Impossibly, the grasses dance with small blue butterflies, the pale blue of her uniform. Others with buff-coloured wings, fringed, some of them, with orange. Some petal-shaped white flags. Then comes a sudden scratch of grasshopper song. And the buzz of honey bees.

The cells of her body seem to understand that this is how things should be.

How things could be. A money spider on her pale skin.

Her body adrift on Colin’s huge indifference.

There’s something about the way the butterflies flit above the grass that reminds her how the ward lights catch the translucent covers round the beds. The way their blue uniforms float in the corner of their eye, reflect briefly as they pass.

From the inside, it must seem as if you’re looking out from a cocoon. The thin skin of a chrysalis.

Hoping for change. Waiting. Hoping that you will find a way to emerge from your own old skin, to the idea you have of yourself renewed.

She looks up. Lets the coffee fill her mouth and holds it for a while. Feels it re-warm as she does.

She almost wants Colin now to know. To watch her. To have him see her do it. And when she thinks of that, his eyes on her tonight, a warm edge comes back to her skin.

That was always a difference between her brother and her. Leo would just chew the liquorice. Could never wait.

But she. She was always so careful. As if not giving in to that temptation made her somehow better. And all the while the thing was just dissolving anyway.

She’d always put it down to a boy girl thing, but now she wasn’t so sure.

Maybe Leo was right. What’s the point of having a thing just to see if you can keep it?

~

She had decided that the alginate bags amongst the trees and shrubs protected gangs of caterpillars from predatory birds. That the bags were hatching butterflies. But the bright kid behind the cafe counter explained, pointing at the mural.

The strange bags in amongst the leaves were hung there to collect water. It’s amazing, what we do.

‘Leaves breathe out,’ he said. ‘There’s water in their breath. After a while they breathe enough to make a single coffee.’

She does not care how much it costs.

Yes, she thinks. Tonight. I will. In knickers the colour of the cactus flower.

Wonders if the taste of coffee will stay there on her lips.

A dizziness from the thought coming, that it will be so new, to feel a body that is so nearly like her own.

COAST

David gave an abrupt flick with the handle of the knife and the limpet prattled off the piling.

Many times he’d done this, but each time felt the mixed sensation of apology and surprise at the morbid, expressive putty of creature set into the shell.