McCredited: UTM December 2025

A fox loped along Kennington Road, North Lambeth, London. Its tangled fur was a dull earth-brown. It seemed alert. After forty metres, it stopped and looked right and left before continuing. Ten metres from John, it slunk right into an alley’s shadows. The day was fading into twilight.
     John stared at the passage’s bin entrails, hoping the fox would return. Other people hadn’t noticed. The cold day was turning to a colder night; clouds massed. Snow fell.
        A rising wind gusted the fall into flurries. He watched flakes get sucked into in eddies between buildings, drawn upwards again to fall. He moved on when he began shivering, crossing the road through a gap in the traffic.
     Outside the Imperial War Museum, two naval canons pointed towards the Thames; both had fired in anger during the Second World War. Snow swirled around them. He trudged past the guns, the wind penetrating his unwashed clothes. 
     Inside, the museum displayed artefacts from centuries of war. For John, it offered warmth. The exhibits were blurred through his drunken haze. The words, the pictures, the armoured machines were indistinct: hard, dark shapes. He followed the designated route, passing jeeps, war planes and shells hammered from metal. Death curated.  
     He stopped before a black-and-white photo in a side collection. It blew through the alcohol fog: a baby boy caught in the 1984 Ethiopian famine, slumped on the ground. The tone was as cold as the weather outside. No one else was in the picture, the photographer invisible. The baby was alive in the picture, but only in the picture.