Om symbol and lotus design

Three winters back the Morwenna went out past the Hogget bank and the sea lay flat as a pewter plate. Not a breath. Old Tamsin Rowe, who mended nets for forty years before her hands gave up, sat on the slipway and said the water was thinking. Her boy Alfie laughed at her. Then the net came up heavy, heavy in a way that stopped the laughing. Mud and weed, and a bell the size of a child's head, green with age. Sitting in the middle of it was a lotus, pink as a cut plum, opening its petals to the air as if it had been waiting all along for someone to bother.

Nobody knew what to do with it. Tamsin said you do not sell a thing that rings when the tide turns. So they hung it in the chapel loft, and every time the swell came under the pier it hummed, one long low note that went through the timbers and into your teeth. Alfie swore the weed curling round the bell was writing something, and he took a lamp down to the harbour wall each dusk to read it.

The boats came home that spring, every one, though the Hogget took three seasons to give up its dead. What Tamsin never told anyone is that the bell still sits in the loft. Go up and listen if you're brave. Only don't ask it for fish, because it doesn't care for fish. It hums, and the net comes home full anyway. That's the whole trick of it, boy.