The photo is not fancy. It is the radio’s pale digits, the last blue-white on the mast if it is still ticking, a jar of foxfire if you brought one—lights agreeing to share a crate.

You sketch a wisp in the margin—the wandering coin over water—so the exhibit can hold three ideas even if your hands only caught one or two: gas and reflection, fungus, storm.

Jonah, if he is here, says, “Folklore-fair.” He means it as a joke. Ms. Ellison, in the morning, means it as a title.

How a marsh makes ghosts.

Kids from town will come and look: no heat if the glow is fungus, no feet on the wisp sketch, a fox recording Dev keeps for education (no woman). Nobody gets mocked for having been scared. Everybody gets the mechanism.

Aunt Mara pins a copy above the cottage table. “Wonder stays,” she says.

You sleep without listening for knocks. The knocks can happen. You know the names of the ones you solved, and you do not owe the dark a full catalog.

THE END

What you learned: foxfire is fungus glowing in rotten wood; wisps are gas or sky on water; storm-glow on metal is electricity. Three lights, three chemistries. Folklore collected them. Science sorts them without throwing the stories away.