The Whole Village Watched It And Then Agreed Never To Mention It

Our village does fireworks badly and proudly. Forty-odd people in a field, a man with a licence he printed himself, and the fire brigade parked nearby looking bored.

The last rocket went up, and everybody did the noise, and then nobody made any noise at all, because there was something above the treeline that had not come from us.

Three lights in a triangle, and I know how that sounds, and I am sorry, because I would rather have seen something original. They were amber. They were absolutely silent. And the triangle rotated once — slowly, like a plate being turned on a table — and then the three lights separated, each going a different way, and then two of them stopped being there, and the third went straight up until it was a star and then it was not.

Forty people. Including the fire brigade.

Here is what I actually want to tell you about, because the lights are not the strange part. The strange part is Monday.

By Monday it was a "weather balloon", and the person saying that was Bill, who had spent Saturday night saying, out loud, "That is not a plane, that is not a plane."

By the following week it had become "those drones the farm uses", which is a farm that does not have drones, which I know because I asked the farmer, who looked at his boots.

By Christmas, at the village hall, when I brought it up, three people looked genuinely confused, one changed the subject with real violence, and a woman I have known since school touched my arm and said, gently, in a tone she has never used with me before: "You want to leave it, love."

I do not have a theory. I have a photograph, and it is exactly as useless as every photograph in this field: three orange smudges over a black shape that could be a hedge.

Forty people saw it. The village decided, without a meeting, without a word, to put it away.

That collective decision frightens me more than anything in the sky did. What else have we all agreed not to remember?