Alice Ahearn
Eleven Studies of Snagged Edges
You, doing that dance. The one with a stranger, trying to pass each other, but falling strangely into step, again and again. Some instinct, deeply entrenched, means you can’t escape even as you see it coming. You can only lock eyes, helpless, share a mutual awkward smile, before the absurd deadlock breaks and you continue on your way.
Rueful chuckles, rippling outwards from the clattering of coins, cascading apologetically from a pocket in a silent auditorium. Or a smile spreading through a train carriage, at the frothing hiss of a canned drink over someone’s hands. There but for the grace, strangers say with wordless smiles. I’m glad it wasn’t me.
Your eyes, averted from a stranger’s funeral.
A wordless step aside on a crowded metro. Out of the feverish sea of shoulders, an arm strains for the overhead rail, a face spasms in pain. In the space your sidestep leaves, she can grab a lower handle. Wordless, the smiles of invitation and of thanks.
Uneasy drizzle, the chilly wait for an ambulance. The stranger, lifted from the pavement’s numb oblivion, will not remember who was there. You are glad that it was you.
Your eyes, meeting a stranger’s at a funeral.
Your edges, pulled inside, an attempt to move without snagging. But the thorns snatch at you anyway, the prickling of strangers’ stares. At you, crying in the street. You, sidling into a bustling town after slithering down a boggy hillside, caked in mud from your boots to – somehow – your forehead. You, counting the train stops, gulping back the roil of the last glass, the one you should have left. You wish it were not you.
You, fidgeting through the small talk before a funeral.
Startling, amid the isolation, the warmth of banality from a voice on national radio. It’s bin day, he warns, broadcasting in a lockdown from a spare bedroom baffled with duvets. Apologies in advance for the racket.
A glimpse beneath the veil, unsought. In theory, at the crematorium, people enter and leave by different doors, so you shouldn’t run into the next group approaching and notice the conveyor belt your mourning moves along. But they’re running late, the conveyor belt broken. As you arrive, mourners still linger outside, embracing their grief, strangers at someone else’s funeral. The veil lifts, and there’s a sameness underneath. For grieving strangers, and for yourself, you might find a rueful smile.
You, learning how much a coffin weighs. And the silent falling into step that means you can carry it.
Alice Ahearn is a writer based in Oxford, UK. She writes fantasy fiction about bikes, libraries and ghosts. Her other short fiction and creative non-fiction explores liminality and small moments of connection, childhood whimsy and the grief we don’t always know how to feel. She also likes translating Latin poetry and writing retellings of Greek myths. She was longlisted for the 2024 Mslexia YA Novel Competition, and her work has appeared in The Short Story, Litro, British Fantasy Society: Horizons, Ancient Exchanges, Indie Bites, and previously in Does It Have Pockets.
