The walls in Mira's apartment were thin—just enough to hear Kanna hum through them in the mornings. Her voice wasn't what you'd call *tuned*, but it was oddly comforting, like the distant clink of wind chimes in summer.
That morning, Kanna didn't knock.
She barged in.
"Emergency!" she declared, holding a muffin in one hand and a plastic container of frozen dumplings in the other. Her coat trailed like a superhero cape behind her.
"You could try knocking," Mira said, sitting cross-legged on her futon, still in her sleep shirt. "Someday."
"I did knock. Emotionally. With my aura." Kanna plopped onto the floor and shoved a muffin in Mira's hand. "Eat. It's cranberry. And you look like you've been communing with the spirits of forgotten letters again."
Mira smiled, but her fingers tightened slightly around the muffin. "Too close."
Kanna reached for the kettle and started boiling water without asking. She knew the rhythm of Mira's kitchen better than her own by now.
"So," she said. "Letter five?"
"No words. Just blank. And then a feather. Later, words appeared—impressed into the page."
"That's not creepy at all."
"It didn't feel creepy. It felt like…" Mira hesitated. "Like someone was trying to remember themselves through me."
Kanna glanced over, eyes sharper than usual. "That's poetic. And kind of lonely."
"I think it is lonely. Whoever's writing… it's not about control. Not this time. It felt like reaching."
Kanna handed her a cup of tea and sat beside her. "I've been doing my own reaching, actually."
"Into what?"
Kanna hesitated—rare for her. Then she dug into her backpack and pulled out a sketchpad.
"I've been sketching in my sleep again."
Mira blinked. "That's not a phrase people say."
"I mean it. I wake up and there's graphite dust on my fingers. Lines on the page. And the last few nights? I've been drawing a girl."
She flipped open the pad.
Page one: a face, half-formed, eyes closed. The next page: eyes open. Familiar eyes.
Mira's throat tightened.
"She looks like me."
Kanna nodded. "But not *you-you*. She feels... displaced. Like she belongs in a different year."
There was another sketch—this one of an old classroom. Wooden beams. Tall windows. A woman with long hair looking out. On the chalkboard was a faint phrase:
**"Truth is a letter we forget to send."**
Mira stared at it. Her hands were cold.
"I think you're connected to this," Kanna said softly. "Not because you're a 'chosen one'—I think it's just that… sometimes grief opens doors."
Mira looked up. "Grief?"
Kanna didn't flinch. "I know what it looks like."
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small vial of pills. Set it gently on the floor between them.
Mira's heart skipped. "Kanna…"
"It's not terminal," Kanna said quickly. "It's just *weird*. My nerves misfire. Some days my legs go numb. Some days my chest tightens. Doctors keep throwing words around, but I haven't told my parents yet. You're the first."
Mira was stunned. "Why me?"
"Because you're the only one who believes in invisible things. And I think… whatever's happening to me—it's not just medical. Something's waking up. Something threaded through memory and illness and dreams."
They sat in silence.
"Why did you call it an emergency earlier?" Mira asked.
Kanna reached into her bag again. This time she pulled out a weathered envelope—creased, smudged, faintly damp. She handled it like it might disintegrate.
"It was taped to my door this morning," Kanna whispered. "No name. Just… this."
She passed it to Mira.
The envelope felt cold. Heavier than it should have.
Inside was a single note—typed, not handwritten:
**"The artist forgets, but the paper remembers."**
On the back:
**"Don't sketch her face again. She's watching now."**
Mira stared at the words, each one pulsing like a quiet drumbeat.
"I think," Kanna said, "someone doesn't want me drawing her."
"She? You mean Naomi?"
Kanna nodded. "That's the name that keeps scratching in the corners of my dreams."
Mira looked back at the sketchpad. The girl's face—hers, but not—seemed to shimmer slightly under the window light.
"Maybe," she said, voice shaking, "you're not sketching Naomi."
Kanna turned to her.
"Maybe Naomi is sketching *through* you."
---
That night, Mira tucked Kanna's sketchpad into her drawer, pressed between two volumes of poetry and an old photo album. Kanna had gone back to her apartment with a laugh and a bad joke about haunted pencils, but Mira saw the fear hiding just behind her smile.
She sat at her desk, letters spread before her like tarot cards. The blank page, the watermarked feather, the echo impressions burned into silence.
A wind passed through the room—but the window was shut.
And then, as she looked again at the sketch of "her"—older, different—she whispered aloud:
"Naomi… what do you want us to see?"
The lights flickered.
And on the page, behind the ink, a new phrase etched itself into the sketchpad's spine.
**"Where the ink runs backward, truth bleeds forward."**
---