Geometric cat face tattoo beside cat photo

Tamsin Hale, who cut glass for the chapel windows two stalls down, did not believe in luck. She believed in angles. Every morning she measured the light on her bench, and every morning the cat watched her do it, unblinking, as if she were measuring something it had already decided. On the ninth day she dropped a pane. It broke into seven shards, and the cat walked across them without a scratch and sat down on the bench in front of her.

"You want paying," Tamsin said. "Everyone wants paying."

The cat yawned. Its eyes caught the lamp at the back of the stall and burned the colour of marmalade. Tamsin took up her cutter and, for the first time in thirty years, cut without a pattern, folding each line against the last until the grey shapes made a head, and the head made a face, and the face looked out at the wet market with its whiskers spread.

When she finished, the rain had stopped. Wat came to shout about his eels and found only the bench, the cutter and a single pane propped against the lamp, its two orange panes glowing as if someone had lit them from inside. The cat was gone. The stallholders still say the eels stopped going soft after that, and Tamsin never sold the window.