Angel wings with script across upper back

You'll have heard the wagon burned down in Ashby, so don't write asking. The fair's still on the road, though we're down to four rides and a generator that coughs every time Mrs Pell lights her pipe. I'm writing because of the crow. It came to the Dolphin field three nights back and sat on the rail of the wing-walker's platform, watching Dora practise, and it didn't fly off when she climbed the ladder. It just sat there with its feathers puffed up like a bad collar.

Dora's been sewing a new pair of wings from an old canvas awning, stitching each feather on with black thread, because the silk ones were moth-eaten over winter. She won't let me touch them. She says the wings have to be her own work or they won't hold her up. I laughed, and she threw a spool at my head, and that was the end of that.

Thursday she went up. You remember the drop from the big top, forty feet to the sawdust. The crowd went quiet the way they do, and I could see her lips moving, reading the words she'd painted on the banner under the rigging: embrace your dreams. Then she leaned out and didn't fall. The canvas took the wind as if it had been waiting all winter to.

I won't pretend I understood it, and I still don't. But the crow was on the tent pole when we struck camp, and this morning there was one long black feather pinned to the caravan door with a hatpin, and a note in Dora's hand that said only, Keep the wings. I'll need them back when the ground gets too close.

Yours, Bea