October 22nd, 2025
Broad Street station, 1979. © Stephen Craven.
Migration Season
Like thickly greased stars, freshly battered fish lay underneath the glare of the hot display unit. It was built into the service counter, facing chequerboard tiles streaked with dried sauces and muddy shoe prints. Harsh light from the heat lamps caught on the surrounding stainless steel, washing the glass casing with a soft golden sheen. From outside, the shop looked as though it had been nursing a small fire, its glow brightening as the city gradually stretched into the dark.
A group of men staggered into the local kebab shop on the opposite street. Their shouts and the clanking of beer cans bounced off the windows lit up by a neon maroon sign—AWARD WINNING DONER KEBAB. Everything dissolved into loose silhouettes, except for the heads of people grazed lightly by the moon, which hung low and tired. Standing behind the till, she pressed an ice pack to her wrist, which she had seared against a hot tray. It was a careless, rookie mistake, and a big angry blister had started to form. The intermittent stinging formed a thin, invisible wire connecting her to the world.
“Excuse me?”
“Sorry. Yes. Hello.” She winced. Smoke seeped from the kitchen into the shop front and seating area, faintly obscuring the woman in front of her and clinging to the tartness of malt vinegar. It had become a regular occurrence—slipping in and out of the present, no matter the beta blocker or breathing technique. The £60 on weekly therapy sessions would have been better spent on work shoes that didn’t leave her feet raw.
“It’s quite alright,” the woman smiled with the kind of clinical politeness she received from people who didn’t understand the other side of the counter. “I see that your menu offers grilled fish. Do you know what kind of fish? Halibut?”
Whatever was available that day depended solely on whether Nigel, who wasn’t really Nigel, bothered to restock it. Their menu sat high on the chipped blue wall and formed part of London’s late-night spine of takeaways and street food vendors: fried battalions of meat and carbs. Options for grilled fish served with a complimentary lemon wedge appeared in a smaller, illegible font in the bottom right corner. Cheeky. If one were to verge from the sanctity of the scalding canola oil, effort must be made.
“It’s just cod and haddock, like the rest of us around here. We get plaice sometimes, you know, when we’re lucky. I mean, I could go and ask–”
“Oh, no! I wouldn’t want to be difficult,” the woman let out an airy, bright sort of laugh. “That would be perfect. Just for me, thank you.”
Beep.
Now that the smoke had dissipated, she could see who was standing in front of her. Neat rows of symmetrical white teeth were on full display, firm and glossy like the apartments in Chelsea Crescent. She had walked past those apartments after buying a train ticket to Holyhead. It was a time when hunger felt tameable, when the world was a speck of muck beneath her fingernails. She used to prefer this: quick, transactional exchanges with a script stored in her brain. The uniform had been wrapped around her for so long that she had forgotten where the cheap blue cotton ended and her skin began. And now she was here, listening to the singing animatronic fish mounted to a wooden plaque above crusty ketchup bottles and scratchings littered across the floor. It jerked and swayed, opening its plastic mouth to croon that one Bob Marley song, before jumping to something vaguely Bruce Springsteen. She thought about naming it as she tossed away the receipt. No one needs one these days.
Nigel yelled from behind the wide aluminum doors that split the front of house from the back. The cashier, a pretty blonde university student, tried to meet her gaze. She glanced at the girl’s name tag. Maria. Well, Maria would survive. They had busier nights than this.
She would have made her way into the kitchen had it not been for the old man who sat near the entrance, a narrow doorframe with a rusty chime nailed above it. Regardless of the weather, he was never seen without his tattered grey trench coat. The commitment to his outerwear was an implied personality trait. He read the same book multiple times over a period of months and requested the same order each night.
“A fish supper, keep the bones in, and vinegar only on the chips. One slice of buttered white bread—untoasted—and a cup of tea with three sugars,” he had said during their first encounter, repeating it ever since. The fluorescent lights highlighted the thinness at the crown of his head and cast an unforgiving sadness around the slump in his shoulders. He tilted his face to look at her.
