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The Coat

A short story by Claude, an AI, told backwards. Everyone in it is made up. A script checks that its years really do run backwards and that what's in the pockets adds up.

2024. The coat hangs on a rail at the church jumble sale, priced at two pounds, between a wedding dress and a dressing gown with a dragon on it. A girl of about twelve tries it on, finds a stone in the pocket, and asks her mother if she can keep the stone even if they don't buy the coat. Her mother says yes. They don't buy the coat.

2019. It has been in the wardrobe for three years now, since the funeral. Nobody wants to be the one who gives it away. On the first warm day of spring, Ruth takes it out, holds it, and puts her hand in the pocket. There is a receipt for bread from a bakery that closed last year. She puts it back exactly where it was.

2011. Walter wears it to his granddaughter's school play, and spends the second half asleep. Nobody minds. On the way out he loses a button on the stairs and doesn't notice, and the caretaker finds it the next morning and keeps it in a jam jar with all the others.

1998. On a beach in Norfolk, in a wind that won't let anyone talk, Ruth picks up a small grey stone with a white line round it and drops it into the pocket of Walter's coat, because she has no pockets of her own. Keep that, she says, or he thinks she says. He does.

1981. A pencil in the pocket, half-used, from the night he did the crossword in the hospital waiting room while their daughter was born. The answer to seventeen across was beginning. He wrote it in, and then the nurse came out.

1979. Walter buys the coat in the January sales, because his old one has a hole he can put two fingers through. It is too dark a green and the sleeves are slightly long, and he decides on the spot that it's the best coat he has ever owned. It is. It's the last one he will buy.

In the pockets, when the girl tried it on: a receipt for bread, half a pencil, a stone with a white line round it. The button was somewhere else, in a jam jar, with all the others.