Mark Taylor

After a fortnight shaving peaches, he began to worry that it was sending him peculiar. He took a walk around town, and watched to see what everyone else was doing. When he got home, he felt much better.

To punish my arrogance, the forest folk put a hex on me that transformed me into a tree. I love it. Every year my trunk grows a little thicker. Every year I reach a little further towards the sky. The sun shines, the rain falls, and I grow and grow. The forest folk are furious. But what can they do about it? I’m a tree.

She felt ashamed of the bird eggs, so she kept them in a drawer. Her grandfather had gathered them, starting when he was a boy, and she supposed that in those days children were not warned so firmly against it. Some of them were still in the nests. All of them were beautiful. All of them were cold. It wasn’t her fault, but she felt ashamed anyway. One day she decided that all her shame could not save a single note of birdsong, and she brought the eggs out for the children to see, with stern warnings that they were not to go collecting themselves. She set them in the sunlight, and one by one, they began to hatch.

After thirteen years of petitions, letters, public meetings, fundraising, and publicity, the council had finally agreed to add a loop-the-loop to the tram line, and Ian’s reward for all that work was a prime seat on the first service around it. He felt a trembling smile as the car started getting up to speed. The tram had never felt this way before, the way Ian always knew it should. The crowd ad the loop were all a blur. The driver made an announcement, but Ian didn’t hear. When they began to climb it felt like being launched from a trebuchet. For a moment, it looked as though they wouldn’t make it. And then they didn’t.

As an Easter treat, I allowed myself to retreat inside an egg. I curled up tight and held still until the shell had set around me. It was small and blue-green, like a blackbird’s egg. When I broke out of it on Monday I saw someone had built a little nest to keep me from rolling away. I washed myself clean and tucked the shell into a gap in the wall, and set about learning to talk again.

I have been writing a tiny story every day for the last six months. I’m not really sure why I started. I think I just thought it would be fun. It was not an attempt to be more disciplined or productive or consistent, which is probably why I’ve been able to keep it up.

Not long after I started, my wife asked me if it ever felt like a burden, having to do it every day. It doesn’t, because I don’t have to do it every day. I get to do it every day. I’ve given myself permission to spend a few minutes of each day on this, whatever else is going on. This is perhaps a healthier attitude to creative practice than any of my past attempts to be more disciplined, productive, or consistent.

There is a small, unimportant detail in Use of Weapons that caught me more than perhaps it ought to have. In hope of extracting a favour from a university, the Culture tracks down a set of wax tablets on which the legendary lost works of a great poet are inscribed. They are held in the wall cavity of a monastery, and are almost completely intact, except for three or four that have been damaged by a fire lit by a passing shepherd.