The Human Condition

half-jumped, half-tripped over the boy's corpse, landing awkwardly, twisting her foot and almost falling over. Managing to keep her balance she ran across the playground with the sounds of her footsteps, her heavy, frightened breathing and the thumping of her heart ringing in her ears.

    The headmaster of the school was dead. She found him in the corner of his office, buried under a pile of papers that he seemed to have knocked off his desk when he'd fallen to the ground. She found the school secretary dead in the short corridor which ran between the office and the staff room, and in the staff room she found three dead teachers.

    In a vacant, disorientated daze Juliet roamed round the silent school and then the surrounding streets looking for someone to explain to her what had happened.

Quarter past five.

    After what had happened at the school Juliet returned home before midday and had found both of her elderly parents dead. Mum was in the bathroom, sprawled across the floor with her knickers round her ankles, and Dad was (as always) in his armchair, staring up at the ceiling. Dribbles of blood had run down his chin and trickled down the front of his shirt. She'd wept for them both of course (especially Mum), and had felt a real sense of devastation and loss. But after a while the hurting feeling had, unexpectedly, started to fade. In the strangest, perverse kind of way, she began to enjoy the freedom that the dark day had unexpectedly given her. She'd never had the house to herself like this. She hadn't had to eat at any particular time (not that she felt like eating anything anyway) and she hadn't had to sit through Dad's choice of television programmes (not that the television had been working). She hadn't had to explain her movements every time she got up out of her chair. For the first time in a very long time she felt free.

    Juliet's small, quiet and fairly insignificant world had been turned upside down. She'd seen hundreds upon hundreds of bodies littering the streets and hadn't known the reason why any one of them had died. She'd tried to make contact with her few friends, her neighbours, the local police and pretty much everyone else she knew in the local vicinity but she hadn't been able to reach anyone. Her telephone didn't work. There were no answers when she knocked on the front doors of the houses of friends and family. Frightened and bewildered, but also feeling strangely empowered and stronger than she had done for a long, long time, she sat alone in her bedroom and waited for something to happen or someone to come and help, not that anyone knew she was there. At the end of the first day she moved Mum and Dad into the back room. When she woke up on the second day she dug two deep holes in the garden and buried them both. Dad had always wanted them to be buried together. She knew that Mum would have preferred them to be close but slightly apart. She'd still loved Dad but, like Juliet, she'd had enough of him too. KAREN CHASE

    `What the hell do you call that?'

    I looked at him for a second. Trick question? What did he expect me to say?

    `I call it your order,' I answered. `Full English breakfast. Bacon, sausage, scrambled egg, mushrooms, hash browns and baked beans.'

    `Doesn't look like the picture in the menu.'

    He opened the menu up, laid it out on the table in front of him and jabbed his finger angrily at the photograph at the bottom of the breakfast section.

    `I know, but that's only a representation...' I tried to explain.

    `But nothing,' he interrupted. `I appreciate that there will inevitably be differences between a photograph and the actual meal, but what you've brought to me here bears very little resemblance to the food I ordered. The bacon's undercooked. The mushrooms are overcooked. The scrambled egg is lumpy. Do I need to go on?'

    `So do you want me to...' I began.

    `That was what I ordered,' he sighed, tapping the photograph with his finger again, `and that is what I expect to be served. Now you be a good girl and run along back to your kitchen and try again.'

    A genuine complaint I can deal with, but I have a real problem when people try and patronise me. I was so angry that I couldn't move. It was one of those second-long moments which seemed to drag on forever. Did I try and argue with this pathetic little man, did I tell him what he could do with his bloody breakfast, or did I just swallow my pride, pick up the plate again and take it back to the kitchen? Much as I