Story by Sarah-Clare Conlon (UK)

Published in issue 33 of The Ofi Press

Off the Grid

Geoff’s profile said he was into psychogeography and I thought that was the bomb. All the other fellas on the site just seemed to like Led Zep and slasher films, and uploaded wacky photos of themselves giving thumbs-up next to extreme sport posters.

So I arranged to go on a dérive with Geoff, and we met beside the museum’s mirrorball to set our parameters: sticking to the shade and stopping at every junction to listen to the voices beneath the pavement. We looked up to the tops of buildings and we looked down on the ground and we looked sideways at each other, and we discovered all kinds of things about our place in the city.

If it wasn’t for the matching Ramones T-shirts from Urban Outfitters, we could have really gone somewhere. But that’s like girls ending up with the same M&S coat as their mothers: the algorithm’s all wrong.

Sarah-Clare Conlon is a prize-winning micro fiction writer and her work has been published by Salt Publishing, Comma Press, The Manchester Review and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. She was an editor on Elle and Nova magazines, and is currently studying for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Manchester.