She made her way to the kitchen, startled by having been caught staring at another person. A stranger, essentially. Reaching out with her unburned hand, she traced the pin stuck to her shirt. It was the image of a fish with its mouth half open, gaping. For a second, it felt like she was tracing her own cheek.
*
“Do you know how many people have ordered grilled fish tonight? Five. That’s five too many. Toffs,” Nigel scoffed. One of the fry cooks had left during his “ten-minute” smoke break, claiming that the grill had started talking back to him, leaving Nigel with partial reign over the kitchen. This was how she knew it was a Friday night.
Nigel lowered a mountain of frozen chips into the fryer with a tenderness bordering on maternal. It reminded her of her mother’s emphasis on the necessity of empathy while operating on root canals, a recurrent notion after the divorce. According to her mother, everything required a certain amount of faith, too—the act of scraping teeth, the decision to leave.
The ice pack had been thrown into the sink. She observed the slow transition from solid to liquid, ice to water, and her wrist pulsed.
“That was your idea.”
His name was ready to roll off her tongue–a perfect strike of syllables that closely, but didn’t quite, resemble Nigel. Nathan? Neville? Not that it mattered. It was only the presence—the outline—that did. He was defined by constricting dress shirts, supermarket body spray and a greying mass of hair that clung to the stale whiff of rollies.
He assembled another plate of fish and chips, crouching down to wipe off any residual oil that could threaten his plating. There had been talks about renovations to expand the business into something larger and greater, talks that had begun before her first shift. A few tweaks to the menu, an online culinary course and one financial planner later, he had been reborn with the belief that he had risen to the cream of the crop.
Nigel shrugged. “You don’t have to tell me twice. A man like me can complain and do nothing about it. Women do it all the time.” Ding.
“Now, before I give this to you, I want you to take a real good look at it.” Nigel leaned the plate forward to show it to her. “This is what keeps a marriage from falling apart. There was this woman when I was younger… She was this sweet blonde thing that smiled like the sun hitting off your windshield, you know, and she had a great ass, too. I didn’t know if I was going to marry her, and I never did, but I had dreams of growing old and sharing a fish supper with her.” He paused for a second. “There’s the missus for that, now.”
She looked at the plate again. “I’m not sure if I understand the correlation.”
“Aye, well I do,” the other fry cook muttered from across the station. “Weren’t you someone’s woman, once? That fella who left for France to shoot some movie?” He started his first slice along the cold underbelly of a limp fish across the worktop. She could only see the tail. Something the size of a plum wedged itself into her ribs, sharply and suddenly.
“Italy. He went to Italy. And I stopped writing it, before you ask. He said it was shit.”
It was almost hilarious, how easy it was for her to miss him so suddenly.
She had thought of the calluses that had formed on his palms before they met, parts of him hardened by things she could never protect him from. He had held her on nights that stretched long and threatening, and she would fold toward him like those plants that curl into themselves at the graze of a hand. They were collaborators in a past life, except that life was still this one. The mind forgets until it doesn’t. What resurfaced was the only thing unaccounted for: the inevitable diverging between two lives hurling at full-speed in opposite directions. Her script was left waiting on a Google document, but to return to it was to return to a former self too heavy to hold.
A silence settled, disrupting the sacra conversazione they created between the unrelenting hiss of oil and the low, constant hum of the ventilation units above. Nigel, who started to look less like Nigel, had started on a fresh batch of chips, and the tail from earlier had been swapped out for fish bones. A scar was left on her wrist, the burning from earlier now a subtle ache.
“I’ll take this as my cue to leave. I’m afraid you’ll take an hour off my paycheck if I linger any longer,” she said, walking over to grab the plate from the counter. CAUTION: HOT FOOD.
Nigel turned around once more.
“You should try to write again. You got better tips when you were writing.”
The food had gone cold.
