The Incident at the Edge of Holborn

Short story about a jacket and unforeseen circumstances.

Melissa couldn’t help but stare.

The man waited at the bus stop outside Holborn station he wore a cropped grey workman’s jacket, similar to the one she considered getting the week prior. She stood hand on its hung shoulder, estimating the possibilities of adopting something that was ‘just eight pounds’, as if she were keeping score. As if it’s worth relied entirely on her ability to win in a game no one ever truly won. After testing the limitations of her own patience she decided against it. She had a habit of swamping her frame with anything and everything larger to hide herself, as if her aim was to disappear entirely. Devoted to change she released it.

A woman sat on the angled bench, acute and cracked at the centre, popped a mouthful of Hubba Bubba with a stout O. Looking back, Melissa recognized the thin zipper and peculiar shape wrapped around the man’s body. A box whose shoulders matched the end in width like an analogue tv matched the shape of the box it came in. She considered it a detriment to anyone’s frame and gazed with unearned familiarity at the stranger’s body. As if the one he wore was the exact one she carted around for the better part of an hour.

And for a while, in her mind, standing on the threshold of pavement and tarmac or whatever the beveled edge between a rough terrain of gum speckled concrete and a sea of black porous material was, Melissa considered the resistance of that jacket to that man. The man stood with his hair thinning at the top of his bulbous head. Which she could see from her place behind him. A privilege she was rarely afforded. In the rush of arrival and the hast of repositioning, a muted splat could be heard echoing from his shoulder. The man reached behind his neck with his hand to swipe as if expecting raindrops. She didn’t have the heart to tell him.