Spiral by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris

We’re staring down a tin of Quality Street at the centre of our circle of seats when the church door bangs open. It’s a new bloke, crucifix dripping from his neck like a lanyard. He’s all cheekbones and squint and giving Robert De Niro. A real Purple Caramel.

Someone with a sticker that says Tim is our facilitator today. He reads the Ground Rules. Purple dude drags a chair from the window and the metal legs grate on the stone floor. We shuffle to make space. Tim reminds us how to listen. Reminds us to think before we ask each other a question. Are we being helpful? Or just curious?

Purple smiles, slumps low in his seat and taps his Nike on the edge of the tin. I try not to look. The nurse in the drunk tank said I had to think about quitting sugar, as much as the alcohol, as much as the reckless, risky sex. Told me the liver metabolises sugar the same way it does alcohol—helping herself to my Twix by the way—and how with too much sugar in my diet, I’d face the same kind of diseases.

The gold sole of his trainer twitches at the lid.

Tim is a right Toffee Finger. He’s prattling on about Jung and how we think we’re stuck in loops but we’re wrong: they’re spirals. Purple cracks his knuckles, dried blood feathered across his hands.

“The floor is opening up,” says Tim. “If anyone wants to share.”

A cough. Then. Purple makes a move. He digs into the lip of the tin with nails I see plucking a Fender on a stadium stage. He works it open. He works the rim and there’s nothing in the Ground Rules, Tim, saying you can’t swap numbers if you both feel safe. The lid flips off, spins, and lands on the Kleenex.

“Anyone?” says Tim.

 But we’re going in—me and Purple—our fingers moshing through stiff foil wrappers and Tim’s eyes are on the clock but there’s Haribos there! I lean back and lock eyes with Purple, working the sweet with my jaws till the first hit of fizz; till the gum dissolves and loses its shape.

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris is an award-winning writer based in Bristol, with work featured in a variety of anthologies and literary magazines, including Aesthetica, The Forge, Pithead Chapel, The Four Faced Liar, Stanchion, Fractured Lit and Flash Frog. She is the recipient of an Arts Council England grant to write a novella and her debut collection of flash fiction Cold Toast is out with Dahlia Books, May 2025.