Rock, paper, scissors by Rob Walton
On Monday a large stone crashes through the window. It is wrapped in an abusive letter. Eva doesn’t know what to do. She worries. Is it a neighbour? Young people? Old people?
Kind Erich, who lives opposite, fixes the window without charge.
The other houses in the street are double glazed. Eva’s isn’t. She has no toughened safety glass. She wonders if she has a safety net. She wonders how tough she is.
She makes Erich a meal. She can tell he doesn’t like it. Oddly, this cheers her up. She turns on The One Show. They watch with few words, then wash and dry the dishes. She puts the cutlery away and has an idea. She enlists Erich’s help.
They kneel next to the coffee table with scissors and paper. She shows Erich how to cut the A4 sheets into neat squares. He watches her make magic. This is something she hasn’t done since childhood, but it quickly returns. She remembers she was good at it and it made people happy.
He remembers he has coloured paper in a drawer with unsent greetings cards. He fetches it with a bottle of wine.
She folds, cuts and turns the paper deliberately, carefully, patiently.
She sticks the first one on her window. They go in the street to look at it. They smile.
She makes more. Erich tries but lacks something. They put them through the neighbours’ letter boxes.
Some of the neighbours put them in their windows.
By the end of the week, almost all the neighbours have the beautiful patterns in their windows, apart from one man with a garden of block paving.
She makes one so tiny hardly anyone would notice it. She knocks on his door. He opens it. She holds it out.
He unfolds his arms.
Scunthorpe-born Rob Walton lives in Whitley Bay, England. A past winner of the UK’s National Flash Fiction Day micro competition, he has had short fiction, as well as poetry, published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. In 2025, The Emma Press published his collection of thirty quirky tiny tales for Middle Grade readers, Please Don’t Read the Footnotes Please.
