Geometric fox head on an upper arm

He worked the design the old way, treating every angular piece as its own small problem so that no two colours touched unless they had to. Red went in for the ears, because a fox's ears told you its mood before anything else did. Ochre for the cheek, then a bruised violet along the jaw where the light would be least kind. He scored each shard with the diamond, snapped it along the line, and ground the edges with the grozing iron until they sat flush. By the third week he knew the fox the way you come to know a difficult neighbour, one angle at a time.

The panel went in on a Thursday. Mid-afternoon the sun came through the stairwell low and slanting, and the whole fox lit up on the hallway floor, a patchwork of coloured light sliding over the lino as the clouds moved. Nobody had warned him it would do that. He stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands and watched the blue panel throw a shadow shaped like a lighthouse across the skirting board.

The client rang the following week to ask whether he could make a smaller one for her sister. He said yes before she had finished the sentence. There was a box of offcuts in the back of the van, and he already knew which pieces he would use.