Prose
The round tables could sit maybe eight people around them but of course at fourteen you have both no friends and twenty friends all at once. So, when there was more than eight of us, we would sit in layers: the higher up the hierarchy you were, the closer you would be to the centre layer. Onions, we would say, were the people on the outer layers, not popular enough for others to shimmy round and make room for them in the middle.
“I was a right onion iday, bloody Kieran wouldn’t move up”
“Tony sat at the kitchen table, his blank homework sheet out in front of him. Sinead, his younger sister, sat doodling on her own sheet beside him. She was eager to get finished up so that she could join her siblings playing. They were the lucky ones, not yet old enough to be worried about things such as homework. She could hear them upstairs, a constant stream of giggles, interrupted only by the odd bump or crash.”
“Aberdeen City Council are delighted to announce our next endeavour. After the unprecedented success of Development, our efforts will be bolstered two-fold, into the avenues of perpetuation and negation. We must continue ascension, while also laying the groundwork for a descension-based strategy of fulfilment.”