Jellyfish ink sketch on paper

Bed six belonged to a retired net-mender called Tobias Rawle, who had a battered sketchbook under his pillow and wouldn't let anyone look at it. One night she asked him what he was drawing, and he tilted the book towards the lamp. It was a jellyfish, done in brown ink, its bell shaded and ridged like the corrugated tin on the old boathouse roof. The tentacles swept up and away off the page, dark where he'd pressed hard and faint where his hand had grown tired. He said they were the only things in the sea that never hurried, and that he'd watched one drift under the breakwater the summer his wife died, and had been trying to get it right ever since.

He worked on it every night after that, and every morning the pencil strokes at the far end had grown fainter, as if the creature were sinking back into the paper. On the last night before they moved him to the cottage hospital, Agnes found the sketchbook open on his blanket. The drawing had reached the edge of the page and simply stopped. She took the pencil from the bedside drawer and carried the nearest trailing line on, past the paper's edge and onto the cool sheet beneath, the way a tide carries on past the mark you were watching. Tobias was asleep. In the morning she found the book closed, and a note in shaky capitals tucked inside the cover that read: FINISHED.