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He never could finish things. It was a fear in him, a childish sort of one that made him believe he could shut his eyes and it wouldn’t be there. Coming to an end meant this is all I can do. Coming to an end meant I think this is good enough. Coming to an end meant here is a part of me. One day he knew he would come to an end, a true end, forever, and it would do him good to get acquainted with the feeling. But that was a fear he couldn’t see even with his eyes open. So he never did finish things: when he saw the end coming, he just

There was a labyrinth on the playing fields, worn into the grass like a desire path, looping around and around. It had come gradually but felt sudden, for once you noticed it, you could not ignore it. We all walked its full length when we passed, even the late schoolchildren muddying their polished shoes by shortcutting. It made us feel much better. It was meditative, mindful, except that none of us knew why we did it.

It was a quick, deep cut, and I knew I would have to be fast to deal with it before the pain came and made me dizzy. There was blood on the window and my forearm and my shirt and I didn’t know where else; there might be blood on the new curtains, and then there would be trouble. I pressed my sliced thumb to my palm to slow the bleeding, and pressed my tongue to my teeth so I wouldn’t yelp when it started to hurt. I needed to be fast, but all I could think of was how stupid it was not to wear gloves.

I brought a bagful of shoelaced conkers to the office to get things started. Soon people started bringing their own; the finance team had a lead on a tree that grew them so small and compact they were like lead shot. I heard their manager boasting you could hardly drill through them, and then the message went round in private Teams chats, you’re not meant to use a drill, it makes them weak, you’ve got to push a hot skewer through. Bandaged fingers gestured to PowerPoint slides. Shattered shells littered the smoking area. The boss kept threatening to put a stop to it, but it wouldn’t happen. Not unless someone broke her thirty-niner.

There is a glitch in the new government ID system. Apparently it’s called an “off-by-one” error. Simple to fix, but the money and the will ran out, and the contractors have folded, so we just have to live with it. It has its ups and downs. Officially, I’m Maureen Lipman.

She had laughed halfway through the funeral, and everyone was being very nice about it. Even the family. Especially them. Grief shows itself in all sorts of ways, they said, but it wasn’t grief. She hadn’t been thinking of Emily at all, had hardly thought of her once since she died. She was thinking of a video she had watched that morning, of a goat screaming like a human. She was still thinking of it at the wake, as they told her not to worry. When they were finished she crept off to the toilets to watch it again. She wouldn’t think of Emily again, now. When she wanted to, instead she would think of the goat, screaming.

We woke to snow, and without getting dressed we went out on the street and slid on our bellies like penguins. As the cold hit us we half-laughed and half-screamed, or I laughed and she screamed, or the other way around. A picture came into my head of a broken beer bottle hidden under the snow, and a long deep gash opening down my front, but I let the bright sun burn it away. To think of it spoiled the fun, and with the cold, I wouldn’t feel it.

In her great uncle’s attic there were photographs of people who had never lived, and books that had never been written. She carried a portrait of a schoolgirl down the ladder to see it in the light, and it crumbled to dust in her fingers. It was all filed, packed up, labelled, but she had never been able to read his handwriting. It was like he used a different alphabet.

The boy was always looking for magic, and the trouble was that magic lived in frightening places: deep in the woods, at the bottom of wells, in mysterious caves. It was all they could do to keep him in sight. One day, he would slip away and dive into the lake to reach the island, or climb into the strange space under the old bridge. They worried what would happen then. They worried what magic he might find.

Under the wallpaper was wallpaper, and under that was wallpaper, and under that was half an inch of crumbling filler, and under that was scrunched-up newspaper, yellowed where it hadn’t turned black from damp. I pulled it out and saw that it from the day of my birth, like it was one of those reproductions you give someone for a big birthday. I opened it up as gently as I could. It wanted to be read: the creases seemed to disappear as I flattened it out. The headline said: DICKHEAD STRIPS WALL, GETS CAUGHT IN TIME LOOP. I packed the paper tight into the void in the wall, and spread the filler over it.

The thread of history has been severed, he said. Despair, despair, for all life shall unravel, and meaninglessness shall abound. I rolled my eyes. Who made his robes? Has the man never heard of a weaver’s knot?

The applause had been going on for six minutes. After thirty seconds it started to sound sarcastic. (Any applause at all was odd for what had been a quite unremarkable team update.) But now that the clapping had gone on for longer than the presentation, it had rolled them all up inside it. Nobody wanted it to stop. They could be a company that made applause, and feel good about it. It was the best day of Jake’s working life. The palms of his hands were turning red.

I opened my eyes and the world glugged in, like water through a bottleneck. There was too much needing to come out for it all to come in at once. I had got so good at sleepwalking I used every hour of the day: while I dreamed, I cleaned the flat and prepped meals for the freezer and sometimes picked up a night shift. From time to time I found socks in the cutlery drawer, cornflakes in the soup. From time to time I got fired. But I never went hungry.