The first drawing appeared the morning after Illia's visit. Astra found it when she opened the door for air, just air, just the cold of the outside against her face for a moment before she closed it again, and there it was on the doorstep. A small square of paper, folded once. She picked it up without deciding to. Unfolded it. It was a scribble of a cow.
Not a good one. The proportions were wrong, the legs too short, the head too large, the tail a single looping line that went slightly off the page. Underneath it, in handwriting that leaned too far to the right, were two words.
Saw this.
Astra looked at it for a moment. She looked up at the empty road. She looked back at the drawing. She went inside and closed the door and set the paper on the table. The second drawing came the next morning.
A tree, rendered with the same casual disregard for accuracy as the cow. The trunk too thick, the branches going in directions that trees did not generally choose, the leaves suggested rather than drawn, small frantic circles clustered at the ends of the branches like an afterthought. Underneath: Saw this too.
Astra set it on top of the first one.
A cart with a broken wheel. A cloud that looked more like a potato. A dog sleeping in the road, its outline soft and a little smudged where the pen had dragged. A market stall with fruit that may have been apples or may have been something else entirely, it was difficult to say. A puddle reflecting what was either the sky or a face, Astra could not determine which Illia had intended. A fence post with a bird on it. The bird had too many legs.
Each morning. Each one left on the doorstep without a knock, without a voice, without any announcement at all. Just the paper, folded once, waiting.
Astra collected them without deciding to collect them. She told herself she was simply clearing the doorstep. She set each one on the table with the others and did not think about it further and certainly did not, on the fifth morning, carry them to the window where the light was better to look at them properly. She did not do that. The eighth drawing was different.
Not in style, the style remained cheerfully terrible throughout, but in subject. It was a cottage. Small, slightly lopsided, the roof at an angle that suggested Illia had run out of space on the right side of the paper. There was a window. In the window, barely suggested, just a few lines and a smudge of shading, was a figure.
Underneath: Saw this. She's still in there.
Astra sat with that one for a long time.
She put it with the others.
A hill with a goat on it. A very long road drawn in a single straight line that went all the way to the paper's edge and presumably continued beyond it. Two children arguing over something too small to identify. An old man asleep on a bench. A flower that was probably a daisy but had been given too many petals, ten at least, possibly twelve. A river suggested in three wavy lines.
Each morning. The doorstep. The fold.
Astra began to know the sound of Illia's footsteps on the path before she left the drawings. Light. Quick. Not cautious, never cautious, just moving the way someone moved when they had somewhere to be and had factored in the stop as part of the route rather than a detour. She never slowed near the door. She never paused to listen. She came, she left the paper, she went.
It was the least pressured thing anyone had done for Astra in as long as she could remember.
The fourteenth drawing was of the sky.
Illia had drawn it in long loose strokes, the horizon a single curved line near the bottom of the page, and above it just open space, a few suggested clouds, and in the upper corner something that might have been a star or might have been a smudge from where her hand had caught the ink. It was by some margin the simplest thing she had left.
Underneath, in the same rightward-leaning handwriting: Thought you might want to remember what it looks like.
Astra unfolded it on the doorstep this time. She stood there in the cold morning air with the paper in her hands and the empty road in front of her and the sky above exactly as Illia had drawn it, open and pale and enormous, and she did not go back inside immediately.
She stood there for a while.
The pile of fourteen drawings was on the table when she came back in. She had not arranged them in any particular order. She had not, at any point, made a decision about what they meant or what she intended to do about them. She had simply kept them, the way you kept things that arrived at your door whether you asked for them or not, and they sat on the table in a small uneven stack and the cottage held its usual silence around them. But the door, when Astra came back inside, took a moment longer to close than it usually did. She stood in the gap of it, looking out, for just a breath. Then she closed it.