In some irrational way, standing before the tree to write her wish felt a bit like being watched, as if the tree itself was bending unseen eyes on the slip of paper in her hand and, perhaps, judging her for it.

She was not a person inclined to think much of other people’s judgment, let alone the imagined judgment of a tree. But the last six months had changed so much about her life that it perhaps she should have foreseen these little revolutions in her own make-up, and been less surprised when she stumbled on yet another one and had to re-assess how it fit into the way she saw herself.

Her impulse, of course, was to defy the idea. But if the point of getting out and about into the city festivities was to relax, it would be OK, she reasoned, to lay by her defiance just this once. She was feeling inexplicably tender - in the sense of a bruise - and so she turned away, and she walked to a quieter area of the park to make her wish. Every quiet corner, now, seemed to have some sort of monster lurking in it, but there was no monster this time except the one that she’d made for herself in some of the less-explored recesses of her consciousness and which she was now stubbornly ignoring. She’d rather have confronted a youma.

She told herself, as she wrote, that she was setting aside her selfishness in the spirit of the festival. But she knew that it was one of those hateful lies to herself, even as she thought it. No: this, too, was a selfish wish, even if it revolved around someone else. But it was not a wish that anyone could grant, and so she did not return to hang it on the tree. Instead, she shredded it to pieces in her hands. Burying it didn’t just feel like littering - it felt inexplicably like showing her own soft underbelly to a universe that she didn’t care to see it. So instead she wandered to one of the park’s grills, and using the end of a stick she stirred the fragments of paper in among the ashes and charcoal, to vanish into the flames meant for something as undignified as a hot dog. It was not the most romantic thing she’d ever done - but despite what was written on those fragments, and despite all those unseen parts of herself that she was growing frustrated at encountering, she was still Elaine. And Elaine, as she had told Myth, was not much of a romantic.

This being done, she dusted off her hands and wandered back to the tree. It felt wrong not to leave something for someone to grant. So she took up another slip, and after a moment, she made another wish - and it was, in a way, the same one she’d just made.

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