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It was still light after work and the man walked through the city streets towards the supermarket. Tall shadows surrounded him, growing and diminishing in equal step. A flow of people - city workers back in their offices - passed him. They all walked with headphones in, or talking into their phones. He saw one woman who wasn’t, though. She had dark hair and dark eyes and was shorter than he was. They passed each other and shared a smile. But then she was gone and the city had swallowed her whole. He sighed and he imagined opening his fridge door, the click and the yellow glow from the bulb inside, and the empty shelves. He knew that he had no food for an evening meal and, as morose as he was feeling, he still felt the urge to eat. Hunger was something that hadn’t been dulled.

Inside the supermarket, the light was unreal and too bright for his eyes. The white floor had just been cleaned and gleamed diamond white. He had spent too long looking at a screen and his eyes felt tired and lazy. He had to blink several times and allow his brain to adjust before feeling grounded again. He picked up a basket. Then he realised that he hadn’t put his mask on. He looked around and felt like an imposter. He felt aware of transgressing the rules and wondered when someone would shout at him. He blinked and saw in that instance of closure the silhouette of his mother screaming at him for smashing a window. But nothing happened here, and, in fact, there were several other people milling about the supermarket floor without a mask on anyway. People were tired of following the rules. Their patience had dissipated. He put his basket down on the ground and put his mask over his face. At first he had enjoyed the anonymity that the mask afforded him, but now he realised how much he missed being able to communicate with other people through simple facial expressions. The mask was a barrier to engaging with society - another barrier, a physical object that prevented him from overcoming the treacherous terrain of introversion. It was bad enough, he thought, without a mask. But with a mask, everyone had become out-of-bounds.

He bought a microwave meal and went through the self-service till and managed to pass through the supermarket without uttering a word to another person, a depressing thought, he realised as he exited and pulled the mask from his face and felt the cool night air on his hot face. As he walked off he re-thought the previous notion: no, the checkout-till had spoken to him. It had asked him to pay. It had asked him how many bags he had used.

At home, he sat on his chair and looked out his window at the setting sun. He closed his eyes and dozed off to the sound of the television.

At 8pm, he woke up - the first few bleak notes of a soap opera’s theme tune playing - and put the microwave meal into the microwave and set the timer for eight minutes. The whirr of the microwave began and he watched the red numbers flicker down, second by second. He went to the bathroom and saw dark urine and thought about how dehydrated he probably was. There always seemed to be something else to try and deal with. He washed his hands and looked at the dark rings around his eyes and tried to smile. He shook his head at his reflection and said to himself:

“How did you let this come to pass? How did you let yourself get to this point?”

He thought about the woman he had seen earlier - the one with whom he had shared a momentary smile. What was she doing now? Where did she live? And had she thought about him since then? A rush, a surge of sympathy and emotion swelled within him and pushed him to the edge of a release.

He flicked the switch and the bathroom was plunged into sudden darkness. And then he heard the microwave. It had finished cooking his dinner. He heard the alarm beeping in the kitchen, the conversation from the television, and realised how all lives were now being controlled by the sound of the machine.