At least intact

At the station I heard them arguing about whether the man was homeless. Who else knits a narrow scarf with baby blue wool over a Coles green bag as he walks, she was saying, than someone who is clearly mad and probably homeless? You have to look at the shoes, the other was saying. He has trodden the ends of his pants but his shoes look new -- cheap but new -- or not entirely new, she then conceded: at least intact.

Then he smiled

She told me that next to her on the station a woman was reading a book, and as she looked over at the book the woman was reading and saw the single sentence in its entirety, ‘Then he smiled’, she thought over all the times she had been with other people, and particularly men, and realised that she had never been able to isolate this moment, this ‘Then he smiled’ from the continuity of everything they had ever said to her and everything she had said to them; from the continuity of where they were and what they were doing when they were with each other; from a street with its broken paving squares, for example, or a particular stretch that a young guy had made when he placed his hands at the back of his head as he spoke; from that information he told her as he stood there with his elbows sticking out – information, or just a set of words, which seemed to harry at the white of the evening sky as she drove herself home.