'The Empty Slot' by Ida Keogh

There’s a tiny slot at the back of my head. I run my hands through purpled hair and it jangles as I touch it, like tonguing a missing tooth. I realise I don’t know how long it’s been empty - a fatal flaw of design. I hunt for the missing sliver in all the usual places. Down the back of the sofa among the cat hair and lint; in the drawer where I keep umbrella covers, expired medicines and keys without doors; between old photographs of the same face again and again, some angelic young thing, now spattered with birthday cake, now blonde hair streaming in an unseen gust, now lip-pierced petulant. I’ve become distracted again. There is no sign of it.

I try to retrace my steps. I start at the park, my stick dragging as I traipse backwards along muddy tracks, interrogating birds in the hedges. At work, I am greeted with blank stares of non-recognition and at the spot where my computer ought to be there is only an indecipherable password and a parody of middle management who pats me on the shoulder as she leads me back to the street.

I am drawn to the beach, where under the scream of seagulls I steal a child’s red spade and dig until stinging saltwater seeps into the widening hole. Crabs come to squabble in this new fighting pit. I ask them, knees soaking, “Where is it?” They click and clack in impenetrable language and scuttle away, tawny shells glistening.

I amble home in salt-stained shoes, content with a day which must have been well spent, because I have ice-cream-sticky fingers and sand in my purpled hair and a crab in my pocket. There was something I meant to do. Perhaps tomorrow I will remember what it is.