What kind of way to behave is that-deliberately provoking a fight with someone you love? But Mom just loves to do it. And she doesn't understand it's her own character that killed my father's love for her.

I'll never do that to anyone.

And I won't let Mom do it either!

There was no one in the hallway, but even if there had been it wouldn't have stopped me. I turned back to face the door and looked at it in a special way, with my eyes slightly crossed… so that I could see my shadow.

My real shadow. The one that's cast by the Twilight.

It looks as if the gloom is condensing in front of you, until it becomes an absolutely black, intense darkness-so black it would make a starless night look like day.

And against the background of that darkness you see a trembling, swirling, grayish silhouette, not quite three-dimensional but not flat either… As if it had been cut out of dirty cotton wool. Or maybe it's the other way around-a hole has been cut through the great Darkness, leaving a doorway into the Twilight.

I took a step forward onto the shadow and it slid upward, enfolding my body, and the world changed.

The colors almost completely disappeared. Everything was frozen in a dark, gray blur, like what appears on a television screen if you turn the color and contrast all the way down. Sounds slowed down, leaving silence, with nothing but a barely audible background rumble, as faint as the murmur of a distant sea.

I was in the Twilight.

I could see Mom's resentment blazing in the apartment. A bitter, lemon-yellow color mixed with self-pity and her acid-green dislike of my dad, who had chosen the wrong time to go to the garage and tinker with his car.

And there was a black vortex slowly taking shape above Mom's head. A curse directed at someone specific, still weak, on the level of "I hope that job of yours drives you crazy, you ungrateful creature!" But it was a mother's curse, and they're especially powerful and tenacious.