October, grey and damp outside the window. Leaves dripping with mist. Another Sunday, days away from work are lonely days. Open the window, chase the spiders out, not many more chances before the autumn really sets in. The feathers of the dream catcher shiver in the draft, but not enough to shed their coat of dust.

A little terraced house, not much to do, but this is the day to do it. On the mantelpiece, where does all this junk come from? Get rid of it, the things are oppressing her, dragging her back towards the person she was, the one who doesn’t exist any more. So why keep these things, staring at her through blank eyes?

She picks up the bird, there is dust in the cracks of its feathers. A cursory wipe with the duster doesn’t get inside the grooves and ridges. She rubs harder, looks at it, for the first time in ages. It looks back at her, head on one side, eye cocked. The draft blows the curtains, and for a moment she can believe the eye has closed and opened again. Startled, she drops it and steps back.

The draft blows again across her face, the warm wind from the desert. The shaman picks up the bird from the dusty ground beneath their feet. The dream catcher shivers from the branch of the tree behind him, the tiny bells of the wind chimes mingle with the sound of the crickets around them.

‘Hold fast to the place inside yourself. The eagle will carry you where you need to be.’

Richard had snorted when she told him.

‘He saw you coming! Look, the thing’s plastic, probably churned out by the thousands in some factory in Albuquerque – or Beijing, more like it!’

But she held the eagle close, feeling the texture of it in her hand. It fitted into her palm as he had fitted into her life, comfortably, with no rough edges.

And when he went, the edges closed over the space that was left as though he had never filled it. Another life, another world. The sand had blown around their faces that day, the golden dust of the desert, creeping into the cracks and splitting them apart, penetrating the fault lines between them. She had come home, back to her mother’s old house, to the quiet street and the quiet job in the quiet town, where the dust and the days were grey.