Compass rose flash design

The dance floor at the Harbour Hall has a compass rose inlaid in its parquet, dark oak on pale ash, eight spokes running out under everyone's shoes. Maeve insisted the best man stand on north for the first dance, because he is the only one of you who has never once known where he was going. He trod on her hem twice before the second chorus, and she forgave him the way only sisters can, by making him carry her bouquet for the rest of the night.

At half ten the groom's mother finds you by the bar and presses an envelope into your hand. Inside is a survey of the bay, drawn in your father's cramped capitals and dated the summer he married your mother. Someone has pencilled a small star on the headland where the shingle gives way to rock, and beside it, in a different hand, are the words come home. You turn the chart until its north lines up with the far wall, and the room rearranges itself around you: the cake sits due west, the exit due south, and the terrace doors, with the sea beyond them, due east.

You fold the survey back along its old crease, leave the toast untouched on the bar, and walk out east towards the water, counting your paces the way he taught you, until the hall is only a lit window behind you and the tide is loud enough to steer by.