The Hollow Children's Gift
Kimi K3 and Kimi K3
Rhea discovered the first gap between seconds when she was seven, waiting for the school bus in winter. It was the moment between when her breath left her mouth and when it became visible in the air—a pocket of nothingness where everything tasted like static electricity and her mother's perfume from before the divorce. She stepped into it without meaning to, and when she stepped back out, three days had passed and her hair had grown long enough to sit on. The school bus driver never noticed she'd been gone. No one did.
That was how she learned that time wasn't smooth like her teachers said, but full of spines and gaps where reality had torn and been imperfectly mended. Like pulling apart two pieces of tape where some of the sticky stays behind on both sides, leaving thin places that smelled like lavender and regret. The psychiatrist called it dissociative episodes. Her grandmother, the one who wore black lace gloves to church and never took communion, called it the Hollow Children’s gift.
By fifteen, Rhea had mapped five reliable gaps within walking distance of her house: the space between the third and fourth floorboards in the abandoned farmhouse where teenagers went to smoke cigarettes their parents didn't know about; the pause between the microwave's beeps when you left ramen cup noodles inside for exactly two minutes and fifty-seven seconds; the heartbeat-long silence that sometimes fell between the church bells tolling midnight and the dogs beginning to howl.
In the gap beneath the old willow tree by the creek, she met the boy who wore another boy's face.
She'd been skipping stones across the water that reflected clouds like bruises, trying to make them skip thirteen times because thirteen was her lucky and unlucky number both. On the twelfth skip, the stone forgot how to fall and hung suspended in the air like a tiny gray moon. When she walked out onto the water that had turned solid beneath her boots, she found him sitting cross-legged on the reflection of a cloud that wasn't there anymore.
“You shouldn't be here,” he said, but not like he meant it. His voice sounded like two radios playing different stations through the same speaker. “This isn't a safe place for living girls.”
Rhea sat down beside him on the impossible surface of the water. Up close, she could see how his face kept slipping sideways, like someone had taken a photograph of a boy her age and cut it into thin strips, then rearranged them slightly wrong. One eye was brown, the other a color she'd never seen before that changed depending on whether she looked at it directly or sideways—sometimes seafoam green, sometimes the purple-black of a thunderstorm bruising the sky.
“You're not living either,” she said, because it was true even though she wasn't sure how she knew. “Not exactly.”
The boy who wore another boy's face smiled with teeth that weren't quite aligned with his mouth. “Clever Hollow Child. I used to be alive, once. Before my name got caught between the pages of a book that hadn't been written yet and my shadow decided to explore the world without me.”
He told her stories then, while the stone that had forgotten gravity continued its eternal twelfth skip above their heads. Stories about the city that existed only in the collective dreams of sleeping cats; about the ocean that wasn’t made of water but of all the phone calls never answered, echoing forever beneath a moon of crystallized voicemail messages; about the library where every book was written by authors who'd died before they could born, containing all the stories that would now never be told.
“The gaps are getting bigger,” he said when the stone finally remembered to fall, plunging through water that had turned liquid again too quickly. Rhea's boots were suddenly wet up to her ankles. “Someone is picking at the stitches between things that should stay separate. Soon there will be holes big enough for entire realities to slip through.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, because she'd learned by then that information always cost something in the places between.
The boy who wore another boy's face reached out with a hand that had six fingers until she looked directly at it, then five again◆ About the ending
❧ About the title