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Short Story

Out There

Jonathan Sheasby takes a look at reality from street level.

Jamie sat there, just sat there, ruminating callously about the mandarin orange. He’d decided he felt nothing for it. He was not related to it in any way – it was out there in the world, and he was very much within himself, disconnected, separated from street corners and people asking for the time or for a cigarette, from people going somewhere at speed, from the concrete he was sitting on. All that was out there, in another place, from which he was fenced off by an invisible all-encompassing barrier.

From his detached perspective he viewed Doug arriving, nodding his hello and leaning back decorously on the chair next to him, outside the café across from the imposing building.

…