When Lena finds a strange piece of glass in her grandmother’s attic, ordinary Piotrowice starts to look far less ordinary, and the quiet holiday turns strange fast.
Holidays in Piotrowice were usually slow enough to feel almost sticky. Lena knew every dent in the rusty-red bench outside her grandmother’s house, every weed pushing through the garden path, every clatter of laundry moving on the line behind the fence. Nothing here ever surprised her. That was the worst part.
Then the rain came down so hard it turned the yard into a blur, and Lena ducked into the attic to wait it out. It smelled of dust, old wood, and forgotten summers. She was wandering past a leaning shelf of boxes and bundled blankets when she saw something tucked beneath a rolled-up sweater: a thick piece of glass, green at the edges, cool in her hand, and faintly lit from within, as if a tiny piece of sky had been trapped inside it.
The moment she touched it, a sharp tingle ran through her fingers. Above her, the attic bulb flickered once and died, dropping the room into shadow. Lena froze. Rain rattled on the roof, loud and close. Then the glass brightened on its own, soft and steady, and when she looked through it, the attic seemed to tilt. Houses, trees, and the lane outside the window slid across the surface in miniature, clear as a reflection and yet not quite a reflection at all.
Lena turned the glass in her palm. The tiny street changed with it, and for one dizzy second she saw the gate, the path, even the corner of the garden from an angle that shouldn’t have existed. She was still staring when something shifted behind the dresser. A thin creak sounded on the stairs.
Lena thrust the glass into her pocket and held her breath. Another step followed, slow and deliberate, and then a dark shape appeared at the top of the attic stairs.