The Fair That Wasn't Held

We were driving back from the coast and took the scenic route, which is how we ended up in the village at dusk just as the lights came on across a fairground.

It was a proper small harvest fair: a carousel with painted horses, a cider tent, a brass-heavy local band, stalls selling jam with handwritten labels. We stayed two hours. My wife won a jar of honey at a tombola. I drank warm cider from a mug I had to leave a deposit on — a pound coin, into a bowl of pound coins. The people were friendly in that watchful village way. An old man at the gate, when we left, said 'safe home' and touched his cap, and the phrase kept ringing in the car for no reason I could name.

We slept at an inn two villages over. In the morning my wife wanted more of that honey, so we drove back the ten minutes.

The field was empty. Not cleared — empty. Grass to the knee, unbent by any wheel or foot, a rusted gate chained shut with rust living inside the links. No generator tracks, no flattened rectangles where tents press their shapes into a field for days.

We asked at the village shop, holding the honey like evidence. The woman at the till went very still. The harvest fair, she said, had not been held since long before she took over the shop — the committee wound it up years back when old Mr. Somebody died. He used to stand at the gate, she said. He liked seeing people safe home.

The honey jar sits in our kitchen. The label says HONEY in a slanting hand, no farm, no date. We have not eaten it, and we have not thrown it away, and we cannot exactly say why on either count.