I dreamed about him nightly, for years, until I knew every wrinkle of his face. We never spoke in the dreams. Rarely did I even get close to him. But he was always there. After confusion, curiosity, and frustration, I began to feel safe. I had something to rely on, just as long as he was there.

One night he wasn’t. I dreamed of terrible things, the ground falling and splits in the sky. The next day I saw him on the street. We spoke for the first time. He said, I’m sorry, I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else, I’m afraid I really have to go.

I heard about it on a podcast. You measure out fifteen grams of sunflower seeds for every year you expect to live, and you put them in a jar. That gives you roughly the days you have left. It’s not too accurate, but hey, life is unpredictable too. In another jar, you measure out fifteen grams of sunflower seeds for every day you’ve lived already. And then each morning, you move a seed from the first jar to the second jar, and in this way you become aware of how your days are passing.

I got a few months in, and it felt like it was really working. I’d never got so much done. And then I slipped on the spilled washing-up water while carrying the jars across the kitchen. I lay there on the floor, feeling the seeds under my shoulders and on my fingertips and in my hair. The first jar had a little handful left. I poured them into my mouth. They were just beginning to turn rancid.

Not a single thing had sold all day. She paid a tenner for the pitch and another to hire a trestle table, which had threatened to buckle under the weight of her crap and was sagging even more six hours later. The float money she had prepared sat heavy on her waist. The price signs she had thought so carefully about were a jumble of discounts. She felt like a ghost. Except that ghosts get to leave all their earthly things behind, while she had to pile all hers back into the car and drive it back to the empty flat.

He’d been dumped by text before, but the eight-day comms round trip to the capsule made it worse. Worse becuase he knew she wouldn’t be chewing her fingers off waiting for a reply: she would have been over it before he read it. Worse because he knew he would regret any reply he sent before it arrived. And worst because he could do nothing to stop the message he had transmitted yesterday, dumping her.

She donated what she could. You don’t burn a perfectly good pair of jeans just because of what happened to you in them. And donation had its own kind of purification: the good deed balancing out the bad, the things being anonymised in charity shop backrooms where volunteers priced them up in terms of physical condition only. She almost felt she could go in and buy them back herself.

The rest she piled carefully, so it would catch well and burn clean. She knew how to build a fire. Dryer lint to letters to books to furniture, then the less flammable things, once the flames were already established. Warm on her skin; she wished she could see the glow on her face. She thought, without regret, that everyone would have understood, if only she had built it in the garden.

filling the suitcase with socks and tools and pancake batter and good books and bad cooks and typing errors and candy bracelets and resealable clear plastic bag for small items or jewellry 100/250/500/1000pcs and a seaside claw machine and toothbrush and spare toothebrush and fingers and chocolate fingers and a little bit of regret tucked in to fill up the gaps, just in case nobody else brought any

Since it’s all over, I sell just about everything I own, keeping only two pairs of each bit of clothing, a toothbrush, the little tent we never used. I buy a new rucksack, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, knowing that quality makes the difference. I consider a stove, a compact little thing, but I want to take as little of this place with me as possible. As I set off walking I turn over in my head what I might be: knight errant; pious hermit; roving killer. Something new, I decide, that the world won’t need a name for.

A minute in to the deckchair-eating competition, I realise I have made a huge mistake. I thought it was just a lark. Nobody can eat a deckchair. And of all the people who can’t eat a deckchair, I thought I would be top decile, at least. But these guys are pros. They’ve got technique. You can see which ones are using which method; who’s breaking legs up first, who’s tearing fabric into thin strips. And I’m here gnawing like an idiot, splinters in my tongue, not daring to look at the front row in case there’s pity in her eyes.

I always wanted to go in a helicopter. Don’t know why. I don’t like heights or noise. I like sitting in my garden and looking at birds. Helicopters aren’t even good for looking at birds. Anyway, every reason you might go in a helicopter seems like something bad. Some kind of rescue or something, or you’ve joined the military. Probably you’ve got a grievous injury, or you’re about to get one, or everything you have is on fire or underwater, or all of the above. I wouldn’t want to go in a helicopter if it was taking me away from the ruins of my house, the garden covered except for the sycamore tree where the magpies nest. Coming back only to pick through the rubble.

