24 September 2026 · fiction: 2030

2030: The Logistics of It

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.

She asked for a paper receipt, five pence, and the girl behind the till looked at her as if she'd ordered a horse.

He came in at ten past with rain on his shoulders (it was raining; it was October) and he didn't mention March, and she didn't mention March, and they sat for a while in the fine English agreement of two people not mentioning something.

Then he asked about her work, and she told him about the fisherman.

"He'd borrowed a boat," she said. "In Esbjerg. A big one. And he'd brought it to Lowestoft full of flat-pack furniture, which is not a crime, and on the way he'd lost a man overboard, which is, and got him back, which is a mitigation. And the barrister asked him how long the man was in the water, and he said, in Danish, long enough to change his opinion of me." She drank her coffee. "And I have to say that. In English. To a jury. Without laughing."

"Did you laugh?"

"I'm a professional. I coughed for eleven seconds."

He laughed so hard he had to put his cup down, and she felt a pleasure so large and so simple it was nearly indecent, the pleasure of making this particular man laugh at a table in Deptford.

"And your job," she said. "The van man."

"Ah." He told her. The system that routed kidney machines and cooling units and bags of blood across Europe was very good, and got better every month, and at four in the morning when a bridge was shut in Liège, it still rang him, and he rang the van man, because the van man would answer. "The whole of it," he said, "is knowing who picks up."

She thought about that for longer than it deserved.

At quarter past he did something she didn't expect. He asked the girl at the till for a receipt, and paid his five pence, and turned it over and wrote on the back of it with a pencil from his coat, a real pencil, stubby, the kind that lives in a toolbox.

"My number," he said. "Not the phone. The landline. I've got one, don't laugh, it's for the four in the mornings." He folded it in quarters and put it by her saucer. "In case you're ever not here on a Thursday. So I know it's the Thursday and not you."

It was a sentence she'd have taken a minute over in court. She took a minute over it now.

She didn't put the number in her phone. The phone would tell the flat and the flat, though she'd switched it off, still had a memory, and P. was a man who noticed which cupboard the colander was in. She put the receipt in the inside pocket of her purse, behind her bank card, in the one place in her life that nothing read. Paper didn't tell anyone anything. It was the last thing she owned that didn't.

That night P. made risotto with the last of the squash, and stood at the stove stirring, and told her about the tenors, who were in a state of insurrection. She laughed in the right places. She was good at the right places. Her purse was on the hook in the hall with the receipt in it, eleven feet away, and she knew the distance to the inch.