The Strange Key

In the morning, Sara didn't tell anyone what had happened — and there was no one to tell anyway. Her grandmother worked in the library as if nothing had happened at all: she tidied the books, sold a novel to an old man, drank mint tea and hummed the very same song Sara had heard from behind the door.

Sara stopped in her tracks. The same song!

But when she asked about it, Grandma only smiled. "It's a very old song, my darling. Everyone who knows it... heard it somewhere."

And so Sara began her search.

Where the first tale sleeps. She wrote the words on a scrap of paper, put it in her cardigan pocket and thought hard. Which tale was the first? The oldest book in the library? The first book her grandmother ever bought? The first story in history?

She searched the shelf of old books and found volumes a hundred years old, their yellow pages so brittle they crumbled at the edges. She searched the mythology section, the folk tales section and the children's section, where she found old books with her mother's name written in them in a childish hand.

But she didn't find a key.