Cartoon bat with skull bow on ankle

Vesper lived in the caravan at the far end of the field, the one painted like a sunset that nobody else would park beside. She had eyes as wide and blue as the glass gems on the carousel, and every one of them had a white star caught in it, for she could never sit still long enough to be looked at without catching the light. She wore a pink bow on her head, stitched from a ribbon she'd pulled off a prize doll at the shooting gallery, and tied to the bow was a skull no bigger than a thimble. Her mother had given her the skull. Her mother had given her the green bead too, a bit of sea glass from the pier, which she wore like a brooch and polished on her sleeve every evening before the first ride started.

Then came the September the showman sold the big top to a company from Leeds, and the old crew were told to pack up by Sunday. Vesper heard the news from a moth. She flew straight to the wagon where the ringmaster kept his accounts and found him asleep over the ledger, his pen still in his hand. She did not bite him. She only sat on the lamp and waited, and when he woke and saw her, he laughed and said the fair had never once let anybody go without a fight.

So she made one. That night she tugged the guy ropes loose one by one with her small sharp teeth, and when she pricked her wing on a tent peg, two drops fell red into the grass, but she kept pulling. By morning the big top sagged like a drowned cake over the empty ground, and nobody could take it down until the Leeds men cursed and gave up. The sun came up on a field full of tents and no lorries. Vesper slept in the rafters, wings folded tight, and the fair stayed another season because of her.

If you ever walk past that field at dusk, and there's a light wobbling over the hedgerow, you go and say hello. Mind the rope.