Epilogue: The Porchlight

  Scene 1: The Box in the Attic

  The attic smelled like dust and magnolia paper. The kind of place where summer sunlight filtered through slats in golden ribbons, and the air stood still—thick with the hush of things forgotten but not lost.

  A little girl, barefoot and red-headed with a constellation of freckles on her nose, tugged open a cedar chest beneath an old quilt that smelled of rain and time.

  Her name was Ellie.

  Inside, past a stack of yellowed field guides and a jar of bottle caps, she found it: a worn leather journal, cracked along the spine, with the words Mudpuppy Patrol – Summer '80 scrawled in uneven paint across the front.

  She flipped it open.

  Drawings. Maps. Notes in a dozen different handwritin’. A sketch of a bootprint inside a compass. Photos—one of six kids covered in paint, grinnin’ like they’d just stolen summer from the sky.

  “Hey, Mama?” she called. “What’s this?”

  But it wasn’t her mama who answered.

  From the stairs below came the familiar voice of someone older, slower, but still sure as cicada song.

  “I reckon that’s mine, sugar,” said her grandmother, stepping into the light.

  She wore a wide-brimmed hat and moved like she’d always been part of the land—steady, strong, with a spark that hadn’t dimmed one bit.

  Ellie blinked. “Yours?”

  Josie Lawson—though no one called her that anymore, not since her hair turned silver and the neighborhood kids started callin’ her Miss Red—smiled and nodded.

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  “I believe it’s time you knew a thing or two about the Mudpuppy Patrol.”

  Scene 2: What We Found

  They sat on the porch, the kind built wide enough to catch a breeze from any direction, with paint chippin’ just right and a swing that creaked like it had stories of its own. Fireflies had just begun to flicker in the tall grass, and the sky was doin’ that quiet turn from gold to dusk.

  Ellie curled up beside her grandma with the journal in her lap, fingers tracing over a doodle of a tree marked with a spiral.

  “What’s this one?” she asked.

  Red smiled, leanin’ back into the swing with a slow rock. “That’s the signal tree. It hummed when the wind hit just right. Sounded like the whole swamp was tryin’ to speak.”

  Ellie blinked. “Did it really shimmer? Like it says here?”

  Red’s eyes twinkled. “Well now… that depends on who you ask.”

  She let the swing creak once, twice.

  “We were your age when we found the map. Me and five other knuckleheads with too much summer and not enough sense. We chased sounds. Shadows. Secrets. Thought we were makin’ it up half the time—'til we weren’t.”

  Ellie flipped the page. “Was it dangerous?”

  “Little bit,” Red said, chucklin’. “But not like you’d think. Not monsters or curses. Just... grown-ups who wanted to bury things best left in the light. We dug up the truth, dusted it off, and let the wind carry it.”

  “Did anybody believe you?”

  Red looked out across the porch rail, her eyes driftin’ past the trees like she could still see the old trails.

  “Some did. Some didn’t. But that wasn’t the point.”

  Ellie frowned. “Then what was the point?”

  Red reached over and gently closed the journal. She rested her hand on top of it like she was sealin’ a promise.

  “The point was, when the world whispered to us, we didn’t hush. We listened. And we answered back.”

  Ellie was quiet a moment, starin’ at the journal like it had just shifted in her hands.

  “Is the swamp still out there?” she asked.

  Red grinned. “Of course it is.”

  “And the shimmer?”

  Red gave a soft laugh, the kind with a little ache behind it. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ll tell you a secret, sugar—some things don’t need to shimmer anymore to still be real.”

  Ellie glanced up. “What do you mean?”

  Red leaned forward, eyes sharp and kind and full of all the summers that had ever been.

  “I mean the magic’s not gone. It just... waits for the right ears.”

  She stood, joints poppin’ gentle, and turned toward the screen door.

  Ellie hesitated, clutchin’ the journal to her chest.

  “Grandma?”

  Red paused, one hand on the frame.

  “Yeah, darlin’?”

  Ellie’s voice was small, but steady.

  “Will you tell me the whole story?”

  Red looked back, smile slow and wide.

  Then she motioned to the swing with a tilt of her chin.

  “Come sit with me on the porch and I’ll tell you about the day the swamp shimmered.”

  THE END