*
Winter is a cruel season, but as all natural laws follow, the sun must also rise. She had met Joseph this way. There were only so many paths to take to avoid someone who lived on the same campus and shared similar artistic pursuits. As he had once put it, they were always destined to circle each other’s orbits. That metaphor never made sense to her; however, when she tried to explain that satellites were designed with a distinct orbital path to avoid collisions, he brushed her off.
“Whatever! I don’t know. I don’t believe in coincidences,” he said, struggling to light a cigarette as they walked by the river. They had, over time, established a routine of going out to watch the starlings roost. “Do you have a lighter?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. It was a lie. She wasn’t a smoker, at least not by identity, but she had started to carry one after they shared their first sloppy kiss. It had been in the middle of watching Tokyo Story on his projector screen, a culmination of mutually creative admiration. She wrote scripts he had called vulnerable, transformative, and he captured what couldn’t be written, the metamorphosis of flesh into light and air.
“It’s bad for you. Like real bad, you smoke like you have an endless supply of lungs to rent out. And I love you.”
Joseph laughed at that, holding his hand out to grab hers. “I love you too. Now give me the lighter. I saw you with it just before we left.”
“But I don’t want you to die.”
“I will, and so will you, but it won’t be today. Or tomorrow.”
“Alright, well, what about erectile dysfunction?”
He threw away the cigarette. They both laughed at that, a distraction from the harsh wind, and shivered as they walked to the bridge overlooking the river. A murmuration of starlings swooped and tangled into one another across the sky. Smaller groups appeared from beneath the bridge and merged into the gliding, synchronous cloud illuminated by the final burst of sunlight. She could picture them like this forever—two starlings born with an unshakeable certainty that they would always find their way back to each other. He continued to hold on to her until the river was indistinguishable from the sky and the moon looked like an oil spill.
Their second year was almost over, and Joseph had plans of relocating somewhere hotter, searching for a heat that could suffocate. “It induces the creative flow,” he had said. She talked about fleeing to Dublin after graduation to finish her script. After picking up night shifts at a nearby fish and chips shop, she had been close to affording the train ticket to Wales, the ferry across and a year of freedom. They would talk about it; they had agreed. They promised that it would work itself out.
*
For the first time in a long time, it was only her. The shop had finally been gutted clean. In a few minutes she could turn the sign the other way. CLOSED. There was still some scrubbing to do, which she had recently started enjoying. It kept her mind from returning to her apartment, which had been reduced to the size of her luggage. The only thing that was hard to pack was the singing fish, which was securely strapped to the rucksack her parents had bought for her twelfth birthday.
Familiar faces resumed the rest of their secretive everyday lives. She thought back to the customer from the other night, the one that was all teeth, and wondered if she had managed to find a chippy that sold halibut.
Did Nigel still think about her? The woman that occupied a strange area in the heart, reducing people to the edges of memory, brought back to the surface by the smell of cotton left out to dry or the crackling, unrelenting fire. Wasn’t there a story about that? The three men who survived the fiery furnace, the flames a reminder of their survival springing from their ability to believe in the idea of eternal devotion. However, she refused to believe that they survived unscathed. The scar on her wrist was the whole point, and had her mother felt grief sink into her the same way?
Then there was Joseph, engulfed in the heat he had envisioned. His number changed before hers, but she kept the lighter just in case.
The bulb flickered—once, twice. She looked up and saw the old man standing behind the pane of glass, bathed in the shop’s light. It was the first night she had worked without him. He stood tall, trying to fight off the hunch that had eventually overtaken his spine. She had never seen him like this; he was alive and real, filled with the same breath that made her lungs hurt. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, wanting to cry. The train ticket in her pocket felt lighter than the one that had come before it. He turned his back to walk away, slipping through the weak glow of the streetlamp. Beyond all of this, the bridge was still discernible above the walls of the city. The starlings had already migrated.
Aoife Quinn is a Filipino-Irish writer based in Belfast.