Elephant in ornate hamsa frame on thigh

On the night the glass fell, the animal would not stand. Its trunk swung toward the lantern and stayed there, and its small eyes went half shut in a way Tobias had seen only once before, in his mother's kitchen the week before she died. He thought of the painted prayer card nailed above his bunk, a hand with an eye set in its palm, and of the brass charm she had sewn into the lining of his coat. He had no paint but the red lead the carpenter used for marking timber, and no eye to copy but his own.

He painted it anyway, a ring of petals in the middle of the animal's brow, and in the centre a single green eye. The lantern swung. Lines of blue and violet ran from the crate's corners where the salt had bleached the wood, and he traced them into a frame with a sailmaker's needle and a length of tarred cord, knotting beads along it until it hung like a curtain at the gate.

By dawn the wind had dropped to nothing and the bull was lying down in the straw, breathing slow as a bellows. The mate came down with a lamp, saw the painted brow, and said nothing about it. Tobias kept the cord. Somewhere off the Cape the sea went flat as ironed linen, and the beads ticked softly against the crate every time the ship rolled.