Watercolour butterfly on the ribs

He lifted the top sheet by its corner. A butterfly hung there in watercolour, its upper wing black and freckled with white dots, its lower wing blotched with carmine and a blue that bled into the paper like weather coming in. My uncle Tobias had painted the whole set in a boarding house in Valparaiso the winter his hands began to shake. He never could hold a brush steady enough to make a clean outline, and he used to say the wobble was why the wings looked alive.

The officer's thumb hovered over the red. 'Is this permitted?' he asked. 'It's paper,' I said. 'Everything is paper until somebody wants it to be something else.' He laughed, not unkindly, and turned the sheet over. The back was blank except for one line in pencil: Send the blue one to Lottie, she always said it looked like rain.

He stamped the form without reading it and slid the tin back across the counter. Out in the car park the air smelled of diesel and cut grass, so I propped the lid open against the wind and let the paintings dry in the open air, watching the damp edges lift and firm until the blue one, for the length of a single sentence, seemed ready to leave the page.