Katie was fifteen when she started seeing the little girl. Outside of the dreams, the girl seemed shaky, uncertain, a far cry from the fevered over-reality she presented when Katie was asleep. She stood inside shop windows as Katie passed them in the mall, waited outside the ice-cream shop to stare as Katie dropped her cone on the ground. More than once, Katie looked up from texting only to see her, looking directly into Katie’s eyes.

The little girl never said anything, and as Katie grew, the silence began to weigh heavy. Sometimes, as Katie woke from yet another dream, she remembered twitches of the girl’s lips, but no sound. In desperation, Katie learned to lip-read when she enrolled in university, telling her classmates that she’d known a deaf man and wanted to honour his memory. She kept a journal, then, but it never made sense.

It wasn’t until post-grad, when Katie arrived at her job at the Museum, that she gazed upon the serene face of a girl from Pompeii, and felt the slow thunder of recognition.