Maya had a question, and it was this: where do dreams come from?
Not *how* — she knew how felt too big and too grown-up and probably involved a lot of words that would take all night. Just where. Where, exactly, did a dream begin before it arrived in her head?
She thought about it while she was supposed to be thinking about other things.
She thought about it at supper, pushing a pea to the edge of her plate. She thought about it in the bath, watching a soap bubble travel very slowly toward the tap. And she thought about it at the window, with her chin resting on the sill, looking out at the garden going dark and blue around the edges.
That was when she saw the hedgehog.
It was a small, serious hedgehog, the kind that always looks as if it has somewhere important to be. And it was carrying something. A parcel, no bigger than a matchbox, wrapped in what looked like a tiny pouch of proper nighttime fog, the corners gathered up and tied at the top like the neck of a small soft bag.
Maya pressed her nose against the glass.
The hedgehog set the parcel down at the foot of the old apple tree. Then it looked up.
The moon was out. Enormous tonight, low and round, the colour of warm butter, sitting just above Mr. Hadley's fence like it had come over for a visit. The hedgehog looked at the moon for a moment the way you look at someone you know well. Then it picked up the parcel again and trundled on.
Maya opened the window, just a crack. The air smelled of damp grass and something sweeter she didn't have a word for.
*Why?* she whispered. Not to anyone. Just into the gap.
But here is what she had noticed: the hedgehog had not come from the left, where the gate was, or from the right, where the compost bin was, or from underneath the fence, which had a good gap for small creatures.
It had come from the direction of the moon.
Not from the moon. Maya was five, not two — she knew the hedgehog had not walked down a moonbeam. But from the direction of it. From the low buttery light of it, out of the patch of garden where the shadows lay longest and most still.
She thought: maybe the moon makes them. The dreams. Maybe the moon is up all night — she *knew* the moon was up all night, she had checked, many times, through this exact window — and it has to do *something* with all those quiet hours. Maybe it makes small fog-parcels, one for every sleeping person, and in the evening it gives them to the hedgehogs and the mice and the slow soft moths, and they deliver them, tucked under pillows and behind eyelids, light as a breath.
That would explain, she thought, why dreams always felt a little cold at the start and warm by the middle. Fog on the outside, something bright inside.
It would explain why she sometimes dreamed about gardens.
It would explain why the hedgehog looked so purposeful.
The moon sat above Mr. Hadley's fence and said nothing, which is what the moon always does, which is almost the same as saying *yes*.
Maya stayed at the window a little longer, watching the garden settle into itself, every blade of grass tipped with a small cold light. Somewhere in the dark, the hedgehog was still walking. Busy. Careful. Carrying something meant for someone.
She thought that was a very good job.