Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children - A Map of Days

It s strange, what the mind can digest and what it resists. I had just survived the most surreal summer ­imaginable skipping back to bygone centuries, taming ­invisible monsters, falling in love with my grandfather s time-arrested ­ex-girlfriend but only now, in the unexceptional present, in suburban Florida, in the house I d grown up in, was I finding it hard to believe my eyes.

Here was Enoch, splayed upon our beige sectional, sipping Coke from my dad s Tampa Bay Buccaneers tumbler; here was Olive, unstrapping her lead shoes to float ceilingward and ride circles on our fan; here were Horace and Hugh in our kitchen, Horace studying the photos on the fridge door while Hugh rustled for a snack; here was Claire, both mouths slack as she gazed at the great black monolith of our wall-mounted television; here was Millard, my mother s decor magazines rising from the coffee table and splitting in midair as he skimmed them, the shape of his bare feet imprinted into our carpet. It was a mingling of worlds I d imagined a thousand times but never dreamed possible. But here it was: my Before and After, colliding with the force of planets.

Millard had already tried to explain to me how it was possible they could be here, apparently safe and unafraid. The loop collapse that had nearly killed us all in Devil s Acre had reset their internal clocks. He didn t quite understand why, only that they were no longer in danger of sudden catastrophic aging if they stayed too long in the present. They would get older one day at a time, just like I did, their debt of years seemingly forgiven, as if they hadn t spent most of the twentieth century reliving the same sunny day. It was undoubtedly a miracle a breakthrough unprecedented in peculiar history and yet how it had come to be was not half as amazing to me as the fact that they were here at all: that beside me stood Emma, lovely, strong Emma, her hand entwined with mine, her green eyes shining as they scanned the room in wonder. Emma, whom I d so often dreamed abo