Once upon a time…

They said her hourglass hung in the reeds, where the ground sighed and the water kept secrets. Marta went to fetch it before the moon climbed twice, for her mother’s voice had grown thin as spider thread. Folks kept a custom here: every midsummer they traded a minute of their life to the Night-Egret by laying a brass button on a floating root. The bird, white as bone, would take the buttons and give a safe path.

Marta had no button. She had only a tin thimble. She set it on a root and whispered, “Borrow me a path.” The Night-Egret flicked one black eye, then glided ahead, parting slick plants and lantern flies. Time in this place moved in loops. Frogs called, then called again, the same notes. Marta saw her mother’s birth-knife, then her own cradle ribbon, tangled on branches that grew backward.

At last the reeds opened on an hourglass half-buried, its sand falling up. Marta turned it. The frog calls broke, the air straightened. The Night-Egret dropped her thimble back, dented. She ran home before the second moon-step, and her mother’s breath deepened like a tide.