The Seeing
LV30 · Michael S. Moniz, after H.P. Lovecraft
Story catalogue · Reading guide
• • •
My mother sees the shapes in everything. She has always seen them. She told me this when I was seven, sitting in the kitchen of the house in Vadu Crăișului while the morning light came through the window above the basin and the light was wrong — not dim, not bright, but structured, as though the beam had a skeleton inside it that the glass was making visible — and my mother said, without looking up from the bread she was cutting, “You can see it today.”
I said I could see something. I did not know what.
“The patterns,” she said. “Don’t be frightened. They are always there. You are not always able.”
I am forty-three years old. My name is Ana Costea, born Toma. I live in the house where my mother was born, in the village of Vadu Crăișului, in the Apuseni Mountains, in the western part of Romania that was Transylvania before it was Romania and was something else before that, and the house has been in the Toma family for longer than the records go, which in this village means longer than the church register, which begins in 1741, and the Toma name appears on the first page.
My mother is Ileana Toma. She is seventy-one years old. She sees the patterns clearly, at all times, in all conditions. She has never not seen them. She told me once that she cannot imagine what the world looks like without the patterns and that she believes it must be very empty, like a room with no furniture, and I told her it looks normal, and she looked at me with a pity I have never forgotten, because the pity was for me, not for herself, and the pity meant: you are the one who is missing something, not I.
My daughter is Mara. She is seven. She sees the patterns the way my mother does — clearly, constantly, without effort or surprise. She draws them. She draws them with the coloured pencils I buy in Oradea when I make the monthly trip for supplies, and the drawings are precise in a way that a seven-year-old’s drawings should not be precise, and I keep them in a folder in the drawer beneath the sink because I do not know what else to do with them and I cannot bring myself to throw them away.
I am the middle. I see the patterns sometimes. On certain mornings, in certain light, in certain rooms — the old part of the house, the cellar, the corner of the garden where the soil is darker and the plants grow in spirals that my neighbour Gheorghe’s plants do not grow in. I see them when I am very tired, when my attention loosens and the discipline of ordinary seeing relaxes and the other layer comes through. My mother says I am like a radio that tunes in and out of the station. Mara is tuned in permanently. I am the static between signals.
I should explain what the patterns look like, because that answer has become harder to give over the last two years. Not because the patterns have changed. Because they have become harder to distinguish from the world they appear in.
When I was a child, the patterns were subtle. A shimmer at the edge of a doorframe — where the wood met the plaster — not light, not shadow, but a quality of the junction itself, as though the angle where two surfaces met was slightly more than an angle. I would see it for a moment, a triangle not drawn but inherent in the joint, a precision the rough plaster and hand-cut wood should not have been able to produce. Then it would go, and the doorframe would be a doorframe, and I would go back to my schoolwork or my chores or whatever had occupied me before the junction spoke.
My mother saw more. She saw the triangles and the relationships between them — the way the doorframe joined the window, the way both joined the ceiling, the way those connections formed a larger shape enclosing the room. Not the room’s architecture. Something inside it. The house had two structures: the one the builders made from wood and stone, and the one already there, which the ordinary house approximated.
My mother calls this the subțire — the thin. Not the thin place. The thin itself. The quality. She says the house is in the thin and the thin is in the house and they have grown into each other over the centuries the way a tree grows into a wall — not by breaking it but by becoming part of it, so that you cannot remove one without destroying the other.
Mara does not call it anything. She does not name the patterns because she does not distinguish them from the world. When I asked her once what the shapes above the kitchen table looked like, she said, “What shapes?” and I pointed to the air above the table where, on that particular morning, I could see a faint spiral — not drawn, not solid, but present in the way that heat shimmer is present above a road in summer, except that heat shimmer is random and this was not random, this was a spiral of exact and terrible proportion, each curve expanding by a ratio that my mathematics teacher in Oradea would have called the golden section and that my mother would have called the breath — and Mara looked at where I was pointing and said, “That’s just the air, Mama.”
That’s just the air. The spiral was just the air. The geometry was just the world. She does not see patterns in the world. She sees the world as patterns. The distinction is the thing that terrifies me and that I cannot discuss with my husband, who is from Beiuș, twenty kilometres east, and who does not see anything and who married me knowing that the Toma women were strange and accepting the strangeness as part of the arrangement, which is what men in this region do when they marry into the known families.
The known families. I should explain this, because it is part of the record, and because the record is the reason I am writing.
