The lights are back on.
You will have to excuse me. It is two days later. We haven’t stopped drinking. I will try and explain what happened, but my body aches from exertion,and lack of sleep. My chest hurts every time I breathe.
But we are still here.
Ten hours after posting the cocktail recipe, I was down to the lantern. Mouldy fingers gripped the window panes, and the door shook. I had stopped cutting them down.
The whole world rumbled. It was time to say goodbye. I lay down in the middle of the floor, in the space I sat in as a child. You can see the whole bar from there. The customers used to step over me. All those people who had come through that door played through my mind. All those empty glasses. All those stories of the dead. And if this was the end, I was glad to be the last one out.
You cannot hear scythes over the noise of parsnipheads.
A yellow glove replaced one of the undead hands. A boot knocked the door into a flapping piece of wooden skin. Then there were five of them. Ten of them. A dozen Butter Mice, charging through the entrance.
Their weapons and armour were butcher counters of blood and gristle. These were masters at work. They knew where to send their blades, where to hit, how to deal with two at once. The noise of the dead was already subsiding.
When they were finished, we marched as one into the cellar. I handed round every intact bottle, and a few with chips and cracks in the side. They lifted me onto their shoulders, glugging beer, wine and spirits straight from glass necks.
Cheers replaced the howls of the parnsipheads
Outside our fields are muddy landscapes that mix a festival with a sports match. Dents cover the bodywork of my poor fern cart, and wires hang from an upended farmer’s belly. Who knows where the others are.
But we are still here.
God bless the Butter Mice.
