Glowy's Day

I was on the barn floor by ten o'clock with a game and I did not get up for most of the morning.

It is not laziness and I would like that understood, because it looks exactly like laziness from outside. A game gives you a next thing. And then another next thing. Each one is small enough to say yes to, and somewhere around the fortieth yes it is suddenly the afternoon and you have not been anywhere.

Squirmy came in twice, pink and out of breath, having run the far end of the path.

"Just one more level," I said, the second time. Or possibly the fourth.

"Suit yourself," said Squirmy, in a genuinely friendly way, and went out again.

That was worse than being told off. I would like that understood too.

So I finished the level. And then I did the thing that is supposed to happen when the timer goes: stood up, stretched, and looked at something far away.

The something far away was the barn door, with Doodle's map pinned to it, and all Humdy's green dots.

And I looked at the tally and said, out loud, to nobody: "That's wrong."

It was. Humdy had been colouring in a dot for every hook filled, which is exactly right and exactly what Doodle meant. But four fluffs had been filling hooks at the far end before the map existed at all, first thing, and had never told anybody, because why would you. So the map said forty-one and the path said forty-nine.

Nobody had known they were eight ahead. Everybody in that yard had been working to a number that was eight short, all morning, on a day when the one thing we did not have was time.

"How did you see that?" said Mossy, in the doorway, smelling of outside.

"It's just counting," I said.

And it is. It is completely, boringly just counting. I count things all day. I count what I have got and what I need and how many of a thing are left and how long until the next one — I do it constantly, in games, without noticing I am doing it, the way you do not notice breathing.

I put the game down on the crate and went out and did the last stretch with everybody else, and got there in time for the good part, which I had very nearly missed by about forty minutes.

Here is the bit I keep thinking about.

I got to Winky's and it was full and loud and there was cake, and Jitters sang the welcome twice, and Beamy read the whole day out off an envelope, and Rainbow put a cloud on the Wheel at eleven o'clock at night and the Wheel turned for the first time since the spring.

And none of that is going to happen again.

The game will be there tomorrow. It is there now. It is exactly where I left it on that crate, and it will be precisely as good on Thursday as it was this morning, and it will wait, because waiting is all it does.

Fifty-five fluffs standing in a cold lane watching a wheel start to turn does not wait.

I came within about forty minutes of not being in that lane, and I would not have been sad about it at the time, which is the frightening part. I would not even have known.

Beamy's envelope said Glowy — found the count was eight out. I was pleased about that. I was more pleased about having been there when the Wheel went round.