Ms. Ellison’s scrapbook is open on the table, fat as a loaf. She treats kids as researchers whether they arrived by legend, by mud, or by a scream that turned into an animal.

Left: Will-o’-the-wisp. Corpse candles. Banshee. Black dog. Sky omen. House that knocks. Right: Marsh gas / sky on water. Foxfire. Fox and barn owl. Stray dog / shining eyes. Storm, pressure, electricity. Wind, wood, mice.

“Stories are maps of feelings,” she says, tapping the gutter between columns. “People were not stupid. They were dark, wet, and trying not to lose a neighbor. We keep the names. We add the mechanisms.”

Jonah reads banshee with his mouth and fox + owl with his finger. He does not argue. He looks like someone whose favorite book just grew a sequel.

Your handwriting will get messier as the thunder gets nearer. That is also data: storms change people.

Ms. Ellison wraps two cookies in a napkin as if cookies were science. “You can copy both columns and take them to Mara’s kitchen. Or you can take the facts onto the dike—railing, no heroics—and watch weather invent new ghosts. I will call Mara. She is almost through the last sandbags.”

The cottage windows bloom with distant pale coins. The dike is a dark line holding the wet world in place. The book is still open, waiting for a pencil.