The Item

There was once a lady of quiet shoes and unblinking eyes, employed by an agency that signs no letters and keeps no name. She was bid to slip like a rumor into a jeweled mansion on a night of chandeliers and sugared violins, where the rich pecked at silver plates and secrets lay humming beneath the floorboards. Her charge? To filch a device not born of Earth—an alien contraption that throbbed like a captive star. But lo—she sipped of a champagne bewitched, bubbling with visions and treacherous colors. The walls bent. The music grew teeth. Faces wore too many expressions. And so our shadow-woman must steal a thing not meant for mortal hands while doubting her own—unsure whether the strangeness lies in the glass… or in the house itself.