There are families in the Apuseni that the villages know. Not famous. Not powerful. Known. The Toma family is known. The Mureșan family in Scărișoara is known — they live near the ice cave, and the cave is old, and the family is old, and the things the Mureșan women say about the ice are things that the glaciologists from Cluj have spent decades trying to explain with science and that the Mureșan women explain with a shrug and the word așa — that’s how it is. The Lazăr family in Arâni was known until the last Lazăr died in 1998, and now the house stands empty, and nobody will buy it, and the reason nobody will buy it is not superstition but the fact that the walls of the house produce a sound at certain times of year that the estate agent from Brașov cannot hear and that every person in Arâni can hear, and the sound is a frequency, and the frequency has a geometry, and the geometry is visible to anyone in Arâni who stands in the Lazăr garden in October and looks at the west wall with soft eyes.
The known families are the thin families. That is not a term they use. It is the term I am using here because I have read enough to know the phenomenon is not local, and that the word thin appears in English, in academic and institutional writing, for places where certain measurements produce anomalous data. What the institutions call thin places, my mother calls subțire. What the institutions call anomalous data, my mother calls Tuesday.
I began looking because Mara started school.
Mara started school in September of 2025, in the village school in Vadu Crăișului, which has fourteen students and one teacher and a building that was constructed in 1962 and that is not in the thin, or is in the thin so weakly that even my mother says the patterns are faint there — faint enough that Mara might be able to attend without incident. My mother was wrong. Mara lasted three weeks.
The incident was not dramatic. There was no crisis, no breakdown, no scene in the classroom. Mara drew a picture during art period. The assignment was to draw your house. She drew ours accurately — stone walls, wooden roof, garden, mountain behind. And she drew the patterns. The triangles at the doorframe junctions. The spiral above the kitchen table. The lines that connect the corners. The lines my mother sees, and that I see sometimes, and that are as present in our house as the walls and the floor and the light through the window above the basin.
The teacher, Doamna Elena, looked at the drawing and asked Mara what the lines were. Mara said they were the lines. Doamna Elena asked what she meant. Mara said, “The lines in the house. The ones that connect the corners.” Doamna Elena looked at Mara for a long time and then looked at me, when I came to collect Mara at the end of the day, and said, “She is a Toma.”
Not: she is imaginative. Not: she has an unusual perception. She is a Toma. The teacher knew. The village knows. The Toma women see things, and the things they see are in the house and in the garden and in the air above the kitchen table. Some people believe the patterns are real. Some believe the Toma women are disturbed. Most believe both at once, which is the specific quality of knowledge in a village that has lived beside the thin for longer than the church register.
Gheorghe, my neighbour, crosses himself when my mother walks past his fence. He also brings his sick goat to her, because she can look at the goat and tell him what is wrong before the veterinarian from Aleșd arrives, and she is always right. Gheorghe knows she is always right. He crosses himself anyway. The rightness is what frightens him. If she were wrong, she would be a crazy old woman and he could dismiss her. She is right, and he does not want to think about where the rightness comes from.
Father Vasile, who served the village church until 2019, called my mother binecuvântată — blessed. He said the patterns were a gift from God, that the Toma women were seers in the biblical sense, that the shapes they described were the architecture of creation made visible to those with eyes to see. Father Vasile was a kind man and his interpretation was generous and I do not think it was correct, but I prefer it to the interpretation offered by Father Mihai, who replaced him, and who called my mother blestemați — accursed — and who told the village that the patterns were a deception and that the Toma family had been deceived for generations and that the shapes in the air were the geometry of the devil’s architecture.
Two priests. Two interpretations. The same patterns. The village holds both interpretations at once, the way a hand holds water — loosely, temporarily, knowing the water will escape and need to be collected again. This is how communities live with the thin families. Not with certainty. With negotiation. Every generation renegotiates the terms, and the terms depend on who the priest is, how the harvest went, whether the Toma woman’s prediction about the weather was right again, and whether being right again feels like comfort or threat.
My grandmother — my mother’s mother, Viorica, who died in 2004 — told me that the family had been burned out once. Not in living memory. In the memory before living memory — the memory that is passed down in kitchens, in the specific language of women who are braiding bread and telling their daughters what their mothers told them. The burning was in the 1780s, Viorica said. A bad winter. Livestock dying. The village decided the Toma family had brought the cold, because the Toma family’s animals did not die, and the Toma family’s house was warm, and the warmth was suspicious. They burned the house. The family rebuilt. The thin was still there. The family was still there. The village adjusted. This is the cycle.
But the cycle is changing.
In the last two years, the patterns have become stronger. My mother noticed first. She said the shapes were “louder,” which is not a visual word, but it is the word she uses because, to her, the patterns have always had a sound beneath the sight, a hum under the geometry. The hum is louder. The shapes are clearer. The triangles at the doorframe junctions no longer fade when I blink. They do not require the soft attention, the loosened focus, that I used to need. They are there in the morning and in the evening and when I wake in the night to check on Mara. They are there in the garden now, visible from the upstairs bedroom, which they never were before.
