22 September 2026 · fiction: 2030

2030: The Next Thursday

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.

The bus, left to itself, drove straight past the bakery. She walked back two stops in shoes she had bought for sitting down in.

He was at the counter, not the window, reading the board, though he had obviously decided. She joined the queue. There were two people between them, a builder ordering eleven sausage rolls by name and a woman arguing with her own watch.

He turned with his coffee and nearly walked into her.

"Sorry," he said.

"Sorry," she said.

He looked at her for exactly as long as it takes to confirm that nobody has been scalded. Then he said, "All yours," meaning the counter, and went to the window.

Nothing. Not a flicker. She had spent eleven years being, she now understood, a woman he might recognise, and it turned out she was a woman in a queue. She ordered a flat white, £3.60, and a cinnamon bun she did not want, £2.90, because the builder had made her hungry and humiliation made her hungrier.

The only free seat was at his table.

He was reading a sheet of paper, an actual printed sheet, folded twice, and when she sat he moved his swimming bag off the chair without looking up. Then he knocked his coffee over. Most of it went across the paper. He said a word under his breath that her court would have asked her to repeat for the record, and she was already pushing napkins at him.

"God. Thank you."

"It's for your daughter?" she said. The paper. The corners were going brown.

"School. They have to learn a poem and say it in assembly." He blotted it. "She picked the one I know. I've been teaching it to her all week. Turns out I've been saying the last line wrong for twenty years."

She put a piece of the bun in her mouth so that her face would have something to do.

He told her his name. She had never forgotten it. She told him hers, the whole of it, and spelled the surname.

He nodded, pleasantly. "Nice to meet you."

He talked. She let him. The daughter was eight, swam every length she was allowed, and had swimming on Thursdays at the leisure centre on Giffin Street, so he came here for the hour and pretended to work. He did medical logistics, whatever that was. He did the thing with his hands, turning a cup a quarter-turn on its saucer at the end of every sentence, that she had forgotten she remembered.

"I did a night ferry once," he said, when she said she worked with Danish. "Harwich to the Hook. Talked to a woman the whole way over, till it got light." He smiled at the table, fondly, at nobody. "Can't remember her name. Isn't that awful? A whole night."

"Awful," she agreed.

"Have you ever done it? The crossing?"

There was a moment when she could have said anything. She was a professional. She had eleven years of the true sentence ready and a spare in Danish.

"Never," she said.

He nodded again, and turned his cup a quarter-turn, and the lie sat down between them, comfortably, like a third person who has been told there's no hurry.

When he left at twenty past, the stained poem was still on the table. She folded it along its old creases and put it in her bag, and did not read the last line until she was home.