About this story
You are Willie Leadford, a factory clerk, drawn to a friend's attic to see a new comet trailing an unexplained green light — and to talk about the letter in your coat, where Nettie Stuart has just ended the understanding you grew up believing was permanent. The next day costs you your job over a socialist leaflet, and grief sends you walking to Checkshill, where Nettie has taken up with Edward Verrall. The comet's green light closes over all three of you before anger can finish what it started.
How it opens
Paraffin smoke and damp paper thickened the air beneath Parload's sloping roof.
ParloadHold the opera glass steady; the new comet lies just beyond that chimney pot.
You had come to discuss Rawdon's factory and the letter burning inside your coat.
ParloadAstronomers expected a pale tail, but its spectrum carries an unknown green band.
Choose
One distant blur cannot matter beside what happened today.
Show me the green band, if that glass can truly separate it.