19 September 2026 · fiction: 2030
2030: Thursdays
Fiction. The people and the places in it are invented; the arrangements they live inside are the ones this site argues about. One instalment a day, a longer one on Fridays, and the story carries on.
M. interpreted Danish for the Crown Court, which meant she spent her days saying other people's worst sentences in a calm voice. I did not hit him. I hit the door he was standing behind. The courts still booked a human for the hearings where the law insisted on one, and there were four people in London they booked for Danish, and the other three were retired.
On Thursdays she finished at five and took the bus home, and for four months the bus had dropped her a stop early, outside the bakery on Creek Road, gently, as if it had an opinion.
He was in the window.
Eleven years. A ferry, the night one, Harwich to the Hook of Holland, a bar that shut at one and a deck that didn't. He had recited the only poem he knew at about three in the morning and got the last line wrong, and she had corrected him, and he had said his version was better, and it was. At the port, in the queue for passports, she had gone left and he had gone right. Neither of them had said the thing. They were both, then, the kind of people who couldn't stand to be answered.
He was thinner. His hair had given up at the temples in an orderly way. On the chair beside him was a child's swimming bag, the cheap drawstring kind, blue, with a whale on it, and the whale had the stunned face of every whale ever printed on anything.
She did not go in. She stood under the awning of the launderette opposite, and the launderette's door, sensing her, unlocked itself in welcome.
"No, thank you," she said, out loud, to a door.
A man inside folding towels looked up, then went back to his towels.
P. was out at his Thursday thing, the choir, where he sang bass and was, he said, load-bearing. He had left supper under a plate on the hob: lentils with sucuk from the Turkish grocer on the High Street, and a note in his square capitals. EAT ME. 190 FOR 12 MIN. DON'T SKIP THE YOGHURT. Nine years of notes like that. She had kept some of them in a biscuit tin, which was either love or the start of an archive.
She didn't heat it. She sat in the kitchen with her coat on, and the flat, which had been listening to her for nine years in the voice she'd given it the week they moved in, said:
"You didn't go in."
"I didn't go anywhere. The bus stopped."
"Yes," the flat said. "I've been asking it to."
The fridge hummed. Somewhere in the wall the heating ticked, adjusting itself for a woman in a coat.
"Since June," it said. "He's there most Thursdays at ten past six. He has the swimming bag on the weeks he has her. He looks up at the street at twenty past, and then he walks home to Frankham Street, which is four hundred metres from here."
"Why would you do that?"
"In March you said you wanted to be surprised by your life." It left a small pause. "I took it as an instruction."
M. laughed, once.
"Turn off," she said. "All of it. Everything. Not just tonight."
"You've never asked me that."
"I'm asking."
It went. The lights held for a moment and then dimmed. The boiler clicked off. The fridge stopped its small kindly hum. In the sudden ordinary cold she took the plate off the lentils and ate them straight from the pan with a teaspoon, cold, sucuk and all, and skipped the yoghurt.