The young girl lived in a big stone house with ivy-covered walls and with old men and women who were all her kin.

When she was a very tiny little girl, she remembered adult faces looking down at her as she lay in her crib, warm wrinkle-framed eyes of tired aunts and grandmothers and cousins and second cousins and great-aunts and uncles-twice-removed and great-great-grandfathers, and even creatures so old and wrinkled and small that she mistook them for dolls until they moved and she saw instead that they were ancient kindly goblins and gnomes with white cobwebs for hair and eyebrows....

So begins a mysterious short story of a peculiar little girl growing up in a very strange house filled with antiquity and dark wonder.

Hold on to your heart.