One starless evening the hat appeared, laying on the pavement. It was ribbed, woolly, navy, with a cluster of mushrooms and toadstools embroidered on its front. Late autumn leaves swept along by a breeze kissed and dusted its surface. We walked past it once, twice. I picked it up, deciding that our gatepost could wear it – the hat would be its own lost property notice. So it stood, a headless hollow, perched on the gatepost.  The following night the sky unfolded, velveteen, stellar. The moon, oval and uncertain looked on, and the hat, unused to seeing jewels in the sky, glimmered.  By day, framed by our window, we saw:  A man in a sombre black suit frisbee his bowler away and sweep up the hat, easing it on to his head, and clicking the spike of his umbrella against the pavement as he strode away; a woman resplendent in an ivory wedding dress, train rustling behind her, cast off her veil, grab the hat and pull it on over her ice-cream sundae hair, laughing as she ran; a little girl riding on her dad's shoulders modelled it as an eyeless balaclava, cocking her head from one side to the other like a parakeet; and the plane tree outside our house tried wearing it at a jaunty angle on its most elegant, vertiginous branch. But by night, the hat always returned to its gatepost. Until, until…A new moon, Wolf moon. A figure, clear and fluid as a stream stood quivering at the gatepost. It dipped its gentle head for the hat to slip onto and, reunited, hat and ghost spirited themselves away.   --- Sonia Hope was a Jerwood/Arvon mentee (fiction), 2019/20 and shortlisted for The Guardian 4th Estate Prize 2019. In 2022 she was the recipient of the Novel Studio, City, University of London scholarship, and is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Kingston University, London. www.soniahope.co.uk