One thread through the day
Follow the lantern
A box goes over on a doorstep before the birds are up, and nobody sees it happen. What follows is every small, mostly accidental thing that carried it to a lit path by sundown — 24 moments, passed from paw to paw by fluffs who had no idea they were in a chain.
- 1
05:20Winky's step
Winky bounces out of the gate and clips the lantern box with one foot. It goes over with a clatter like a drawer of spoons; lanterns roll into the long grass, down the bank and under the bridge. Winky does not notice and is three gardens away. Zenny, sitting still in the dark, hears it and remembers the direction.
- 2
05:35the bottom of Zenny's garden
Zenny tells Mossy something went over at Winky's, "that way, before the birds started." Mossy goes to look.
- 3
05:50the long grass by the gate
Mossy finds the first lantern on its side in the wet grass, with a sleeping snail inside. The snail is rehoused on a damp stone first. Mossy carries the lantern back to the step and says nothing about it, and notices a flattened trail in the grass running down towards the bank — much too long to have been made by one lantern.
- 4
06:30the lane
Zippy runs the whole path before breakfast and comes back with two facts nobody had: it is far longer than anyone remembers, and there are iron hooks the entire way, far more than expected. Fizzy, already fighting a lantern hinge in the road, makes Zippy say it again slowly and goes to find somebody with a pencil.
- 5
09:45the yard
Huffy says three times that the carrying rope is frayed and is told not to spoil the day. Huffy does dragon breath, then holds the worn part out in silence until everybody looks. Nobody apologises. Huffy cuts the rope into short lengths, three lanterns to a length, so that if one goes only three go.
- 6
10:45the bottom of the bank
Muddle, holding on to the single word "wicks", takes the wrong turning, ends up lost in the nettles and finds the lost box on its side with twenty-two lanterns spilled into the ditch. Getting them up takes three trips and both knees. Puzzly meets Muddle at the top with a bucket.
- 7
11:00the hole in the bank
Wondy sees a hole in the bank, wants to climb in, and stops to look and listen instead — something inside is dripping. Puzzly asks dripping what. It is the oil can, gone over the edge that morning and wedged under a root, with about a third left. They get it out with a stick and Newby's scarf.
- 8
11:00the barn
Doodle draws the whole path on the big roll of paper — gate, three steps, lane, bridge, orchard, the long bend, Winky's house — with every hook as a dot, and pins it to the barn door. Humdy is given the job of colouring in a dot for every hook filled.
- 9
13:00the yard
Sharey divides the third of a can of oil between fifty-five lanterns — not equally, but deep in the dark places and thin where the moon does half the work. It takes an hour, with Mello passing dishes. A spoonful is left over and goes to Jelly, for the orchard, which does not need it.
- 10
13:00the shade by the barn
Mendy patches the nine lanterns that came up out of the ditch split at the seams, through the hottest hour, with Oopsy handing things over and gradually becoming less terrible. Nine bright crooked patches, one off a tea towel. Mopsy comes and sits for a while and says nothing.
- 11
13:30the barn
Humdy, bored on the barn floor, turns the dot-colouring into a race and notices that the gate end is going green fast and the middle is not going green at all. Cloudy works out why: everybody started at the ends. Tidy moves four fluffs into the middle.
- 12
13:50the barn
Puzzly asks, at last, what time the sun actually goes down. Nobody answers. Muddle guesses seven, Wondy guesses half six, somebody at the back says eight with great confidence. Mossy says twenty past six — it has been getting earlier all month. It is ten to two. The whole land moves twice as fast for the rest of the afternoon.
- 13
14:30the crate in the sun
Yetty unpicks the season's knot in the spare rope, starting at one end and working for over an hour, and gets the last loop out at half past two: forty feet of good rope in one piece. Fizzy had said twice to cut it. Nobody makes a fuss, because by then everybody has forgotten it was a knot.
- 14
15:00the barn door
Glowy stands up from the game, looks at something far away — Doodle's map — and sees that the tally is wrong: Humdy has been colouring filled hooks, but four fluffs filled hooks at the far end before the map existed. The path is eight ahead of the map. Nobody had known.
- 15
15:30the yard
Memo says the path has been lit once before, right at the beginning, when Rainbow first came — and that it failed because they hung them at the top of the posts and all the light went into the hedge. Every lantern on the path is moved down two feet, which takes an hour nobody has.
- 16
16:20the barn doorway
Cloudy, drifting, arrives at the answer to the hedge tunnel, where there are no posts at all for thirty feet: you do not hang them, you stand them on the ground down each side, in the roots where the hedge is thick. It becomes the prettiest stretch of the path.
- 17
- 18
- 19
16:50the wall and Winky's front room
Oopsy is certain the missing lantern is his fault and starts apologising. Mendy stops him and makes him find out first. Eleven minutes later: nine came up from the ditch and nine are on the wall. The fifty-fifth is the one Snoozy took indoors at six that morning, sitting cleaned on Winky's table. There never was a missing one.
- 20
17:00the far end of the orchard
Jitters, practising the welcome song where nobody can hear, turns round and is the only fluff to see the whole path at once — and sees the thirty black feet of the hedge tunnel with nothing in it. Jitters runs the whole way back unable to speak and points.
- 21
17:30the whole path
Tidy sends Wobbly to check every lantern, far end back, because Wobbly is the only one who would do it properly. Wobbly finds four things: one leaning on a dry twig, one near enough to scorch the hedge, two on soft ground that would tip. All four fixed before dark, with Shivvy along for the dark bits.
- 22
18:00the bridge wall
Homey, tight-chested since four, sits on the wall by the bridge deciding to go home. Mopsy sits down and says nothing for a long while. Because they are the only two fluffs being silent, Mopsy hears the bridge lantern's glass ticking as the crack opens in the heat — it would have gone over the water within ten minutes. They swap it for Mendy's spare, the one with the flower off a tea towel.
- 23
18:15the gate
The matches run out with the gate lantern unlit. Pouty has a proper minute of being fed up about it, then points out you do not need a match when there are forty-nine flames already lit up the lane. Hopsy carries a lit twig two hundred feet, slowly, cupped in both paws — it nearly goes out twice near the hedge — and the gate lantern catches from it.
- 24
18:15the gatepost
The path lights from the far end back, stretch by stretch, coming down the lane towards the gate. Sparkly stands on the gatepost with Beamy's envelope and names whose bit each stretch is as it comes on — the orchard is Jelly's, the bridge is Truly's, the tunnel is Cloudy's, the rope is Yetty's. The lane cheers each one. Jelly cheers loudest of anybody at the orchard.
Nobody in the chain could see the chain
That is the whole point of it. Each fluff was busy with their own day and their own feeling, and found out what they had been part of at about half past nine that night, when somebody read it off an envelope.
Read the envelope →