirate’s hunger, ready to pillage its depths the second he is given leave.

There are gifts, a small pile of them, wrapped in brightly colored paper recycled from other birthdays, other holidays. There is a cake, slightly lopsided, frosted in lemon buttercream that smells sweet and sour in the same breath, impossibly tempting and glittering with sugar crystals. Little Katherine, her mother’s belly round and ripe as a Halloween pumpkin, bulging with the impending harvest of her sister, sitting prim at the picnic table her parents have set up in the backyard. What are we here for, after all, if not for that? So: We must go back a little beyond the beginning, then, to learn to observe. Had she been pressed on the matter she might, after protesting that there was nothing remarkable about her, have suggested her own sixth birthday as the moment of the twist. Like the town where she lived, where she had been born, and where she was beginning to feel, in a slow and abstract way, that she would someday die, Katherine-never Kate, never Kitty, never anything but Katherine, sensible Katherine, up-and-down Katherine, as dependable as a sundial whittling away the summer afternoons-was ordinary enough to have become remarkable entirely without noticing it. She had two parents who loved her and a small ginger cat who purred when she stroked its back, and everything was lovely, and everything was terrible. She had a sister, six years younger and a little bit shy in the way of children who had yet to decide whether they would be timid or brave, kind or cruel.

She had a brother, six years older and a little bit wild in the way of boys who could look over their shoulders and see the shadow of a war standing there, its jaws open and hungry. IN A HOUSE, on a street, in a town ordinary enough in every aspect to cross over its own roots and become remarkable, there lived a girl named Katherine Victoria Lundy.

Seanan mcguire in an absent dream