Tilda stands at a crossroads just outside of town. It’s a place where worlds meet, and the perfect place to create a new person. The crescent moon glimmers through the oaks bent thick along the roadside. The cold-burning stars in the sky hold a sort of magic if you know how to swim in their light. Tilda spits in the dirt, turns a tight circle, and recites the incantation she learned as a child.

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.

Words from a worn-out book for children, which is, of course, where the most powerful spells are kept.

I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.

When a breathy whisper needles up her spine, she thinks perhaps she’s made a mistake coming here alone—but who else would have come with her? Normal people (that is to say, people with friends and family) never come to the crossroads at night.

Loneliness has many solutions, and one of them is to create a new person who’s able to say, I know what you mean; I feel the same way, a person who might offer you a bite of their jam tart. And perhaps this new person might touch those feathery feelings that no one else can reach—the sandpapery rasp when you think about the people you’ve lost, or when you hear the call of a distant crow while eating your lunch alone.

Mistake or not, she pushes onward. Too late to turn back now. She recites the words again and then a third time.

A cat rubs against her leg, although anyone could tell it isn’t really a cat at all, just something that looks very much like a cat and feels very much like the wrong place at the wrong time. It slinks past her and sits on the road. The silver bell on its collar gives a disharmonious jingle, like the fine print in a contract warning of some unavoidable misunderstanding. Tilda notices the slip of paper rolled beneath its collar and bends to retrieve it. She opens and reads it. When she looks up, the cat’s gone, but the instructions it left behind are clear.

Tilda places fallen branches into the shape of a girl her size. She gathers mud at the side of the road and packs it around those bony sticks until a new girl forms, wet and lifeless. She selects three small stones from the crossroads. They lie cold in her hand, and she considers how rarely she’s felt anything warm in her life. She clutches at the instructions and reads. This next part is vague: Scratch one word onto each stone to define this life. Tilda chooses happy and friendly and understood. She digs three holes in the mud girl’s breast and places each stone in a hole.

The mud girl’s eyes are obsidian; her teeth, chips of white agate. Tilda’s lips hover near the mud girl’s slit of a mouth, and she exhales her hot breath into the clay until the girl gasps for air and sits straight up in the road.

“I’m so happy you’re here,” Tilda says. Already she feels the connection of the crossroads. Someone to listen. Someone to hear. She reaches for mud girl’s hand.

Mud girl sits naked and pale in the moonlight. Tilda helps her stand, then offers her coat. Without uttering a single word, mud girl turns and walks away, leaving Tilda alone in the moonlight.

Stars smear across the deranged sky, and the feathery things inside her give a flutter as if to say, how silly you are.

In the following weeks, Tilda watches mud girl wave at everyone on the street. Complete strangers become her friends. When she speaks to them, they laugh and touch her arm. In the café, mud girl sits at a table and chats with her new friends, eating scones and drinking the lattes they buy for her. People have given her clothes and jewelry and even a cellphone.

Not once does mud girl make eye contact with Tilda. It’s as if a girl so bright can’t look into the shadows.

Tilda stalks mud girl on social media. She has thousands of friends now, and her photo gallery brims with pictures of food and bicycle rides. Her background image shows the concert she went to on Friday with her new boyfriend.

Mud girl’s life doesn’t seem real. It’s all smiles and sunshine and an endless stream of happy endings. Tilda had wanted so much more for both of them.

On Saturday, mud girl picnics with friends in a nearby park. They toss around a frisbee and eat assorted pastries. From behind a tree across the lawn, Tilda sits and watches.

By afternoon, heavy clouds fill the sky. A drizzle becomes a downpour, and lightning leads to thunder. The friends laugh and dance in the rain, but mud girl starts to scream when the soil around her limbs begins to wash away. The others watch in horror as mud girl runs in circles trying to hold herself together. When her arm falls off, she drops to the lawn and howls into the sky. For the first time, she looks at Tilda. Regret and disbelief, like she can’t believe something so horrible could happen to her.

Tilda runs over to comfort her, but mud girl shrugs her off. Her legs dissolve into the wet grass. Tilda scoops up the mud and tries to pack it back onto the girl, but none of it will stick together. Mud girl doesn’t have any of the dark and heavy things that cling to the world with gravity, that same weight that holds Tilda’s feet to the ground.

After the rainstorm, Tilda sits beside the pile of debris that used to be mud girl. This is all her fault; she hadn’t understood. What is light without shadow? Making a person is difficult, but she’s certain she’ll do better next time. Tonight, she’ll go back to the crossroads and gather more sticks and mud. Choose new stones. This time she’ll use different words—heavier words like fearful or grieving or broken—the kind of words that make a person real. Perhaps she’ll use the heaviest word of all—forgotten, a word that bends light and swallows worlds.

Then they’ll sit in the crossroads together and remember, reminding each other who they are, and why the heavy ache of living is so important.