The Likely Resolutions of Oliver Clock

by Jane Riley

You see, if I had to break down life as if it were a sentence, so much of my world existed at the full-stop end of life. Or more precisely, the space after the full stop. And I was happy with that.

This is the part of life I am used to: the finale, the denouement, the punchline. What I had little experience in was the ellipsis of life. The bit before the end that no one wants to know about, the part where words are hard to find, stumbled over or not said at all, when the act of doing is only the biding of time.

Yet, now that I was away from the table, I felt the draining effects of all the socialising and lashings of wine; suddenly I was overcome with tiredness.

The smell of sizzling garlic from a nearby Italian restaurant spun out on to the road and threaded its way along the footpath, wound around road signs and suffocated a stray cat.