OBLIQUE

That morning Françoise took her coffee, sat comfortably in the side basket of the old motorcycle and took a drag from her unfiltered cigarette. All the signs were that another cold winter was coming in small, quiet Oblique, sitting on the edge of France, far from the action -and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She may no longer have been a journalist for Libération or L’Humanité, but she always worked better alone. She had a voice here. A tiny voice, sure; but at least it was her own voice and no one, no one, told her what to say. She didn’t yet know what the next few days would bring. For a few more hours, the tiny island would enjoy its barren solitude in the Iroise Sea, before becoming the main topic on every news site, so unexpectedly that it would be discussed by experts and non-experts alike for entire decades.