Emily Francis

Molly's Journal

It was around midnight when I was walking through a part of town I hadn’t been before. I scuffed my shoes across the pavement, cocked my head upwards to gaze at the dense patches of dark clouds hanging above the suburbs. A cat jumped off one of the yellow bins and leaped across my path, entranced by the aroma of boiling chicken and noodles trailing from the back door of the takeaway. Breeze blocks stood between the road and the concrete squares of yard for each building, a man nursed his back against their gritty surface. His face was sheened by a day’s hard work in a stifling kitchen. Cupping his hands around the final stub of a cigarette, he shielded the dying spark from flatlining.