Mark Taylor

The fly was still alive on the web. It beat its wings to escape, then rested a few minutes, then tried again. She could free it, and damn the spider. Or she could leave it, and damn the fly. It was best not to interfere, she thought, a rule learned from nature documentaries and from people who would never stir themselves to intervene anyway. She looked again. The spider was nowhere to be seen. At one corner, the web had fallen into soft, fluttering wisps. She gently pulled the rest away, and the fly ambled skyward. She rolled the web between her fingers until it balled up and fell to the ground, whispering you can’t catch me.

“He doesn’t think ahead,” I said. “He just does what he’s going to do, and then he wonders why he loses.” The other dad made an ambiguous noise and sipped his drink. The boy dropped a counter into the Connect 4 board. “There, you see,” I said, “he’s given it away. There’ll be tears in a minute.” The girl made her line, but the boy picked up another counter anyway. “No, mate, you’ve lost already, see?” I said. They boy looked at me. “What do you mean, ’lost’? We’re making a pattern, Daddy. Can’t you see it?”

The street was all temptations. Pubs and bookies and kebab shops; convenience stores selling sweets and crisps and cigarettes and lager. Pretty young ladies invited him into gentlemen’s clubs. He walked past it all as though he was a righteous man. He was looking at his phone the whole time.

When the big tree fell, we counted its rings, but we could never seem to finish. Each person who tried came away with a bigger number than the last, and a bigger headache. The ones who worked together fell out. The ones who worked with notes or photographs would inevitably lose them. We decided it didn’t matter. We all knew the big tree had always been there.

At the end of the movie was a poem, read in voiceover by the main character. I would have preferred to discover it in an old forgotten book, but still, I was grateful. That poem seemed to answer every question I had about my life, or at least to promise that they might have answers. The reviews all agreed: that overused bit of doggerel at the end was the garish hat on a worthless film. Nobody in the world needed to hear it again. But I did.

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.