Soot sprite tattoo with pastel leaves

The last tent came down on Tuesday, and you'll never guess what spilled out of the rigging loft when Dennis pulled the canvas. Forty or so soot balls, round as conkers, rolling out of the seams as if they'd been waiting for the sawdust to settle. Dennis swore they were only grime that had gone soft in the damp. Then one of them stopped against my boot, looked up at me with those two pale eyes, and scuttled off toward the generator truck like it had a train to catch.

They've been with us since the winter Bertram took over the big top, I reckon. Nobody saw them arrive. They kept to the dark behind the costume trunks and the bulb cage, and whenever the show ran short of a patch of light, a few of them would turn up with leaves stuck on their heads. Pastel ones, blue and pink and a green like new lettuce, cut from the handbills that were never going to sell another seat. Bertram said they were the only audience we had left that never asked for a refund.

This morning I found the generator door hanging open and a dozen of them sitting in a row along the fuel drum, each with a leaf held up like a little umbrella. The one with the blue leaf climbed onto the rim of my tea mug and stayed there while I drank it. When I rinsed the mug it was gone, but the lights in the empty ring were still on, and there was a single leaf lying in the middle of the sawdust, dry and perfectly flat.

Yours in sawdust, Ruth