The chiffon girl was not made of flesh or bone. She was literally a vapour, a tremble of silver mist stitched together by will alone, clothed in endless folds of soft, whispering chiffon. If you stood too close to her, you might inhale a little part of her by accident — but you would never know it.
Her obsession was peculiar, even among vapourkind: she collected diaries. Not just any diaries — not the popular ones, not the published ones, not the ones wrapped in leather and gold foil. She sought the forgotten diaries: the tear-stained, the half-finished, the ones hidden under mattresses and abandoned in the backs of drawers.
She ate them.
Not with teeth. She absorbed them — pressed her smoky fingers into the pages and drank the ink, the fears, the secrets, the half-born prayers. Each diary changed the pattern of her mist; made her a little more complicated, a little more nuanced in ways no human could detect.
When chiffon girl floated through towns, she didn’t use her eyes to find the diaries. She listened for them — the thin, high song of secrets needing to be remembered. Diaries hummed at a frequency only she could hear.
Tonight she hovered at the edge of an old neighbourhood, pale under the crescent moon. Somewhere nearby, in the cluttered second-story room of a sleeping child, there was a diary thrumming in a cracked purple notebook. The pages smelled of pencil shavings and cherry lip balm and dread.
The chiffon girl drifted up the side of the house, her skirts brushing against the window glass with a sound like a sigh.
Inside, the diary lay open on a crooked desk chair. A page read:
“I don’t think they really know me at all.”
The chiffon girl shivered in pleasure.
This was what she craved — the raw honesty, the tender bruises of a soul still figuring itself out.
She reached one smoky hand through the gap in the windowpane and touched the words. They dissolved into her immediately, like sugar melting into water.
She tasted loneliness, hope, a secret wish never to grow up.
It was exquisite.
—
Today, the diary girl stood at the bus stop, one hand absentmindedly curled around the strap of her satchel, the other brushing the folds of her chiffon skirt. The skirt was soft and light and printed with a delicate pattern of ivy and birds and tiny, tumbling stars.
As she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, she noticed something: the pattern wasn’t just a design — it was a map.
There were rivers in the threads, curving in gentle arcs; there were forests stitched in swirling greens and hidden cities where the stars gathered in tight, secret constellations. The longer she stared, the more real it became — not just a pretty print, but a living, breathing world, fluttering around her knees.
A gust of wind lifted the hem slightly, and for a moment she swore she saw a door open between the ivy vines. Not a printed door — a real one. A tiny one, fit for someone smaller than a sparrow. And from that door, a light winked at her.
No one else seemed to notice. A man in a rumpled jacket scrolled on his phone. A woman with earphones shifted her shopping bags.
But the diary girl knew.
There were stories hidden in her clothes, stitched between fabric and dream.
She clutched her satchel closer — where her diary lived, where all her maps and secrets were kept — and smiled.
Today, she thought,
the world is folding itself open for me.
—
The chiffon girl drifted away from the sleeping house, bloated with diary after diary, secret after secret. She had grown heavy — not in body, for she had none to speak of — but in feeling.
Once, she had loved the delicate layering of it all. A sadness here, a first kiss there, a petty hatred like a thorn tucked between petals. It had been enough to taste little bits, to add a fine thread of complexity to her swirling vapour form.
But tonight, something was different.
Tonight, she wasn’t satisfied with layers.
She wanted density. She wanted weight. She wanted to feel the whole cake of being human: heavy, flawed, unruly, wild.
She floated to a moonlit park and spun slowly, her chiffon skirts catching memories from the air — the whispered arguments, the silent wishes screamed into pillows, the small secret humiliations no one else would ever know.
It wasn’t enough.
She needed a diary so full, so saturated, it could pin her down to the ground. She wanted blood in her mouth, dirt on her feet, hands to scratch the walls when the feelings got too big. She wanted a body.
And so, she made a decision no vapour-woman had ever made before.
She would become a girl.
The chiffon girl tore the hems of her own skirts and wove them tight, weaving in the secrets she had eaten, the songs, the griefs, the awkward wishes, the prayers no god had ever answered. She stitched them with invisible threads pulled from the oldest diaries she had consumed — the ones written with real ink, real tears.
And when she was done —
She dropped to the earth.
For the first time, she heard the crunch of leaves underfoot.
For the first time, she felt the cool bite of the night air on skin.
Her mist had condensed into flesh: pale, soft, imperfect.
She gasped. Her chest rose and fell. She stumbled forward, laughing a strange, shivering laugh. Her hands — no longer translucent — touched the trunk of a tree and felt it: rough, real, resisting.
She had become the whole cake.
And she was ravenous for more.