Moon phases across the stomach with a chest symbol

I didn't stay for the pudding at the reunion, but I stayed long enough to find Mrs Pearce's old chemistry room still smelling of Bunsen gas and damp coats. Nobody else seemed to notice the window was the one we propped open with a retort stand the summer you were expelled. I thought you should know that Gerald Wicks still sells insurance in Swindon and still blushes whenever anyone says the word isotope.

Grandad's ledger came up in conversation, of all things. Dot Harrow remembered him drawing the moon on the back of Co-op receipts, every night of the month, five shapes in a row: the thin paring at the start, the swelling middle, and the full round one at the centre that he stippled with a sharpened pencil until it looked like frost on a window. He said you could not rush the dots. You put them down one at a time and the light arrives by itself.

I have the ledger in my bag now. The last page is dated the week before he died. The crescents are too fat and the full moon is only half filled in, the dots thinning out towards the edge as if his hand had started to lose the thread. Underneath he wrote one line I never understood until tonight: Still waxing, don't fret.

So I'm posting this with that last page photocopied. Come to Mum's on Thursday. We can finish the full moon together, if you still have a steady hand. I'll bring the pencil.