Girl, in an archway by Mark Stocker

I discovered you in the gallery, framed in an archway, by a bin. I asked if you knew much about art and you said no, you were just in from the rain. You held an apple, bitten and browning in one hand – not for me, but in my direction. I was tempted. In your other hand, pages splayed between thumb and delicate finger, you held a paperback, sodden with drips from tangled hair that could have been pre- or post-Raphaelite, I didn’t much care. The book was trash and I liked that, here. You suggested coffee and led me along corridors decorated with dead-eyed figures who could never have imagined us. You looked at none of them. We ordered cake, and I paid. You squeezed jam from the sponge and brushed it across your plate into a crimson landscape. I twisted my head for perspective and asked what it meant. You laughed at what you called reflections of reflections and at the need to see in them something greater than ourselves when what stares back can only be something less. You told me you were uncomfortable sitting and had to leave. Back in the archway, you paused uncomposed with lines and imperfections tilted to the light, and it was me who felt something less. You gave me your apple, which I took a bite from and dropped into the bin as you dissolved back into the rain.

Mark Stocker is a writer from Suffolk. He is a graduate of the National Centre for Writing’s Escalator programme and has won prizes for his short and flash fiction. He is currently working on a novel.

Girl, in an archway, made the FFF Competition Six Long-list