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”
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 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 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.”
