The Date

She arrived for their date with a burn on her cheek. She said it was because she’d been feeling tired all day and made the error of napping against the door of her log burner. He told her not to worry. “I’m not remotely worried,” she said. “I’m just explaining how I burned my cheek.” He began to speak about his two bands, his electronic gaming achievements and the graphic novel he was working on. She talked about her hopes for the future, including the one that more people would begin to speak out and raise awareness about how awful it is to drink a glass of water directly after eating an apple. He seasoned his conversation liberally with quotes from songs in the hope it would validate him as a person of complexity and taste. She recognised and ignored them and talked about her favourite conspiracy theories, such as the one that the President’s head had done what it did in the open-top car in Dallas in 1963 entirely on its own, without anyone shooting it with a rifle. Though his sense of smell was weak, she struck him as a person who would be effortlessly fragrant for the rest of her life. She thought he looked like someone who’d once had a moustache: it was something about the blank desert nature of his face, the way it seemed to yearn for someone to grab a crayon and hastily colour part of it in. He overpopulated his anecdotes and told her a prolonged story about someone she’d never met which made no sense to her, and would have also made no sense to anyone else without prior knowledge of the central character’s weak points. She enjoyed spontaneously fabricating a past for herself, including the unfulfilling autumn she once spent composing call waiting music for orthodontists. 10pm rolled around and she told him her train was due to leave soon. He insisted on accompanying her to the station and discovered she had not lied. “How old are you?” he asked. “Twenty-seven,” she replied. He was amazed that someone so young already owned a train.

Extracted from my new short story collection, Curious Events Lately Occurring In This Neighbourhood, which will be released on September 15th. If you’d like to pre-order a copy, and contribute to printing costs in the process, you can do so here direct from Breakthrough Book Collective.