Ribcage, pelvis and moth with peony

It's gone half eleven and the kettle's gone cold, but I wanted to write before I lose my nerve about the Hollins skeleton. The museum sent it over in a crate that smelled of formalin: a woman's frame from the 1880s with the pelvis still wired loose. Mr Okafor says I'm to have the spine articulated by Friday, and I've spent three nights on the ribs alone, lifting each one as if it might still remember where it belonged.

Last night a moth came in through the open window and walked straight onto the vertebrae as though it had been booked. Brown and dusty, one wing torn at the tip. I didn't have the heart to shoo it. I sat with a glass of Mum's sloe gin and watched it fan its good wing over the bone while the streetlamps buzzed on Harrow Lane. Mum always said a flower was only a flower until you tried to draw it, and I thought of the peony in the back yard, the one that flopped every June no matter how she staked it.

This morning the moth was dead on the windowsill, wing spread flat. I pinned it to a card with a stainless pin, the way Mr Okafor taught me, and slid it into the drawer where the spare vertebrae sit. Nobody will look at it there. It's just a small thing the collection picked up on its way through.

Love, Nell