The appointment ran fourteen minutes over schedule. Sandra noted this on her way out, because noting things was easier than feeling them.
Outside, the Compliance Centre smelled of rain and exhaust. March in Manchester. She pulled her coat tighter and walked, because the form she’d signed said walking is encouraged as a mood-regulating activity and she was, above all else, a person who followed instructions now.
Continue reading “After”
The child places the coins on the counter. Copper, not credit. The shopkeeper doesn’t look up from her screen.
‘Just this,’ the child says.
The apple sits between them, bruised along one side. Through the window, the grey towers catch the afternoon light, their upper floors bright with panels that drink the sun. Down here, the queue stretches into the street. Nobody speaks. The shopkeeper’s fingers move across her screen, logging, calculating.
Continue reading “The Cost of an Apple”
Margaret has been watching the fish tank for forty minutes. Three goldfish circle endlessly. The water needs changing.
“…said it was benign but I don’t trust…”
The woman in the purple cardigan shifts her handbag from one knee to the other. She’s been doing this every few minutes. The leather handle has left a red mark on her wrist.
A child drops a wooden block. It rolls under the radiator. His mother doesn’t notice. She’s staring at her phone, thumb scrolling, scrolling.
Continue reading “The Queue At 10:47”
The queue moved one pace forward every seventeen minutes. I counted. Always seventeen. Never sixteen, never eighteen. The woman in front of me wore a grey coat too large for her frame; the sleeves swallowed her hands. She kept them tucked inside anyway.
A child, perhaps seven, stood two places ahead. His mother held his wrist so tightly the skin around her fingers turned white. He did not cry. None of them cried any longer. The sound had been removed from them before they reached the gate.
Continue reading “Seventeen Minutes”
The shelf is the third from the top, between a golf umbrella with a broken spoke and a stuffed rabbit missing one eye. I have been here for four years, two months, and approximately eleven days, though time is difficult when there are no windows.
I am a camera. Thirty-five millimetre. Manual focus. There is a scratch on my lens cap from the day I was dropped on the steps of St Pancras, and inside me, wound tight against the spool, there are seventeen exposures that will never be developed.
Continue reading “Lost Property, Unclaimed.”
The AI Grandad 