The field after the festival

An original imagined descriptive account of a campsite being packed away.

By nine, the village had begun fitting itself into cars. A red tent lost its roof, a blue one folded to the ground and a row of washing vanished from between two poles. People who had lived beside one another all weekend now stood inside separate patches of flattened grass.

The paths remained. They curved around places where doors had been, crossed near an absent table and led confidently towards a gap which no longer required an entrance. I followed one for a few steps before remembering that the field was becoming a field again.

A child carried a sleeping bag larger than her body. It dragged at one end, collecting a thin green fringe. Her father stopped fastening the boot of the car to help, and for a moment the morning contained only the negotiation between two people and one inconvenient roll of fabric.

Beyond them, the stage was a dark rectangle without a voice. Yesterday, its sound had made the far tents tremble. Now somebody was coiling a cable with the concentration of winding the last sentence back into a book.

I lifted my bag from the grass. Underneath it, the flattened place was dry. That small outline would last longer than our goodbye, though much less long than it seemed while I was standing in it.

Examine the methods the writer uses to present the campsite’s disappearance.