On the edge
The two kids on the railway platform were almost certainly brothers, and the lady, sitting on the painted bench watching them fence with stick swords, was almost certainly their mother. There was a certain swashbuckling joy to the swipes and thrusts of their swords that would sometimes find their mark, but mostly just cut through thin air. One of the brothers, the younger one if size is a marker of age, took a couple of neat sideways steps, over the yellow markers, to avoid the artful thrust of his brother. The mother, suddenly animated, jumped to her feet and said: “Stay away from the edge. It’s dangerous”. The boy, as if pursued by demons, fled from the danger and found sanctuary waiting just a few meters away. Edges are bad. If you stray over them you die. - On the radio, the commentator was whipping himself into a kind of frenzy, as a team that the pundits had said would win were ground down and beaten, by an unfanci...