Lace-winged moth across upper back

The trouble was that they were beautiful. Pale as breath on a cold window, their wings were thin enough that the lamplight came through, and where they had settled on the cloth they had eaten the linen in patterns no seamstress would dare. Holes like frost ferns, edges spun into fine black webbing where the wool had gone. You stopped sweeping after the first afternoon. Instead you sat on an upturned crate with a candle and traced the lace with your thumbnail, thinking of your mother's bobbins clicking on the kitchen table in Bootle, and how she used to say the best lace was the work the mistakes had made.

On the twenty-ninth night the sea rose and a port scuttle banged open, and the cabin filled with a grey wind. One moth struggled against the lamp glass, wings beating a dry rhythm, and you caught it in your cupped hands before it could fall into the bilge water. It weighed less than a folded ticket. You carried it up the companionway to the rail, the spray stinging like sand, and waited for the swell to lift the bow.

When you opened your hands it did not fly straight away. It climbed onto your knuckle, shook its feathered feelers once towards the Atlantic, and then lifted into the dark over the water, the lace of its lower wings catching the ship's light until there was nothing left to see but the wake.