Gold and silver festive temporary tattoo sheet

Walter Grieve came in at ten to five, when the light was already going, and asked for a sheet for his granddaughter's stocking. He wanted the beaded chain with the teardrop links, gold not silver. "They're the drops off my mother's chandelier," he said, holding one up to the strip light as if checking it was real. Hettie found the last sheet in the bottom drawer, one corner curled, a black bauble with a star cut from its centre still stuck to the backing paper. She counted out two silver snowflakes and one gold, and wrapped them in tissue that had been folded so many times it had gone soft as cloth.

He did not take them home. He stood in the doorway, lifted the gold snowflake from its backing with a thumbnail, and pressed it to the inside of the shop window, low down by the handle where the frost always began. It held. By morning the cold had settled on it, and the small gold star caught the lamp from the bus shelter across the road. Hettie left it there, because the window was the one part of the shop nobody had ever asked her to sell.