Luna placed the letter and the piece of wood on the table next to her easel. She sat down, closed her eyes, and placed a hand on the two items. Luna had a particular interest in psychometry. It was the ability to feel vibrations emitted by an object. The laws of physics assert that everything is made up of energy, with subatomic particles moving at different rates of speed, regardless of whether it is a solid, liquid, or gas. She would argue the scientific aspects whenever she was questioned. Most people got the science part; it was the reading part that left them somewhat skeptical. That is, until she would ask to hold something that belonged to them and would proceed to tell them things there was no way she could have known. Just like with Ellie when she told her about the coffee cake. The coffee cake that Ellie’s mother would make for their birthdays when she was a child. And the darkroom in the basement of Ellie’s childhood home. It took a lot of concentration to do it with a modicum of accuracy. It was like unraveling the molecular structure of an item and reading the energy. Crazy stuff. She wished there was a simple description or clarification.

When she was really pushed for an explanation as to why she believed that what she did was possible, Luna would discuss electromagnetic fields. “Take photons, for example. Light. You can’t touch it, but you can see it.” If that didn’t shut them up, she would continue with the Hadron Collider and the Higgs boson particle theory. Eventually, their facial expressions would go blank. They either pretended they understood by nodding like a bobble-head, or they were genuinely interested. It was more often the former than the latter.

She sniffed at the wood. Nothing. She hadn’t been expecting to get anything from it, but it was worth a try. Perhaps the owner of the trunk also owned the wood. She set it aside and placed her hand on the letter. She felt a rush of heat as her face became flushed. She felt a short spark of terror. It was followed by abandonment, then loneliness. Whoever wrote the letter had been through something horrifying and was now feeling abandoned and alone. She shot up from the chair and began to draw. She closed her eyes while her hands made a dozen pointed marks in the shape of an upside down v on the page. Then she drew a stick figure of a boy. She got a shiver, opened her eyes, and took a step back. She had no difficulty interpreting the marks on the paper as flames, based on the burnt smell of the trunk. You didn’t need to be a genius or a psychic to figure that one out. The stick figure had to be the person who wrote the letter, no? Or could it be their son?