Bat wrapped around a purple crystal ball

She shooed it with the flour cloth. It perched on the rim of the old glass ball her husband had bought at Ludlow fair thirty years back, the one that had never once shown her anything but her own face going grey. The bat hooked its thumbs over the edge and looked at the glass, and then it looked at her, and she understood it wanted her to look too.

Inside the ball a small cold light spread like frost on a window, and stars came out in it. Mrs Pell saw the lane beyond the farm gate, the last cart of the day, and her son Tom in his red coat hurrying home across the fields with his collar up against the sleet. She saw the plank bridge at Carrow where the river had taken the ice and never given it back.

She pulled on her boots and her husband's coat and went out with the lantern. The bat rode her shoulder, its wings wrapped about her neck like lace. At the bridge she found Tom with his foot jammed in a broken board, the water already creeping up his shins, and she had him free before the cold reached his knee. When they got home the bat was gone, but the glass ball sat on the windowsill with one purple star still turning in it, and it never clouded over again.