Adventurers
…and it was a bookshop, like any other on Charing Cross Road, and she left a free tabloid beside the grotty till and a small pile of unpriced hardbacks on the splintered counter
…and Zia had always said she’d rather listen to Chopin – would actually rather listen to a piano tuner – than to The Cure, but the security tape showed her nodding along to ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ all the same
Before something distracted her
Before she dropped the book to the floor
Before she left and never returned
…and we don’t know why, there weren’t really any clues, just that newspaper filled with misery and tragedy while paperbacks holding more of the same sat bleaching in the sun
Except, on the floor, the fallen book
…and peeking out from the frontpiece a forgotten photograph above a spidery inscription
Mark on the Bristol waterfront, 2007
© Matthew Sheret, 2008
