The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout 2025. For November, we are delighted to publish a piece from Issue 14: ‘Joy’ by Karys Frank. Read or listen to the story below and find out how Karys wrote ‘Joy’ here. 

Eric was late to the airport, but Laura was not there yet with her life. The pieces of it would not come together. She was studying, she was being evicted, she worried her boyfriend was cheating on her. Someone had stolen her identity and was buying blenders from abroad in her name and she had spent a lot of time sorting it out.

The police told her the blenders were likely bought for mixing drugs. How could people do that to their bodies? Laura was training to be a nutritionist.

He and Helen had raised a good person, Eric thought, even if Laura was a little highly-strung, but she would get there. The previous night he’d had a disturbing dream of Laura as a puppet, jerked about by unseen hands, wooden jaw dropping and snapping wordlessly, but he wouldn’t tell Laura about it. He’d tell Helen.

Eric ran full tilt into the adamant fact of Helen’s death.

Incredible, that Helen’s body could be cold, under earth for two years. Eric resisted the urge, of course, to go to it straightaway.

But really, where was she?

Practised, he offloaded panic on a steady outbreath. He would never meet Helen again. This is normal. We’re born and we live in a body that dies and then someone who loves us arranges to set it on fire, or has it put in a hole in the ground. He shouldn’t find it strange.

Eric dropped onto a bolted-down plastic chair in the Arrivals lounge. He had trouble seeing the digital display due to his eyes being a little watery of late. Two carrier bags of M&S sandwiches and crudités rustled at his feet.

The chairs all faced the same way, as though nothing unexpected should happen behind the people seated, or to the sides. The grid formation comforted him. It curbed the impulse to be wayward.

Eric had heard that some people, when at the tops of buildings, feel an irrational urge to throw themselves off. Eric thought he knew this feeling. Although he didn’t, not really. He’d never been depressed. Not stalked by the black dog.

But Eric recognised the impulse. A subversive drive to wreck what’s good, in case it’s going to get wrecked anyway, so you might as well get in there first. You do it; you jump, just to see.

It happened to be Eric’s birthday. He practised showing delight at the sight of his daughter, extra delight because she was visiting on this day. He had to be careful, though, not to seem happier than she’d ever seen him. He planned to take a present from her with a kiss and a soft chiding. He’d say he hoped she hadn’t spent too much.

Laura’s flight from Newcastle was announced. Eric stood up. He put his glasses on, took them off again. He straightened himself, smoothed his Parka and tried to look like he wasn’t missing anything. No, he’d never acted on that impulse to jump off a building. And that wasn’t nothing. He took out a tissue to wipe his eyes, which were playing up. He waited to greet his only child, now an adult. He waited without her mother because her mother was dead.

Laura barely paused to hug Eric, but it was long enough for him to feel she’d lost weight. He thought to tell Helen, corrected his error, then wondered what Helen would have had to say about it, and what he should say about it to Laura, if anything.

They exited though the airport’s hermetic doors to human-made scents. Espresso at a coffee stall, warm croissants, petrol from taxis and the vape fumes of tour guides awaiting groups. He looked around at these activities, at the strangers’ industriousness and entrepreneurialism. He loved being alive.

The plan was for a picnic. In the park, he wasn’t sure about sitting on grass. He worried he couldn’t get up unaided. To his relief, Laura picked a bench. She insisted he roll up his sleeves to raise his vitamin D levels, while she applied factor fifty.

As Laura fished about in her bag, Eric sat back and mentally rehearsed again for the moment she would produce his present. But there was no present. Laura just pulled out an enormous black phone and jabbed at the screen. It was kicking off at home, she told her father. Some chancer had called at her door, according to her boyfriend, pretending to be a bailiff after her stuff. The sheer brass neck!

Secretly, Eric worried about the series of catastrophes that had entered Laura’s life around the time she met her boyfriend. But honestly, what advice could he give about relationships? When he met Helen he’d kissed her early, sure in finding this. Yes this, now. And that had been that.

Eric looked around at the park. He noted the blossom on cherry trees, the pristine, white petals’ ecstatic abundance. He inhaled the scent of cut grass. Even the smell was green. He missed Helen most when the seasons changed. When the life force of a season ebbed and nature regenerated into remarkable new forms.

So what if Laura had no present for him? It was Helen who’d kept them tethered to the rhythms and rituals of family life. Now it was just Eric and Laura, making their shaky ways forward. If that meant missing out on a new dressing gown, or an Amazon gift card, well.

Eric was pulling the lid off a pot of hummus when Laura shouted:

‘Hey! Edie! Edie!’

Laura waved over her father’s head to a young woman sunning herself some metres away. Edie waved back, raising her sunglasses.

‘Oh my God!’ called this Edie. ‘Oh my God!’

It turned out that Edie and Laura had been school-friends. Eric didn’t recall the name. He looked at Edie’s face, trying to make out if she had become herself yet. Laura was not quite herself yet, but at her age this was normal.

