Projector Hum

Bethan serves the front counter at Pugh's Fish in Cardiff Market, and on the Saturday of a rugby international the queue runs back past the Welsh-cake stall. You can't be served without a ticket from the old red dispenser. When the Now Serving sign calls your number, whatever you've been putting off walks up to the counter that day. Bethan has never pulled a ticket, and she has run the queue for years.

Today a man's old business partner turns up with a clipboard, a brass quartet turns up for the wrong person, and the numbers nobody answers are not going away. Somewhere above the slab, the sign is counting toward the end of the roll. Bethan has a long day and a letter in her apron pocket.

A work of fiction. Performed by synthetic voices.

Supported by ShotBreak.

There's a windowless room on Platform 1 at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne, with steel shelves, luggage tags on string and trains rumbling through the ceiling. Noreen Vella has worked its counter for most of her life. Describe a lost thing exactly at her hatch and it's sitting on her shelf, tagged. The catch is that somebody else in the city has just lost it.

Kieran is twenty-four and has just been moved off the ticket barriers. He thinks the rule is a gift and wants to prove it. Every Friday at half past four, an old man called Arthur comes in and describes the same brown glove, and Noreen tells him the same thing: nothing like that.

A work of fiction. Performed by synthetic voices.

Supported by SagaSeal.

Halloran and Pike is a hundred-year-old department store in downtown Dayton, Ohio. Its returns desk has always offered one perk, printed on a laminated card: bring a gift back with its gift receipt and you get store credit, and the person who gave it forgets they ever did. No awkward thank-yous. Dolores Kemper has worked that desk for forty-five years. She has never returned anything, and she always tucks a gift receipt in with the presents she gives.

It's December 27th, the busiest returns day of the year. Her new floor manager has a target to hit, the line runs back past the escalators, and at the end of it stands Glen, the man she was married to for twenty-eight years. He has a cardboard box sealed with masking tape, and every gift inside still has one of her receipts taped to it.

A work of fiction. Performed by synthetic voices.

Supported by SagaSeal.

Larkin Court is a short dead-end street of triple-deckers in Dorchester, Boston, and tonight a snow emergency has been declared. On Larkin Court the space-saver rules are as dull as trash day. You dig out your spot and put something in it, and it's held. The catch is that it's held for the person you really mean, not the person you say.

Dennis Kearney is seventy-four. He has shovelled a space in front of his house that's far too wide, and he has set his late wife's kitchen chair in it. Then his own Buick bounces off it. Before the night is over he'll have argued with a tow truck, a chair, the whole street and the young nurse next door, who has to get to her six o'clock shift.

A work of fiction. Performed by synthetic voices.

Supported by Lynqly.

A wet October Saturday in the tin-roofed pavilion at the end of a seaside pier. Desmond Rook has been spotting fakes for forty years. Pearl Dobbs has brought in her late dad's picture of a fishing boat, hoping to prove her sister wrong about it, and Ollie, the volunteer steward, is calling the tickets for a queue that never gets any shorter.

Then Desmond says something he didn't mean to say. A door slams, and there's no door. A gull cries, and then it cries again, exactly the same. A man whose whole trade is telling an original from a copy has to apply his own test to the room he's sitting in, and to the three people in it, himself included.

A work of fiction. Performed by synthetic voices.

Supported by STELQ.

Bev Ashworth, of Larch Close on the edge of Leeds, invites everyone round and means none of it. The postman, the window cleaner, the courier: "You must come round for a cup of tea one evening, love." Then, before they can answer: "Well, I won't keep you."

Since Tuesday, the invitations have started to stick. Whoever Bev asks round to their face rings her doorbell at seven o'clock, with no idea why, and can't leave her kitchen until she says the words. Which is very handy when you've spent eleven years at war with next door's leylandii. A dark domestic comedy about a hedge, a doorbell that plays Für Elise, and a kitchen chair nobody is allowed to sit in.

A work of fiction. Performed by synthetic voices.

Supported by STELQ.

Gordon Pask has stood behind the same worn counter in a wet northern market town for fifty-one years, and he'll tell you he has never once lied to a customer. This week he is selling up. His daughter Ruth is up from the city with the papers, and a cheerful young buyer called Kieran is measuring the walls. Completion is Saturday at ten.

Then on Tuesday morning the brass bell over the shut door rings by itself, and it goes off again every time somebody in the shop says something they know isn't true. Gordon treats it as a fault in the stock. Everybody else starts choosing their words very carefully, or taking them outside.

A work of fiction. Performed by synthetic voices.

Supported by SagaSeal.