Competition Thirty-Four Highly Commended: Please Take One by Timothy Collyer
By ten past nine, Peter had come out of the printer instead of the quarterly figures.
Not Peter. His photograph, cropped badly at the shoulders. The hymn numbers. The line about donations to St Luke’s Hospice. Twenty-eight sheets slid into the tray, warm, curled, before I pressed cancel.
Someone had changed the copier to double-sided.
I turned one over.
Nature of Complaint:
Please describe your concern in the space below.
Ref: ________
I carried the stack back to my desk. Brenda from Payroll found another by the machine and laid it face-down beside my mouse, square with the mat. She did not say sorry. That helped.
At eleven, a mug appeared by my keyboard. Tea, milk, no sugar. I drink coffee. I drank it anyway.
Near lunch, Tariq asked Facilities whether the toner cartridge had been logged. In the kitchen, one sheet had been pinned beneath Fire Marshal Training, March Dates TBC. Nobody mentioned it. Nobody took it down.
The next day, at the church, I placed the stack on the table by the door. My handwriting looked borrowed on the folded card: Please take one.
People did. They turned the sheets over, glasses low on noses, handbags nudging knees. A woman paused with the paper half-folded; a man slid his inside the programme. I turned to the window.
I stood at the back and looked at the stained-glass window I have never liked, the one Peter chose when we married here thirty-one years ago because he said the blue made everything look washed and new.
Afterwards, I collected the sheets from the pews.
Most were blank on the back.
Three were not.
I folded those separately, once, then once again, and put them in my coat pocket, where they sat against my hip all the way home.
Tim Collyer is a British short story writer and multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He won the Seán Ó Faoláin Prize. His work appears in The Threepenny Review, Nebula, and Clockhouse.
Art by Liz Powell – lizpowellart
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