As Laura scrambled items together, in readiness to leave him, Eric thought back to the school where he’d worked as a caretaker. Most pupils there had not yet become themselves either, apart from a rare few. Eric recalled polishing floors before students arrived in the churchlike building. He’d had a feeling, when light flooded in through the high windows, that he could not precisely name. He explained it to Helen as being, surely, the promise of the young people. But at such times, when the school gates opened and the pupils, with their giant bags, their larking and their shrieks, flowed past him, he’d had to cast down his face to not give himself away.

‘I’m sorry, Dad, but it’s Edie!’ Laura left her father to talk to her friend. Eric watched Laura collapse to her knees in front of Edie.

Edie screamed and said again, ‘Oh my God!’ Eric watched a new energy consume Laura. She was excited, clearly happy, in a way she had not been with him.

‘Don’t worry about me, you two. You stay, you talk,’ called Eric, waving his hand at the notion he might mind.

After a while Laura returned, said she was really sorry, but Edie was going through something.

‘You enjoy being with your friend. I’ll see you later.’

Eric smiled at her. Laura nodded.

She said, ‘I fly back at seven.’

They made no plan to meet again.

He felt Helen would be pleased with him. He was freeing Laura to a fine day without him.

Eric should probably go home. But something in the air, maybe it was Spring, or the feeling of bounty all around, made him stop by the high street.

At the bookshop there were discounts. After browsing, he picked two titles, resisting a three-for-two offer and enjoying the rare feeling of discernment this gave him. These books had trashy-looking covers.

He imagined Helen’s amused responses. Well, he was going to buy them anyway. Helen would look for books about heroes and heroines, about lives being saved against all odds, about last wishes being granted, about amazing coincidences, showing there was a plan after all, and that there was someone for everyone. Whereas Eric enjoyed seeing characters stray, then get corrected, or correct themselves, or not. He liked seeing how far it was possible to stretch a life before it breaks or snaps back and slaps you in the face. He would start reading again soon. When he had the ability to absorb a life outside his own.

On his walk to the bus stop, nothing bad happened. He dodged the cracks on his path, enjoying being the opposite of the man his father had raised him to be. As the bus pulled up, Eric considered that his father would never have taken a bus. Something to do with machismo, he guessed.

On the bus, people watched their screens, reverent. Eric studied closely the fixtures and fittings of the bus interior as though seeing them for the first time. He marvelled. Look at that! Every bolt, nut and plastic item designed, and made to fit perfectly into a greater entity.

That was when it started. He felt a familiar embarrassment, a spontaneous undoing. It was like a film of a mirror being smashed, in slow motion, playing in reverse. Scattered pieces came back whoosh to remake a whole. This hadn’t happened since Helen’s death, and now here, of all places… harmony.

He resisted the word. Was harmony right?

Helen was the only one he’d told. She had not known what to do with the knowledge that her husband experienced transcendent feelings, at random, when opening the dishwasher, or shaving, or putting away laundry.

She’d sensed that her husband had hit upon something, or learned an inarticulable secret, though she didn’t know what, having never experienced transcendence herself.

The feeling held. Not on a bus, Eric prayed. These feelings could transmute, showing themselves in such damned physiological ways. A blood rush to the cheeks, a change in the eyes.

Eric tried to ground himself by thinking of the failings of words. How, at a funeral, people will say of the departed ‘he would do anything for anyone’ or ‘she was a friend to all’ while mourners worked to align these words with their experiences of the deceased. At Helen’s funeral words reached for her, but fell short.

Eric’s bliss subsided. The bus juddered and hissed. As always when weary, Eric became preoccupied with physical sensations. Warmth, a pleasurable stirring in his groin, his own hand on his cheek, mothering him.

Inside his coat, his palm moved to feel his heart’s thudding. Helen had bought him a pulse tracker, after his spell in hospital. They’d joked about it racing during sex. Once, Helen confided, at climax Eric said something like Jesus Christ.

He ate the rest of the picnic in front of his TV. Room temperature tzatziki and bread fingers. How good it was to eat when hungry.

Seven o’clock passed. Nothing from Laura. Eric imagined the nose of the aircraft, ridiculous, comic book huge on the runway at Southend. He envisioned tiny Laura climbing into the fuselage and it taking off. How could such a thing be suspended? But these days, Eric was used to accepting impossible thoughts.

He went to bed. How good it was to sleep when tired.

He thought back to the hospice, when the nurse told him that Helen’s eleventh-hour vivacity was common, that ‘there’s sometimes a Lazarus moment,’ when a dying person becomes lively, before the end. He wished the nurse had said it earlier. For Helen to be so splendidly herself, just before he lost her, was a cruel thing.

Eric tried to picture Helen, but couldn’t think where she was.

So preoccupied was he imagining Helen, and checking for a message from Laura, he didn’t take his pill.

Dawn broke on a morning without clouds. In this state he neither slept nor was awake, because of the exhilaration in his heart, and his anticipation of the coming day.