The Missing Snowglobe

Who could turn her life so completely upside down?

- ALEXANDRA BENEDICT

Dusk was falling faster than snow. Beth filled the snowglobe and soldered it shut. Nothing could get into, or out of, of her little winter world.

She held it up to the last of the December light. She made every element of her snowglobes- blew the glass in her forge, sculpted and painted the figures and houses. She looked through her magnifying glass to check that everything was in place. It was. She couldn't fix her life, but at least she could make the snowglobes perfect.

She tipped the globe. Plastic snowflakes swirled, as if in slow motion, around a couple holding hands. Wrapped up warm, they held mulled wine and smiled, as if they were staring into a warm fire or a happy future.

Beth stared out of her window onto the grey, unsettled sea. The Whitby lighthouses blinked, hopeful seagulls followed a fishing boat, and a crowd gathered near the pier around a cluster of carol singers.

Carols were bittersweet for Beth. They reminded her of carolling with her parents when she was fifteen.

Mum had leaned over to Beth in the middle of In The Bleak Midwinter and said, "Parents do what they think is right for their children, yes?"

"Sure, Mum," Beth had said, then saw the worry in her mum's clove-dark eyes. "Why, what is it?"

Mrs. Rossetti, the choir mistress, had sent them a frost-sharp glare. A week later, Beth's parents were killed in a car crash, and she never knew why Mum had been so concerned.

Wind shook the pane in its frame. Beth looked up the hill to the lights on Whitby Abbey then down to the cobbled street below. She almost dropped the snowglobe. In the halo of the streetlight, a hooded man was staring up at her. He then lowered his head and slunk away down the steps to the narrow beach.