28 September 2026 · fiction: 2030

2030: Saturday Supper

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.

P. had set the table with the blue glasses from the wedding they hadn't attended, which M. had wanted and he had ordered, which was the kind of thing he did.

Rosa arrived with her coat already half off and a drawing she'd made on the bus, which she placed down before sitting. Four people by a pool. The one at the end with the big open mouth was M., Rosa explained, who had laughed loudest when Rosa's tumble turn went wrong.

P. looked at it for a moment. "She has a very good mouth," he said.

He poured T. a glass of the white. T. said thank you and meant it. He was the kind of guest who put the thank you where it pointed at something specific. Thank you for the candles. Thank you for the bread. He ate with attention. P. noticed all of this without appearing to notice any of it.

The poem came after the bread, before the hake, because Rosa had a hierarchy.

She'd learned it at school for her mum's class, she said, but she'd changed the actions because the original ones were babyish. She stood. Put her hands flat on the table, then her arms out wide, then one hand on her chest.

The poem was about a bird that returned to the same tree every year regardless of what happened to the tree. The tree lost branches. Lost its leaves. One year it was cut to the stump and the bird came back and sat there and sang, because the bird did not know what to do with a tree that was no longer a tree, only with the place the tree had been.

Rosa said the last verse to T., because he was sitting directly across. The last line was something about the bird that returns not to be comforted but because it cannot help it.

T. looked at his hands. He picked up his fork and put it down.

P. went to the kitchen and came back with the hake.

It was very good. Butter beans, lemon, capers he said he'd been saving since October. M. had told him once, eight years ago, that she liked hake this way, and he had made it perhaps thirty times since, and each time she had said so, and each time she meant it a fraction less, and she had never found the words for that, because the words would have been worse than the hake.

Rosa ate around the capers. She moved them to the edge of her plate one by one, a small deliberate archive, each caper accounted for.

"The capers are a feature," P. told her.

"I know," she said. "I'm keeping them for evidence."

T. laughed. Quick, real, too quick to be polite. M. looked at him and he looked back, and the look lasted one second too long. One second is long enough.

P. refilled every glass. T.'s first. Then M.'s. Then his own. He was attentive. Careful. He had learned to make good use of whatever he was given, and what he had been given tonight he was making very good use of indeed. He asked T. about the choir, because T. had mentioned a choir somewhere in the evening, and T. explained about the tenors, and P. asked the questions that kept it going, and M. sat with her wine and listened to the two of them and felt the distance between the candles and the blue glasses and the words she had typed outside a leisure centre on Giffin Street. Working late. You choose x. Nine years and it was the first thing she had sent him that wasn't true.

He knows, she thought. Not as a fear. As a fact, settled and cool, the way you know the weight of something you have been carrying long enough.

P. brought out the pudding. Pears, poached, with something from a jar he had ordered from somewhere specific. A specific honey. He set one in front of Rosa with a small bow.

Rosa laughed. She picked up her spoon and looked at the candles and at the blue glasses and at the four of them around the table, and she said, as a statement of plain fact: "We should do this every week."

Nobody said anything.

The candles went on. Outside, a bus came down Deptford High Street and stopped at the corner, adjusting to something further up the road, and then moved on.

"What?" said Rosa. "We should."