Heart dreamcatcher with feathers on a forearm

Frank had come off the coal barge at Pell's Bridge with his palms torn raw and a stare in his eyes that the men at the Crown called the sea-look. Nobody in Hollin Bottom had a proper word for what came over him at night, only a bucket of cold water and a good deal of shouting through the wall. Agnes had sent him a plain round net the winter before, and it had hung above his bed until the feathers went grey. Her grandmother had always said a round net catches everything, the good dreams with the bad. A heart kept the bad ones out and let the good ones find their way in.

So she bound the rim with sinew, pinched it into a small heart at the centre no bigger than a thumbnail, and strung the web from its points the way she had been taught. From the bottom she hung seven beads on fine thread, one for each night he had been gone, and two feathers from the hen pen, their tips darkened with soot from the range so they looked like the evening water under the bridge. She wrapped the whole thing in a clean tea towel and walked down to the quay with it in her apron pocket.

Frank was sitting on a bollard with his cap in his lap. She didn't say much. She tied the net to the rail above his bunk on the barge and told him which way the heart faced. That night the baker's boy reported that Frank slept straight through to the bells, and in the morning the beads had turned in the draught from the hatch, scattering small blue dots across the cabin wall. Agnes sat in her kitchen with the empty hoop in her lap, as she did every night, and waited to learn whether the net had done its work or only given him something to look at.