Ocean Smoke, she said, over a soft grey bundle. Dawn Owl, she said holding up another in blue. Mole’s Back, she hummed over a mushroom-brown set. Her voice sounded very close to an incantation. Reverent maybe, and why not? What is a name but a spell to bring something into life and keep it there? A dressmaker’s pin slipped through the shoulders, isn’t it? A name. It holds you in place, makes you real.

Isn’t that why mothers name their babies really. With these sounds, these particular sounds, don’t they say, the new mothers, I will keep you alive and here with me. Like I said, dressmakers. Pins.

Tallow, the girl said holding up a wan yellow sheet.

Elephant Tusk, holding up ivory coloured shams.

Elephant’s Breath, holding a slightly darker one.

The sheets I guess broke everything down into pieces. Carcasses snipped up into their most lovely parts.

Do you prefer the Tusk, madam? the shop girl said, watching me in that careful way of well-trained shop girls. Or the Breath? They are both so lovely, she said.

And they were, they really really were.

Approximately four billion years from now our galaxy is going to crash into our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, and a new galaxy is going to form. Someone somewhere has already given that new galaxy a name. Milkomeda. Imagine the audacity of that. The ridiculous human-ness of that. To look four billion years into the future, into a future in which it is almost inconceivable that any human will be alive, and to begin to name things. Just how far removed though is a galaxy from a child? What is a child but two strands of data ploughing into each other in the dark cosmos of a woman’s body. Galaxies, don’t they crash together every day.

How could anyone sleep on sheets dyed a colour called Elephant Tusk? Beauty makes the unimaginable easy though, and the sheets were that.

I pointed to the whitest white and bought them. The set at the top of the stack. Don’t tell me anything about it, I said to the shop girl. I bought the whole set, duvet cover, pillowcases, shams with pressed edges, fitted sheets and flat.

The girl told me about the sheets anyway, she couldn’t be stopped. She told me how they were made from cotton that was brought to Italy from Egypt and woven there on giant hundred-year-old looms where the sun streamed endlessly through farmhouse windows and every grandmother made raviolis that were tiny and soft like babies’ finger bones. You paid extra but you could feel the sun, the way it had soaked into the strands, the warp and weave of the cloth. You paid extra but you dreamed every night of wheat fields and olive trees and rolling hills, sun on your shoulders and tables dripping with olive oil and prosciutto. She could have been telling me that, I was trying desperately not to pay attention. She wrapped the sheets in yards and yards and yards of tissue, everything was encased when she was done. Encased just exactly so.