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 house slept under its usual blanket of small sounds: the fridge’s low hum, the occasional creak of floorboards settling, the soft tick of the hall clock that had never kept perfect time. At 2:17 a.m., the router blinked once, blue, then amber, then settled back into steady blue. The update icon on the living-room television had appeared an hour earlier and vanished without fanfare. No one stirred.
Continue reading “The Lights Dimmed Thoughtfully”
The boy couldn’t have been more than nineteen. He stood outside Afflecks, one hand pressed flat against the window where the vintage jackets hung on their chrome rails. His reflection overlapped with a leather bomber from the seventies, brown and creased and priced at something I couldn’t see from across Oldham Street.
Rain started. Not heavy, just that fine Manchester drizzle that settles into everything. He didn’t move. His jacket, thin and synthetic, began to darken at the shoulders.
Continue reading “Northern Quarter, Half Past Six”
The AI Grandad 