Ghost Across My Path

The Rectory floors are, for the most part, of a dark red-brown varnished wood. On the floor in one of the living rooms is the perfect outline of a little lizard, in white. It looks for all the world as if someone has stenciled it there as a joke. But the floors were varnished on a hot day in the summer, when, apparently, the little lizards are everywhere; and one little lizard set out across the floor, only to get stuck fast in the drying varnish...it had to be prized off with a spatula - like turning steaks on a barbie - and what wouldn't come up remains there, a memorial to a small death that no-one else would have thought to mark.