Whenever I slept downstairs at Selma’s she would tell me bedtime stories with happy endings. When I was little, after each story I would take hold of her wrist, lay my thumb on her pulse, and imagine that the whole world followed the rhythm of Selma’s heartbeat. I pictured the optician grinding lenses, Martin lifting a heavy weight, Elsbeth trimming her hedges, the shopkeeper stacking cartons of juice, my mother layering fir branches, my father writing out prescriptions, all exactly to the beat of Selma’s heart. This had always reliably put me to sleep, but now that I was ten years old, Selma felt I was too old for it.

As Selma sashayed into the kitchen, I was sitting at the table copying my completed geography assignment into Martin’s notebook. I was surprised that instead of scolding me for doing Martin’s homework for him yet again, she said, “Well, hello there,” and poked me merrily in the ribs. Not once before in her life had Selma said, “Well, hello there,” nor had she ever poked anyone merrily in the ribs.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Selma warbled, and opened the refrigerator. She took out a package of sliced cheese and some liverwurst and waved them both in the air. “What will it be for your snack at school today?” she warbled. “My little mouse,” she added, and now the warbling and the little mouse were truly alarming.

“Cheese, please,” I said. “What’s going on with you?”

“Like I said: nothing,” she warbled. She spread butter on a piece of bread, and because she was still sashaying around, her wrist knocked the cheese off the counter.

Selma stopped moving and looked down at the package of cheese as if it were something valuable that had smashed into a thousand pieces.

I went over to her and picked up the cheese. I looked into her eyes from far below. Selma was even taller than most other grown-ups and was around sixty at the time: as high as a tower and as old as the hills, from my perspective. To me she seemed so tall that you could see far beyond the next village from her head, and so old that she had helped invent the world.

Even from down there, a meter from her eyes, I could see that something sinister had played out behind Selma’s eyelids the night before.

Selma cleared her throat. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said softly, “but I’m afraid I dreamed of an okapi.”

I was instantly wide awake. “Are you absolutely sure it was really an okapi?”

“What else would it have been?” Selma asked, adding that you can hardly mistake an okapi for another animal.

“Yes, you can,” I said, and suggested that it might have been a misshapen cow, a badly assembled giraffe, a freak of nature, and besides, the stripes and reddish color are hard to see at night.