We were pinot, merlot, local lager, all tilted dancing & hashed karaoke. We walked home around the rim of the snow-globed town, past frayed estates and pony fields, and this long, familiar, long walk home was longer than it had ever been. No signal. So dark.

Someone – probably JoJo? – someone tripped over a feed bucket and couldn’t get up again. Someone else threw up – naming no names. Megan put her hand on an electric fence and screamed. Par for the course. We were peak convivial, and magnificent, and someone – was it Fred? – someone shouted, I love you all, and we committed, there and then by a broken field gate:  we all loved each other, and we loved our little town, and there and then, right there and then, we loved it all, the earth, the universe and everything, and we loved it more for knowing about the dawn. 

And suddenly, the moon –

– slipping through an allowance in the cloud. A swan ruffled awake in the pink weird-lit and all the hedge-shadows shifted to madder red and crimson. We stopped, as if commanded.

Blood moon, said Fran, who knows about these things. And then our silence, louder than a bomb and shocking like a bomb, and time sagged down like old Lycra. 

Moonlit, I stood under a hawthorn tree with blossom falling around me like I was someone medieval. More than anything, I wanted to lie down on the soft fungal underlay, to feel its age on my skin. I felt mycelia flex and shiver, sensing my ever-present digital fret. One flinch set off another, and another, a filament ripple, a call out. The bindweed came first, speedy as ever, and its convoluted purple cousin, trumpeting on mute. I heard my heart respond, slow and slow. The tree started to walk away, leading me to an edge, gently, as if I were its only child.  

I heard my heart, slow and slow. I heard my heart, slow and slow. And someone talking – was it Bob? – someone saying,  I can hear it. I can hear the moon.

We all looked up, our faces like receivers, parabolic, and we all heard it then: rich harmonics and chants of mineral-rich tectonics, time slipped. 

Frost finger-flicked our faces, for fun, or pain, or for a wake-up, and someone – was it Fran? Or Ed? – when someone said, will the moon still sing for us when the miners and machinery come?