There are several, each with a few lines of text beneath a hazy photograph. But I've never noticed the notices before. I always stop to gawp at the window display and it always makes me feel a little less horrible, less strange. I like how it's a tiny refuge of imperfection. There's something sad about the jumble shop, but I like it.

The wigeon's trickling sawdust and the calligraphy set's likely to be missing inks or nibs or paper, almost certainly the instruction leaflet. The overcoat's sagged and the tambourine's punctured. The notice shares street-facing space with a sheepskin overcoat, a rubberwood tambourine, a stuffed wigeon and a calligraphy set. A PERSON WITHOUT OTHER PETS & WITHOUT CHILDREN UNDER FOUR. A photograph of your mangled face and underneath an appeal for a COMPASSIONATE & TOLERANT OWNER. You're Sellotaped to the inside pane of the jumble shop window. You find me on a Tuesday, on my Tuesday trip to town. There's no impulse from the root of his brain to the roof of his skull which says other than RUN. And there's no course or current to deter him. But he doesn't stop, and notices only the cumbersome blades, the spears of rain, the upheaval of tiny insects and the blood spilling down the wrong side of his coat, the outer when it ought to be the inner. Were he to stop, were he to examine the hillslope and hoof-rucks and groundsel and dandelions and chickweed and nettles and dock, he'd see how the breadth of his sight span has been reduced by half and shunted to his right side, how the left is pitch black until he swivels his head. It's attached to some gristly tether dangling from some leaked part of himself, but he cannot make out the what nor the where of it. It's the size of a snail shell and it makes a dim squelch each time it strikes. And there's a hot, wet thing bouncing against his neck. There's blood enough to gush into his beard and spatter his front paws as they rise and plunge. There's wind enough to tilt the slimmer trunks off kilter and drizzle enough to twist the long hairs on his back to a mop of damp curls. This time, he's further than he's ever seen before, past every marker along the horizon line, every hump and spork he learned by heart.

There are no steel bars to end his lap, no chain to jerk at the limit of its extension, no bellowing to trick and bully him back. This time, there's no chance for sniff and scavenge and scoff. Dandelions and chickweed, nettles and dock. He's the surge that burst the dam and he's pouring down the hillslope, channelling through the grass to the width of his widest part. And it's like no kind of running he's ever run before.

Spill simmer falter wither