strange · 2026.10.26
The key was already turning in the lock when I noticed the door was hung upside down, the handle near the floor. I stepped over it into the hallway of the flat on Alderney Street, and the smell came at me — paraffin and boiled orange peel, the way Nan's kitchen smelled the winter the boiler went. A row of tins sat on the sill above the radiator, each one labelled in her slanted hand: peaches, marrow, damsons, one word I couldn't read. They were warm to the touch, warmer than the radiator beneath them.