Script quote along an upper arm

The rain has been coming sideways across the Saturday market since seven, and Mr Okafor has given up on his bunting and thrown a tarpaulin over the bric-a-brac. I am writing this under the awning of the clock stall because my fingers are too cold to text, and you told me to write properly, not just send a photograph of a wet gull.

You will remember the box Mrs Pilling brought in last week, the one with her late husband's lantern slides. Most of them are cracked views of cathedrals nobody visits any more. But there is one of a gardener's hut with its door propped open, and when I held it up to the skylight this morning, a single mote of dust hung in the beam above the hut, perfectly still, as if someone had paused the world to let it finish being a speck. I stood there far longer than a sensible person should, with the kettle going cold behind me.

A woman in a green coat came to the stall at half eleven. She didn't ask the price of the clock or the cracked glass. She asked whether I had anything that held light, and I gave her the slide. She held it up, frowned, then smiled at the empty patch of sky where the mote had been. "It's gone," she said, not unkindly. "That's the trick of it. You only get it while it's on the glass."

I have been trying to decide since whether she was wrong, and whether a thing can be kept by letting it go. Yours, as ever, Ruth.