You can just pay to go in a helicopter. Feels a bit pathetic, though, all that money on a daft little whimsy in a helicopter that could be rescuing people. Maybe one day someone would get me that as a present. If they were to think of it.

Old Man Matthias lives in a little tumbledown hut on a scrubby patch of land where the scrapyard used to be. He’s off-grid, and he must have to shop sometimes but none of us have ever seen him. You sometimes spot him out in his garden or fiddling with his solar panels, or just stood there, arm in the air. We dare each other to sneak over, steal some apples, draw a cock and balls on a solar panel, but we always chicken out. He’s got a scary dog. We’ve seen it on his TikTok.

I tried on a few new pairs of legs. I’ve had these so long, they must need replacing. Some were stronger. Some were longer. All were more shapely. But none of them had that little tingle, the damaged nerve to remind me that they carried me everywhere I have been.

You know how it goes with immortality. First you think it’s the best thing that could ever happen to you, then you wise up and realise it’s a curse. The thing is that, so far, everyone has died in the end. They never got the chance to wise further up. You can’t just think your way into wisdom. The wise among us know that.

So if you wise up first and then become immortal second, you have a bit of a panic. You think: I’m going to watch everyone I love age and die. (It’s only our own mortality we’re supposed to be sanguine about, normally.) You think: what if I just get tired of it all? You think: what if someone sets my feet in concrete and throws me into the river?

You spend a long time thinking about the first two, and dismiss the third as a bit silly and outlandish. Of course, thinking about the first two is pointless, because you just have to live through them, the same way the mortals do. And thinking about the third is wise, because if you stick around forever, all sorts of things are going to happen to you. And when people learn you are immortal, this is the kind of idea they come up with to deal with you.

But what makes being thrown into the river with concrete shoes so horrifying is the part where you drown. The desparate struggle, when you have minutes left. I don’t have minutes. I have forever. I watch fish. I watch what floats past. I see the riverbed shift and flow. You know when you get sick, and it’s the only time that feels like a proper holiday, because on an actual holiday you can’t stop thinking about your responsibilities? It’s like that, at the bottom of the river. I’ll come out of it a better man. And I will come out of it. That’s what “immortal” means.

She had never been able to hula hoop. Never ever. She just wasn’t a person who could move that way. But she watched her kids say the same thing, “I can’t do it”, over and over. About riding their bikes, about tying their laces, about hula-hooping. They said it after a minute of trying, and whatever it was, before long they had done it. How long had she spent trying to hula-hoop over her lifetime, she wondered? How often had she tried more than once in a row?

So she took the day off work, and bought a hula hoop, and practiced. Because we are not fixed. We are capable of so much more than what we are now. That was the lesson the kids had taught her. That alone was worth all the late nights and heartache.

It was 4pm. The hula hoop clattered to the floor again.

What an unbelievable waste of effort it had been. Opening the wrappers with a razor blade. Syringing just the right poison in just the right dose, enough to do the job and well-distributed so the taste would be right. Smoothing the chocolate over the puncture marks with a hot knife. Resealing the wrappers. Subtly marking the one left safe for herself. She had thought of everything, except the dog. And now the bloody dog had eaten the lot. Not that she didn’t want to kill the dog too. But the chocolate would have done that on its own.

Pilot always knew first. She didn’t whimper or drop her ears: that came earlier, when she lost the scent but still had hope. Those things meant, “I’m a bad dog”, and all she needed was a reassuring touch and a few words from Pat to be off and running again. But sometimes, just as Pat thought they were getting close, Pilot would start playing. She would play brashly, irrepressibly, like a child who doesn’t want to be told off. She fetched sticks and nosed at pockets and ran around in tight little circles, like she was doing now. Those things meant: “It’s a bad world”. Those things meant that they would not find the boy alive.

She had snapped the spout clean off the teapot. She couldn’t help but play with it for a while, seeing how neatly it fit back into place. From the right angle there was barely a crack to show it had been broken.

She remembered her time as a nurse, breaking ampoules. Those tiny glass fragments that fell into the medicine. But there was no needle or filter to stop the shards floating in the tea from ending up in the cups. She poured her sister’s first. It made an almighty mess.

I sort each stone according to what it might be good for. Building. Skimming. Forming to an edge. Cracking a skull. Holding down a sheet. At the shoreline, the sea spray in my eyes makes it difficult. When I am finished, I take only the best from each pile, and walk along the cliffs to the next beach.