Solstice

From the corner of his eye, the village notice board looked like a guillotine. He turned, squinting. The cataracts had introduced halos around lights and muted colours, but never this. It was the village introducing itself. Asserting: laws on the contours of things are less stringent in these parts. You better get used to it.

He remembered the way along the side of the road, just about. The stone circles on the grass to his left, and the cars coming up ahead, avoiding him. It was impossible for them to miss the fluorescent yellow jacket, and in any case, bad things never happened to him, he thought, so why should misfortune pick up the slack now, at his age?

He’d not been to the solstice in many years. Back then, the road dissecting the henge was packed bumper to bumper, the fields crowded with friends – their movement, their grown-out hair, their rocks and minerals. Today was empty. Maybe it wasn’t the solstice after all. Dates and times were increasingly scrambled in his head. He could ask a passerby, like the man with a dog approaching the field gate, but he didn’t trust himself to get the words out.

The man let him go first, and so he had an audience struggling around the muddy puddle, no doubt a sludge of animal shit, reeking, and little flies everywhere. A good-looking man, eyebrows like bold commas. Far too young to know what this place used to be. Out there, past the last stone, the one they’d named Ophelia, past the brambles, was the spot. Far too cold to even try it today, plus he was far too old. Too cold, too old. He got out his notebook and wrote down the rhyme. So banal, and yet it chimed within him like a brass bell every time he repeated it under his breath: it’s too cold, and I’m too old to get fucked in the village wood.

Rolling around in the sap, pollen, mucilage, toadstools. Such things seemed impossible now, at two degrees Celsius. Celsius, Celestin, Clement – they were nice names for a boy. He wrote them down, too, but unlike the rhyme, they fell into a bottomless well inside him, not brushing the sides, disappearing without a trace or echo. He turned back. After all this time, the stones seemed stripped of their hardness, now like woolly mammoths grazing in the barren field, and he didn’t like it.

Where was everyone? On the way back towards the car – the one he drove against doctor’s orders, still on the waiting list for the eye surgery – he saw the man with the dog again. Drinking a pint outside, despite the cold, watching him. Nausea.

He knew then, of course, that he couldn’t remember where he’d parked the car. He stood in front of the guillotine to seem purposeful. He was surprised how many of the words he could make out: a bell for sale, blind kittens, mulled wine, help needed.