by Peter Ackers
"…My girl and her impending death…"
My girl lived in a nice place for someone with a lowly hairdresser's job. At the end of a residential cul-de-sac, where the road widened so the whole street looked like a giant, flat lollipop, there was a semi-circle-shaped new brick building two stories high. The bottom floor contained residential flats, very modern, while the top contained offices belonging to a furniture shop with its front facing the main road that ran past on the other side of the building. There was a tunnel through the building to the main road, but a large iron gate barred the way. The residents, all of whom had a key for the gate, had requested it because too many drivers were using the cul-de-sac as a shortcut between the main road and the city centre, clogging the street with parked cars that blocked people's driveways.
Parked in the shadows under the tunnel was a van like mine, but blue and battered. There was a horse trailer at the back. I couldn't hear a horse or anything else making noises from inside. But I knew that some of the residents of this street were wealthy people who might enjoy riding horses when they weren't shaping the country or fucking over the little people.
Further up the street, there was a woman snipping at messy segments of her hedge with a small pair of scissors. There was a kid sitting in the street and trying to fix his skateboard. Parked at the edge of the circle of tarmac at the end of the cul-de-sac was a small Neighbourhood Pride (a Council splinter group that dealt with restoring neighbourhoods) van with two human two shapes inside. There were blurs of silhouette behind the office windows where suits toiled. Apart from that, I seemed to be alone in this big city of hundreds of thousands.
Then my senses pricked up. Something was wrong here.