i. Silver fag packet crests a mud-slick wave: the owner of the Oldbell coffee house sluices the night down the hooded passage to Market Street; at King Street’s wider bottleneck entry a bank worker, tucked into shadow, eats a wrap with discretion. Bashful Alley censors light at either end, admits only what is specific to its stone: deepening green of the vegetation framing cobbles; the moss on a wall, sweating beneath a leaky overflow. Salt and pepper cruets on the coffee house table, squeezed into the one strip of sunlit pavement, glow like tiny arabesque lanterns. A young woman shields the light from her phone screen, at the mid-point of Bashful Alley, leaning into stone, and from King Street, you can’t see her; from Market Street, you can’t see her. Dinesh Allirajah ii. iii. iv. |