And I am seeing more than I used to. Not sometimes. Often. Three mornings out of five, the light through the window has structure — the skeleton of geometry inside the beam. The air above the kitchen table carries the spiral most of the time now, not as shimmer but as presence, the way dust motes are present in sunlight except these are not motes. They are points in a curve, and the curve is precise, and the precision is what makes me sit down and put my hands on the table and breathe.
Mara draws things now that she did not draw a year ago. Last week she drew the garden and the drawing included shapes that I do not see and that my mother looked at for a long time without speaking. When my mother finally spoke, she said: “She sees the small ones.” I asked what she meant. My mother said: “The patterns inside the patterns. The same shape, smaller, inside itself. I have seen them once, when I was very ill, when the fever was high and the thin was very loud. She sees them on a Tuesday.”
Fractals. The word is fractals. I looked it up. Self-similar structures at every scale. The pattern repeating inside itself at smaller and smaller magnitudes. I found the word on the internet and I found diagrams and I showed the diagrams to Mara and she said, “Yes, but they’re not flat. They go into the wall.”
Into the wall. The fractals go into the wall. The self-similar geometry Mara sees does not stay on the surface. The wall, the floor, the stone, the wood — the patterns are not on them. They are in them. They are the structure of the material itself, visible to a child born into the thin the way her grandmother was born into it, and her grandmother before that, back past the first page of the church register.
People in the village are beginning to see. Not the Toma patterns. Not the full geometry, the connected lines, the spirals, the fractals Mara draws on Tuesday mornings. But the shimmer. The edge-of-the-doorframe thing. The quality of the light. I heard Gheorghe’s wife, Maria, tell her sister that the kitchen light had been ciudat — strange — for a week, and that the new bulb did the same thing. Maria is not a Toma. Maria is from Beiuș. She has lived here for twenty years and crossed herself when my mother walked past the fence for every one of those years.
Maria is beginning to see.
On the Reddit forum I found — r/GPSanomalies, which has become, in the last six months, something much larger than a forum about GPS errors — there are posts from all over the world. People describing shimmer. Geometry in light that should not have geometry. Shadows with too much structure. A woman in New Mexico posted a photograph of her kitchen window, and the light coming through the glass had a spiral in it, the same ratio — the golden section, the breath, φ. She did not know what the ratio was called. She knew it was there. Her phone confirmed it.
Two hundred thousand pins on the map. Red, orange, yellow. I looked and found Vadu Crăișului. There is no pin. Nobody has reported our village because nobody here uses the internet to report things the village has known for three hundred years. But I could place one. It would be red — persistent, confirmed by multiple observers across multiple generations — and it would sit in the Apuseni Mountains beside Cornwall and New Mexico and the Aegean and mid-Wales. The lattice would acquire another node. The node would be my mother’s kitchen.
My mother does not use the internet. She does not know about the lattice, GPS corrections, atomic clock drift, or pattern density alerts. She knows the patterns are louder than they have ever been. She knows Maria is beginning to see. She knows Mara sees the fractals and that the fractals go into the wall. She has known this would happen because her mother told her, and her mother’s mother told her mother. The thin gets louder. It has always gotten louder. Once nobody could see the patterns. Then some could. Now more can. Soon everyone will, and the Toma family will stop being the strange family and become the family that saw first, which is either vindication or irrelevance. My mother does not seem to care which.
Mara is in the garden. She is drawing. The coloured pencils from Oradea are in her hand and the paper is on the flat stone by the well. She is drawing the air. Not the garden. Not the house. The air between the house and the mountain, the geometry I can almost see today, in this particular light, with this particular looseness in my attention.
I look at what she is drawing: triangles connected by lines connected by curves connected by smaller triangles and smaller lines, the structure going inward into itself, the same pattern at every scale. The drawing is precise, and the precision is wrong because a seven-year-old should not draw this precisely, and the precision is right because the thing she is drawing is precise, and she is drawing what she sees, and what she sees is the world.
I am the middle. I see it sometimes. My mother sees it always. My daughter sees what my mother sees and more. The village is beginning to see the edge of what I see on my best mornings. Maria saw the shimmer last week. Gheorghe will see it next month, or next year, and when he does he will cross himself and then bring the sick goat, and my mother will look at the goat and tell him what is wrong, and she will be right. The rightness will no longer be suspicious because the rightness will be visible. The visible will be normal. The normal will be the thin. The thin will be the world.
Mara is drawing. The pencils move. The shapes are exact.
She does not know she is the future. She thinks she is drawing the air.
• • •
Fiction by Michael S. Moniz. Produced with AI assistance in writing and editing under the author’s direction. H.P. Lovecraft is the literary influence; references to Lovecraft in source credits identify the inheritance or AI writing persona.
Edition and source
Selected final: LV30_THE_SEEING_Light_Trust_Pass.docx. Selection basis: Vale pass. Story prose preserved; reading-edition title and credits standardized, source word-count notes omitted.