Ad Hoc Fiction

He could hear her at the door and as usual, he shut his eyes, not to feign sleep but to exclude, to not witness. He let himself drift. The yellow lights of the tram in smog, the scratch-mark down his cheek on his first day at school. Twenty years later he’d marry her and ten years after that she’d leave him. His daughter would never recover and he would bury her at the bottom of her heroin descent. Thereafter his own life would snake down the board, through weekend binges, job loss and social isolation to house-bound decrepitude.

Time to engage. He opened his eyes. She was there, the bastard daughter of his bastard of a son. She would have had time to sneak a fiver from his wallet.

‘A wee trip down Memory Lane, Grandad?’
‘Trip of a lifetime,’ he said. Platitudes were so convenient sometimes.