Checkout

Behind Arioch at the supermarket checkout was a family of pottery-faces. The father, his face a chipped and crazed bowl of rustic sienna, had already battered Arioch's legs with their shopping trolley as if to hurry him along. Not that Arioch was buying a lot or taking up very much time - a single basket, with slightly more individual items than the gannet-faced store supervisor would allow through the express lanes. Sienna's wife wore a face of faded Delft in blue and white, a country scene complete with windmill, perhaps an heirloom.

Four children: two boys, two girls. The boys, their faces juvenile daubs of random green and brown glazes and blank patches of barely-fired white jobbing clay, were arguing over a magazine. The two girls, ditto but pinker, just looked like they wanted to be anywhere else.

"You can have the magazine, Todd, but you can't read it until after we visit Gran's," the father said. This satisfied neither child: the essence of successful parenting. "That's not fair!" the boy whined in reply. "That's not fair!" his sibling chmed in. "Why does Todd get a magazine and I don't?"

"Life's not fair, Joshua," his father snarled with surprising venom. "You learn that as you get older." As an answer it satisfied no one, but Todd put the magazine back on the rack and began to quietly punch his brother whenever the father's back was turned.

Arioch paid for the groceries and on leaving the supermarket, head full of ponderous thoughts, nearly tripped over a Tupperware(tm)-faced child. The child belched loudly around a feral grin before being clipped across the lid by his mother, a somewhat brittle-looking green lettuce crisper who probably drove a Lexus. "Don't burp in public, Dylan."