The jar fogs, then clears. The crumb glows like a shy star that has to sit down.

Jonah admits, not looking at you, “That’s cooler than a ghost. Ghosts are just… people leftover. This is a mushroom doing math.”

“Chemistry,” you say, but you let math live. The light is faint enough that you cup your other hand around the glass. Foxfire. Not a grave-candle. Not a soul. Living fungus in rotting wood, making light the way some animals make light in the sea: a reaction, a leftover, a trick of being alive.

You label the lid: foxfire, stump bend, no heat. You sketch the white-blue wisps beside it so the page holds two kinds of almost-ghost.

The storm is stacking over the dike now—clouds like dark furniture being dragged. Down toward the landing, the boat-shed mast wears a thin blue-white thread, a different lesson: electricity practicing on wet metal.

Jonah’s phone buzzes. His mom: Home soon. Stay with Mara’s kid. He grins. “That’s you. You’re a location.”