Refugees from closing time without change for the meter. Emergency candle lit with a zippo. Wine. Chatter. Laughter.

The flame dies. Silence. Quivering kisses.

Four decades later, my hand trembles in a church’s vaulted gloom as a zippo’s flame kisses the wick of a tealight. And I remember another candle.

Andy Hedgecock lives and works in rural Nottinghamshire, UK, close to an Iron Age earthwork, the remains of a Roman fort, a decommissioned coalmine, and a disused railway line. It’s a place of scars, erasures, and stories.