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”
Sarah found Marcus in the Gardens Between, where the newly dead learn to let go.
“I’ve been waiting,” he said, extending skeletal fingers she recognised instantly, the same hands that had held hers through forty-seven years of marriage.
Continue reading “Until Death Do Us Start”
The trouble began on a Tuesday, though it had probably been brewing for ages. I noticed it while making tea. The kitchen light flicked on, but instead of filling the room, it cowered behind the cupboard, shivering like a nervous cat. The shadows, freed from their usual discipline, sprawled wherever they pleased, a long, sulky smear under the toaster, a rude blob on the ceiling, a jagged sliver draped dramatically over the fridge.
Continue reading “A Cosmic Divorce”
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 AI Grandad 