Tribal fox design with swirls

You will laugh, but I nearly didn't go to the reunion at all. I sat in the car outside the Co-op on Mill Lane for twenty minutes with the engine off, watching the frost burn off the bonnet. Then a fox trotted across the car park as if it had a meeting to get to, black-tipped ears up, and stopped by the bins to look at me as though I was the one who was late.

The hall smelled of floor polish and squash. Nobody had changed except Dennis Pryor, who still tells the same joke about the cricket pavilion. Mr Halloran was there with his clipboard, reading out the names of those who had died, and when he said Alan Cope we all looked at the floor for a while. I kept thinking about that fox, the way it had curled its bushy tail round its feet and watched without blinking.

I drove home by the back lanes. In the frost along the verge, a line of small prints ran beside the road, then turned and looped in a tight spiral before carrying on, as if whoever made them had stopped to think. I got out and followed them for a hundred yards, my breath going up in clouds, until they vanished under the hedge where the field starts.

I am writing because I went back to the car park on Sunday morning. The prints were gone, but the frost had made a perfect ring on the tarmac by the bins, and I stood in it for a while. Come to the next one. I will drive, and you can laugh at me all the way there.