By Alfred D Searls

15 Seconds of Fame

The train slows as it begins its approach to the station, the furthest outpost of the centre of the city. Within the expensive silence of the first-class carriage he senses the familiar change in tempo and lifts his eyes from the well-chosen Christmas present, a hardback history of Soviet canine cosmonauts.

Through the frosted glass doors that divide the travelling classes he notes the vague human outlines in standard class in which, as ever, it’s standing room only. There, passengers are packed in, like Laika in her capsule, though their discomfort comes without the possibility of posthumous glory and eternal fame.        

His eyes turn to the deepening twilight world beyond the window, and he begins his customary reflexive inspection of the banks of smart new apartments, built for smart new people, which now line the tracks where factories once stood. 

Delicate floodlights advertise the sheer modernity of the tall, blank side walls, but never once overwhelm the soft glow of the lamplit rooms that face the tracks, spilling their secrets into the night. 

A figure, silhouetted and androgynous, bobs and weaves down an imaginary ski slope on a real ski simulator; a couple cook; a singleton sits; a giant screen beams its lurid, live feed to an unseen audience; and no one ever stares back.  

As he slips silently past, he watches with the clear, first-class conscience of the carefully invited voyeur. This is his nightly welcome home. This is their nightly fifteen seconds of fame. 

HOPSCOTCH AT THE HOSPITAL

The little girl and her mother enter the long, high-ceilinged corridor in the older, Victorian part of the hospital. 

To the experienced observer they appear to be visitors. They certainly walk like visitors, and visitors for whom this journey is now a familiar one, as day patients are rarely that keen to reach their destination and are apt to proceed at a much more cautious pace.         

The little girl, seemingly a happy and good-natured child, is perhaps eight, perhaps nine. She is bustled up in her big winter coat, which somehow makes her seem even smaller than she is, and her school uniform is just visible beneath its voluminous folds. On her head, attached to a black Alice band, she is wearing a pair of cat’s ears.  

Her mother, thirtysomething, respectable and responsible, is holding a small bag of sweets, obviously bought for the child. 

On closer inspection she’s holding them a little too tightly and though the smile she wears for her daughter is warm, it is perhaps a little too polished. Yet that underlying conscious effort goes undetected, and the little girl returns the smile with interest. 

The sight of the large, highly polished, chequered floor tiles ignites a bright, broad smile on the little girl’s face. She looks up at her mother with a look of pure delight and her mother smiles back and gestures ahead.

“Go on…and remember, on the blue tiles only!” 

The little girl skips and bunny hops delightedly from tile to tile, greeting each with a little squeak of carefree pleasure. Behind her, and unseen by the daughter, the mother smiles again. But this time it’s not camouflage, it’s just happiness.  

Alfred Searls was born, bred and buttered in the city of Manchester. After a grimly successful career in PR and marketing, which left him with a nagging suspicion he was becoming a character in a Kafka novel, he branched out into writing things he actually wanted to write. Consequently, he now writes for Northern Soul on a range of subjects. Elsewhere, his work has appeared in the Catholic Herald and his short stories have been published in Metonym Literary Journal, Cinder Quarterly Journal, Jupiter Magazine, Dash Literary Journal, The Antonym Magazine, and The Mallard. See more of his work here.