Skeleton torso with rose and insect

The lamps on Corporation Street were still burning when I locked the studio last night, and the wet pavement made the whole street look like a tray of spilt pennies. I've finished the anatomy plates for Dr Okafor's lecture. Twelve sheets of ribs, scapula and pelvis, each one hatched down to the last grey. But I think I've been drawing them wrong. Every bone has been a bone and nothing else.

Then the moth came in through the open sash. It was a big brown thing, the colour of a dry biscuit, and it battered itself against the lamp until it dropped onto my spare pen case. I didn't shoo it out. I picked up a fine nib and started on the margin of a fresh sheet, beginning with the wings, because wings are the easiest part to get wrong.

By two o'clock the moth had gone still on the blotter, and I had put a peony over the left side of the ribcage without quite meaning to. It was Gran's peony from the yard in Harrow, all those ruffled petals that look like they're arguing about something. I kept going. The pelvis took a shadow like a bowl of cold water. The moth settled where the spine should have been, its legs as thin as darning needles. When I stepped back, the page looked like a body someone had opened to see what kept it flying.

Okafor will hate it. I've put it in the folder anyway, underneath the plates, where she'll find it first.

Love, Nell