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Nine people are trapped inside a bookshop during a terrorist attack, each with their own story to tell.

Features poetry and artwork by Alice Rix-Moore,

Published in a strictly limited run of numbered, signed copies, this short story was given away free to the first 33 people in line at the launch event for Nine Stop Trip.

  • paperback (SOLD OUT)

“Damn. This really wasn't a good idea. Or was it? Was this a good idea? What is a good idea? What are ideas... that's a question, that is definitely a question.

I've never noticed just how smooth this counter is before, I mean it's just so smooth, perfectly smooth all the way under this magazine, how do they make them so perfectly smooth? Except for that bit, that little chip there, I wonder how that happened, what story explains how that tiny defect came to be?

Wow, I am really all over the place here, need to calm down, need to get a grip. How does something like this happen? A perfectly sensible young woman, she's got a degree, she's been travelling, she reads The Guardian, she knows what the world's all about.

So how could it happen that a young, intelligent woman like that could come to be locked in her place of work while the police prowl the streets with a head full of acid?

That's the girl's head full of acid obviously, very obviously in fact, not the police. Man, what would that be like? Hundreds of coppers, all armed and armoured, tripping their tits off playing hide and seek out on the deserted streets, giggling and weeping and shooting at things that aren't there and hitting things that are...

The question remains however, what key events had to come together and combine to allow this situation to arise? What twists of fate resulted in this woman standing here, behind this counter, wearing clothes a bit like mine only scruffier. I mean look at her hair, doesn't she realise what a mess she looks, she's...

...but wait, is that, is she, me?”

[ ©  a d a m   b y f i e l d , not to be reproduced in any form without written permission ]