The Moderation Queue

Fern Kilbride sees about seven hundred strangers a day, for thirty-eight seconds each.

She is a moderator on the Wellbeing queue at a contact centre on the Broomielaw in Glasgow. A machine flags the posts that sound like trouble, and Fern decides: leave it up, take it down, or escalate. She never sees a name. She never sees what came before. She never finds out what happened next.

Then, in a sea swimming group, a plant swap and a carers' forum, she starts to recognise one voice. Lower case. A heron on a slipway. A mother who no longer knows her. Every message ends with the same word: anyway.

Fern is not allowed to look for her. She is not allowed to care what happens. And at the end of May the queue is closing, and a machine trained on Fern's own decisions will be doing her job.

She has been reading the Heron in pieces for weeks. She is about to find out what it costs to read somebody whole.

A tender, funny, quietly gripping story about work, strangers, care and the courage it takes to ask someone how they really are.