Short story: Mind The Gap By Karl Whitney - - - - The umbrella caught in the door as it snapped shut, and Maureen watched as it was snatched away by the train into the darkness of the tunnel. She had been standing on the threshold (did you call it that – where the door meets the platform in the station – it felt like a threshold, anyway) and someone’s voice, a man’s, called her back. ‘Mo.’ She had turned around to see him sitting there, the tone of his voice and the look in his eyes imploring her. To stay on the train, with him. To get off in Camden and walk back to their flat. She had stood there and stared at him. Their lives were so intertwined now: too intertwined to leave him or for him to leave her. She had thought this for the last few months, every day, but some days she tried to obscure the callousness of the thought by substituting another, less disruptive, one. Together: their flat, where all her stuff, their stuff, was. His stuff. She couldn’t leave. Her eyes welled up. It felt like water was filling her head. She couldn’t hear him clearly as he said something else. ‘Mind the doors, please.’ Her left foot was on the platform now. Martin grabbed for her hand; he could convince her to stay before the next stop. She moved away, and his grip slipped down to the brown umbrella she had held close to her all afternoon. ‘You never expect it to rain, and, when it does, you’re never prepared,’ she had said to him years ago, admonishing him for coming home from work one day soaked from head to toe, his suit sagging, shiny from the water. He remembered this line as he sat staring at the umbrella flapping, trapped between the doors of the train as it hurtled through the tunnel. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.