Parallel lines
When I opened the caravan door the fields looked as though someone had dusted them with a thin spill of sugar. I’d had the heater running since early, but it had only just taken the musty edge off the air inside. Murphy had spent most of the morning curled against the plywood bulkhead of the bench, nose tucked under his tail. I made tea, tried again to make progress on the laptop, then closed it. The day felt too still for sentences.
We walked a slow loop around the field next to the barn to wake up properly. Murphy trotted ahead, leaving small, neat prints in the white. Beyond him, the rest of the farm sloped away in a muted sheet of colour — pale gold in the places where the grass still showed through, blue-grey everywhere else.
That was when I noticed the lines.
Two faint, almost parallel marks cut across the frost, running from the hedge near the gate and disappearing somewhere mid-field. They weren’t deep enough to be ruts, not crisp enough to be tyre tracks. Just a pair of slightly duller streaks, as though the frost had taken differently there.
Murphy stopped where the lines began and sniffed the air, then looked back at me. Not wary — just uncertain. I stepped over them to take a closer look, but the ground offered nothing. Hard soil. No print. No indentation. Only the faintest suggestion of something having passed early or late, before the frost settled.
I assumed it was Tommo or one of the farm hands on a quad, though I’d been here since early and hadn’t heard anything pass.
It didn’t matter. A farm has its own logic.
Back inside, I tried to work again. Frankfurt had sent a final task, and the cybersecurity firm wanted a paragraph explaining some protocol I hadn’t quite got my head around. The heater ticked softly, and the router blinked in the half-light, but my attention kept slipping back to the field. A pointless distraction. I told myself it was just the novelty of being here rather than at my desk.
Around midday Tommo crossed the yard to check on a feed delivery. He nodded a greeting, mentioned the hard frost, and asked if the heater was doing its job. I almost mentioned the lines but didn’t; they already felt too slight to bring up.
When the sun finally climbed high enough to blur the frost, we walked the same loop again. Most of the white had thinned to damp patches, but the lines were still faintly there — shifted somehow, or maybe just seen from a different angle. Murphy again paused at the start of them, then skirted two paces wider, bypassing the patch of ground entirely.
By late afternoon the farm had lost its shape to dusk. I was warming another mug of tea when Emma sent a photo from the shop: dust sheets kicked to one side, a half-finished shelving unit standing awkwardly in the centre. In the corner of the frame her sketchbook lay open on a page she hadn’t mentioned. I looked closer. A few pencil marks — hedge, horizon, a bit of winter light — and across the middle, almost incidental, two faint lines running parallel through the rough shading.
I stared at them longer than the rest of the picture. She hadn’t said anything about a walk, or the fields, or drawing outside. It was probably nothing. Habit. A line to anchor perspective.
I cropped the image and saved it.
Dusk pressed in early. The temperature dropped, and a wash of mist crept along the yard. I stepped out for a final time, letting Murphy stretch his legs. The lower field was blank now, a single muted sheet without detail. No frost, no tracks — nothing to confirm or deny whatever I’d seen that morning.
On the way back to the caravan I realised I’d walked a little wider, as though avoiding something underfoot.
Inside, the heater hummed and the windows began to haze again. I opened the laptop for a third time and tried, without much success, to ease the day into a sentence that made sense.