Every Shade of Happy

ide because the thought of having to dig them out made him feel almost as if he’d

Algernon stayed mute, astonished by his own stupidity. Once again, the right words had come out of his mouth yet the meaning of them had glitched somewhere on the path between his brain and his vocal cords.

How can you be who you are when you don’t even know where you’re going?

‘Stop being so nice when I want to hate you!’ she’d said, her words gurgling through the tears in her throat. He was not her father, he was just her mother’s ex-boyfriend but she’d known, in that moment, she had loved him all the same.

Algernon’s feet, constricted by brand-new leather shoes, dangled a good two inches above a bare wooden floor where he sat. The narrow bed, metal-framed and identical in every way to all the others in the dormitory, sagged wearily beneath him, and a coarse woollen over-blanket made the back of his legs itch. A single pillow, where he was to lay his head that night, whispered to him of other schoolboys’ nightmares still caught inside its cotton slip.
Algernon’s bony knees, poking out from black flannel shorts, sported ruddy brown grazes which peppered their way over the bulge of his kneecaps before disappearing into the carefully folded cuffs of his new grey socks. Dragging a nail along the skin of his right leg he gathered a line of pinprick scabby crusts, which, when bringing his finger up close to his face, he was able to examine closely. Each one, he thought, was a beautiful relic of the life he’d left behind. He flicked the debris from his nail onto the floor and watched how a single tear of blood trickled down his shin before rather satisfyingly staining the cuff of his new grey socks. His knees told of a very recent and daringly triumphant act of bravery and for a brief, liberatin

inside because the thought of having to dig them out made him feel almost as if he’d become an intruder in his own home.
In the end, the ready meals were already cooling on the plates