Author S. K. Nicholas

I sit on a hard, backless bench, hands clasped and bored as though I’m at church, bored to the infantile prattlings of the damnless, people so witless that they couldn’t sin if they tried, unless the sin was to be fireless.  I look across to a young man pushing food around his plate and jiggling his knees up and down.  A woman stares over my head, dreaming of her last cigarette in 2004, or her last serious, toe-curling, teeth-clenching fuck on her birthday in 2007, or maybe she’s counting the dead flies caught in the cobweb that no one wants to go near.

Moving outside, I look for the sea and a limitless horizon pricked by specks of white where the waves are breaking on a wild day.  Clouds mass and collide like drunks at the horse racing.  I sneak up behind a girl called Cessy and pull her hair…