Luna

Luna has walked in her sleep since childhood. They would find her on the roof of the family house, arms crossed, peaceful, while the whole household panicked in pajamas. The doctors said to board up the stairs; her grandmother said to give her the night, since the night carried her. Awake, she’s an anxious young woman who checks the kettle three times. Asleep, she is the calmest person in the city.

Her hiring is a famous accident: one night she crossed an afterhours party in the Industrial Zone in her nightgown, in through nobody knows where, eyes half closed, step even. The whole room fell silent. The boss hired the apparition before she woke, and the school of the dancefloor did the rest — the school that teaches you to vanish into a strobe finally had a student who had never needed the lesson.

Her number isn’t one: between ten at night and six in the morning, Luna drifts through the room, lunar, unreachable, and the register climbs with every pass she makes — nobody in the city earns more per step. Customers lower their voices when she comes near, the way you dim a light. In the daytime, though, book nothing: the sun wakes her, and awake she counts the emergency exits instead of walking through them.

The paradox makes the rounds of the neighborhoods: an anxious girl with the nerves of a statue. The explanation is simple — she checks everything before closing her eyes. The lists, the exits, the tide forecast; her catastrophes are canceled in advance, and all that’s left is to sleep straight through them. The night the curtain came down two doors over, she’s the one who cleared the dressing rooms at a strolling pace, without waking up — at least that’s what the legend says, and nobody feels like correcting it. The new girls learn her lists by heart; people sleep better in the Houses where Luna has done the inventory.

At four in the morning, Luna is in the middle of her dream, which is to say at the top of her form: while the stable folds, she makes her rounds across the rooftops with the same even step, and the whole neighborhood sleeps under her watch without knowing it. At daybreak she goes home, closes the shutters and sleeps for real — deeply, honestly, like someone who has already checked everything. What she wants she said one night, eyes shut, and someone had the presence of mind to write it down: a room of her own, no alarm clocks and no windows, with a dressing room for the moon.