A woman sits in a small dark room and before her is a piece of paper. She looks upon it as if it holds the secret to life itself. Tears well up in her eyes and soon she is crying. And I don’t mean just a few tears, properly fucking sobbing. She stands and turns to leave, but there is no door. She scrapes at the walls, screaming, trying desperately to find a way out, but soon stops and drops to the floor crestfallen.
The girl looks up and to her left sees a filing cabinet in the corner of the room. She looks back at the paper, slowly rises and picks it up. As she places it into the cabinet she turns her head and looks straight into my eyes. Her tears have gone and with glazed eyes, she smiles.

Grouper - Invisible

I wake up. It really unnerved me. I was physically shaking, my heart pounding. I lay awake for the remainder of the night, unable to settle. When the sun finally crept through the curtains, I quickly dressed and left the flat, needing to just get out for the sake of it. Coffee, croissant, cigarette, a day old English paper as well as the local French rag seemed to be the order of the day.
By the time the caffeine was doing it’s job, I felt more with it. Bored of the English news of gossip and hearsay, I pushed the paper away from me and did my usual routine of trying to polish my language skills using the French press. Cheating as I do by basically looking at the pictures, I flicked through it quite quickly. I would never have noticed anything on the classified pages normally but there was something there that day that caught my eye. An advert in English.



As I walked down Rue Mestophilé , I felt as if I was in a trance. No.6 screamed out for attention in between the rest of the dull lifeless buildings on the street. A neo-gothic monstrosity of granite and marble. Two stone wolves guarding the steep steps up to the solid oak doors. It wasn’t the best first impression I’ve ever had of a company.

As I walked through the entrance, I was relieved to find, not a dark and dingy candle lit castle, but a modern fairly ordinary office foyer. It flowed through to a staircase and a manned lift. To the far side, smiled a receptionist behind her desk.

“Good morning Sir, welcome to the Nat Aston Foundation.”
Her middle English accent threw me.
“Yeah my name’s ****, I saw your ad and was…”
She cut me off. “Oh yes, Mr ****, we’re expecting you. If you would like to just take a seat, somebody will be with you shortly.
”Expecting me? I hadn’t spoke to these people, I’d just rang the number and listened to a standard recorded message reiterating the info in the ad. What had they done, traced the call? Had the receptionist just gotten me mixed up with somebody else? The latter was slightly more believable, so I didn’t argue.

After a few minutes, the sound of leather heels drew my attention to the hallway on the right. A tall but slight man in his mid twenties strode towards me, confidence dripping off every step. A thin but powerful smile underscored the brightest blue eyes and neatly shaven head.
His hand forced itself into mine. “Hello, my name is Nat Aston, welcome.”

Art by (in order): simple mike (dotspiral), airefresco, Amodiovalerio Verde