Mossy's Day

The best hour is the one while the grass is still wet, because that is when the small things are out.

Good morning to a snail halfway up a stem, in no hurry whatsoever. Good morning to a beetle. Good morning to three green things, which is a habit of mine and always has been — a leaf, a stalk, and a bit of moss that I am, frankly, named after.

Then Zenny asked whether I had heard a clatter over by Winky's gate.

I had not. I went to look anyway, because Zenny does not say things twice for no reason.

There was a shape in the long grass. Grey, round, lying on its side. I had walked past it twice already that morning and filed it, without thinking about it at all, under rubbish — which is what you do with a thing lying in the wrong place.

I crouched down and had a proper look, which is most of my method.

Not rubbish. A lantern. One of the good ones, glass-sided, wire handle, and it had come in from somewhere with enough weight behind it to flatten a path in the grass behind it.

There was a snail asleep inside it. A different snail.

"Right," I said. "You first."

So the snail was carried to a damp stone and told where it was going, and only then did the lantern get picked up and taken back to the step, where somebody found it later and I should think assumed it had been sitting there all along.

I did not mind about that. What I minded about was the flattened trail, which went off down the slope towards the bank and was far too long to have been made by one lantern.

I stayed outside as long as they would let me, and then there was a great deal of standing about in the barn, and standing about in a barn is not a thing I am built for.

By midday I had the shut-in feeling. Grumpy, with nothing to be grumpy about that anybody else could see, which is the worst sort.

Then Puzzly said the thing.

"Wait. What time does the sun actually go down?"

Somebody laughed — a small laugh at a small question — and then stopped, because nobody answered. Muddle said seven. Wondy said half six. Somebody at the back said eight, with tremendous confidence and absolutely nothing to back it up.

They came and asked me, because I am outside all day and these are the things you know without anybody telling you.

"Twenty past six," I said. "It's been getting earlier all month."

It was ten to two.

I have never seen a barn empty that fast in my life.

And I was aware — I was aware at the time, standing there — that I had known it all morning and had not once thought to say it, because it had not occurred to me that it was a fact anybody else was short of.

That is a thing about knowing the outside. You forget it is not general knowledge.

Glowy found me in the barn doorway a bit later, having just worked out that the map on the door and the actual path did not agree with each other, and that the path was eight hooks ahead.

"How did you even see that?"

"It's just counting," Glowy said, and put the game down on the crate, and came out.

Winky's front room at nine o'clock at night is about fifty degrees and entirely full of fluff.

I lasted a good while. I got cake. I heard Beamy read out that envelope, and my name came up in it for a lantern in the wet grass, and Jelly cheered at something further down the list, and it was all extremely warm and very loud and I was glad to have been in it.

Then I went and stood in the doorway for a bit, where there was some air.

The part I would keep is the end. All fifty-five of us walking back up the lit lane to the Wheel in the cold dark, and the tunnel glowing out of the roots where Cloudy said to put them, and everything smelling properly of night. There were moths at the lanterns. There are always moths, and nobody but me ever seems to notice them.

I would not have swapped that walk for three hours of the front room.