by Ian Johnson
Within the borders of the unfinished staffroom jigsaw, their blessed river glistens like the scales of a sated snake. The glossy vista, blessed beneath imagined sunshine, shifts and pulses and convulses in a fathomless rhythm, threading the cogged hum of two cities—dividing and defining the fraternal twins of Newcastle and Gateshead—identical only to strangers.
Ancient bridges of centuries gone leer their consent as the mighty Tyne punches through to bitter North Sea nothing—those cross sections of daring and doing, wrought to conquer and cow, with splayed legs schemed to give peaceful passage for hulking freighters and ten-inch guns as the bloated shipyards played war once-upon-a waning empire, the City’s benevolent masters of industry exposing themselves on their imagined new London for posterity.
But now, they’re spent matchsticks, teaching children physics, under Miss Keeble’s gaze, as they were on her first day at Jesmond Primary – segments of segments, straight down the serpent’s rippling back. The watercolour bridges – a brush-stroked haze from a magpie’s gaze – were made intact by many mindful hands. The vast blue sky – impossibly anonymous – lay in broken pieces.
An aged cleaner rattles Miss Keeble’s peace, noticing the bottle of wine in a sparkly gift bag beside the spare educator, her peers steering the swirling current of home time pick-ups. “Is it your birthday, pet?”
“No. It’s my last day.”
“Eeee, you’ve only just started!”
“Well. Nearly a year. I was only maternity cover.”
“Aye, I know what that’s like. Surplus to bloody requirements! I used to clean over the infant building. I loved them bairns. Cheeky buggers, these pre-teens. You must find them hard to manage?”
“That’s what they said.”
She had put the cardboard and pipe cleaners aside, eschewing the lesson plan, opting for breadsticks and strawberry laces, across a gap in their desks, bearing the weight of a slab of Cadburys.
The glee, uncontained.
The connection, longed for.
“Now EAT THEM children!”
Twenty-nine, fine.
The thirtieth, choking? Throat closing.
The EpiPen, entrusted, lost in a handbag. Left on a train.
The twin blades of an air ambulance above the playground.
The harm, none done.
The apologies, profuse.
The cleaner nods her confusion away. “I might jack this job in. Gan back to the tills in Asda. It pays a damn sight more, and I get a discount. More of a clock-in, clock out affair, mind. At least here, you leave when you’re done.”
She cranes over the neglected puzzle. Her crow eyes glitter in recognition. “Me grandad worked on them shipyards.”
“Mine too. Well, great-grandad”
“If they could see us now! Ey, I’d call that jigsaw finished, if I were them. The sky’s nowt special. Pointless, filling it in.”
***
The High Level Bridge ratcheted across the postcard expanse, defying its second century, its Victorian bones rod straight – three piers, six spans, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da – providing a peep show, a kinetoscope, for men of means on slick rails roused to blink through.
Those functional relics for ephemeral joy, or swelling shame, were scolded by progress. The eponymous Tyne Bridge arches its steely beamed spine like Atlas to bleary commuters from the carriages above, hurtling to another tide for the first or thousandth time, feeling awe in belonging, even in their everyday despairs.
Miss Keeble – now plain Fiona – regifted the wine to a hen party. Today wasn’t the day to fall off the wagon. A woman with a trolley trilled “snacks and refreshments” at her elbow. Fiona pointed to a Diet Coke, hiding her puffy eyes.
“Here you go. Actually… have that one for free. The fridge is knackered, so it’s a bit warm.”
She left Fiona to the vanishing sprawl.
Down on the quayside, sheer glass buildings twinkle and wink. The Millennium Bridge, the magnificent seventh, yawns in the face of tiresome endeavour. Bars and bistros and theatres occupy. Leisure and modernity lean at the muscled brown murk with deft, dainty fists. Grit and graft and short, thankless lives give way to mindfulness as deed and currency
This wasn’t a city of bridges or sky, not anymore.
It was for people who thought for themselves – broken and rebroken and rebuilt – unboxing new contexts, starting in the corners.
Ian Johnson (he/him) is an emerging writer from North East England. His words appear in Trash Cat Lit, Product, Apricot Press, Underbelly, Pistol Jim, Literary Garage, The Argyle, Scaffold, and Free Flash Fiction. He is a 2026 ‘Best of the Net’ nominee.
January House Literary Journal 
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