The paddling pool arrived just as the weather broke. I carried the rain-spattered box inside. We’ll want it again soon, I thought. Since I cannot leave a parcel unopened, I took it through to the kitchen and took a knife to the packing tape, but my hand slipped and made a long, clean incision through the plastic inside. I let it drop to the ground, and carefully put the knife back in the drawer. Then I went out into the garden, and lay below the storm.

Behind the portrait was a hidden panel, and behind the hidden panel was a safe, and inside the safe was a key. She wasn’t sure what the key was for, but she didn’t have anything worth keeping in the safe, so she thought this would at least make a good joke one day.

At the bank there was a safety deposit box that nobody ever visited. When the fees stopped coming and they drilled the lock, all they found was a slip of paper with a number on it.

The first shelf he put up sloped down to the left, just a little. The second sloped down to the right, rather a lot. He could have rolled a marble down them with some satisfaction. It didn’t much matter. The cat wouldn’t let him put anything on them anyway.

There were three happy birthdays in my condolences card from work. The first was funny. The second stung. The third reminded me that it was, in spite of everything, my birthday.

When we kicked the mud off our boots it made the hallways smell like the old school changing room after football. Takes you back don’t it, one of us said, like there had been no better days since then. I remembered the ways I didn’t cry then, so didn’t cry now.

The kid said we should use leaves and stones as money. The stones were coins and the leaves were banknotes. I can teach her something here, I thought. I gathered up more of them than she could ever carry. I was the richest man on Earth. Her little purse was worth nothing to me. No, she said, those ones don’t count. Just like that, I was ruined. I had forgotten where the power lay.

In the east, another sun was rising before the last one had set. It slowed as it drifted across the sky, like a dead car rolling to a stop. As the week passed, another rose, and another; they accumulated in the sky, jostling for space, bright coins in a celestial penny-pusher. The world grew bright and hot, and a single shining moon looked down on us with pity.

For lunch we went to this little hole-in-the-world sandwich place, where beings of impossible beauty serve up dream-wrapped rolls from beyond time. Ted brought a packed lunch. He said he couldn’t afford to eat there. They didn’t charge, but still. We knew what he meant.

When he got back from the job and opened the back of the van, a cat hopped out. He had thought he heard something back there, but with the blood pounding in his head it had been hard to sure of anything. When it miaowed again, though, he recognised it. It looked up at him, the moonlight glinting off its collar. He knew it would be stupid to take it back. But her little eyes looked so sad.

Two little pigeons on a branch, fluffing up their feathers. They have only been pigeons for a day, and they don’t quite know what they are doing yet. Before that they were books, hurled out of a window with a curse that left them to flutter away. The pigeons feel there is great knowledge in them, but they don’t know how to share it, so they fluff up their feathers and shit on the cars. Already, more people have looked at the pigeons than ever looked at the books.

He was from the sea and she was from the clouds. I understand her, he thought. The sky is a great bright ocean. If only she could understand the deep. She thought: I understand him. The sea is a sky that holds you. If only he knew what it is to fly. But they met on the land, which made them both afraid.

We collected shells in a bucket and argued over whose were best. Bigger or shinier or more perfect or more unusual: we all had our arguments. Really we all just thought the day couldn’t be as special as it felt if it was special to someone else, too. When we got them home, the shells all looked as dull as each other, and the ones at the bottom had crumbled into coarse sand. We kept them until we moved out, and never looked at them.

I had lain there so long a layer of dust had settled over me. Weren’t you supposed to get bedsores and blood clots? Weren’t you supposed, at least, to get bored? I took a deep breath in through my nose, and thought that I would sneeze, but I didn’t. The dust on my upper lip didn’t even move. It was past time I got up, but I needed just a little longer.

At four in the morning, roused by the twilight, the cat climbed a shelf and knocked my magic lamp to the floor. We pretended not to hear and went back to sleep. By the time we woke up, his wishes had been granted: we were well-stocked with the posh food he likes, and next door’s cat had disappeared. But none of us could work out what his third wish had been.

The crab claw snipped at my toe and the sea came rushing in, salting me all through. They are illusory, imaginary, these borders between us and the world. But it stings like buggery when the world gets through them.

There are certain things (jumping into a volcano, fighting a bear) that feel like they ought to go on a “things to do before you’re forty” list, but can’t, because of you would die of them. Even if you wanted to take that deal you’d have to choose just one, which full ruins the list. That is why I sought immortality: because the stuff I want to do is just too stupid for a mortal to try at. And when I said so to the gods, their rage slipped into laughter. They granted my wish, and asked me to join them. It’s where they all came from, too.

In my dreams I am a great hero. Everyone loves me, everyone wants me. In my dreams I can fly, and my leg never hurts, and there are sweet fruits like nothing in the waking world. Sometimes, best of all, I notice I am dreaming, and I can make the dream be whatever I want. In those dreams, I sit quietly in that old garden, and listen to the birds with you.

I must have switched the wrong breaker, because the wire gave me a hell of a zap. I shook the finger out and instinctively put it in my mouth, although the pain was already gone. I thought there had been a buzz in my ears, a flash in my vision, a new kind of feeling. I wanted to touch the wire again with my wet finger. I hovered it an inch away, pretending to myself that I might to it by accident. Then I went and switched off the main breaker.

“I bet those ships you dreamed of weren’t so rough, eh?” he said. I leaned on the rail and thought about it. The ships I dreamed of were rough; the seas stormy; the nights cold. I was seasick and injured and almost went overboard. We were becalmed and boarded and shipwrecked. What made them dreams was knowing that, however much I dreamed that I might die, they could not kill me. “It’ll be rougher yet,” he said, and I held on to that: a crueller sea to dream of.

It had grown cold enough to numb fingers, and suddenly there were all sorts of fiddly jobs to do. Buttons to button, knots to knot. When we blew on our hands, our breath was cold and crystalline. When we rubbed them together, they powdered like snow. At the fireside, we thawed just so we could refreeze stiffer and more brittle. Slowly we came to understand our comrades who had walked out onto the ice.

As I strode down the street, my umbrella poked eyes and knocked off glasses and impaled a passing bluebird. I twirled it merrily as people dodged into the road or ducked into doorways. They yelped and shrieked, and some even tried to complain to me until they saw I didn’t care. It was a glorious dawn for me. I was young, and righteous, and newly rich.

The sky had shrunk to a tight blue square and then greyed away for good. It seemed easier to tunnel through the Earth to the other sky than to open mine back up. I thought of it, as I stared up at that little square, now white, now black, and willed it wider. But I chose the harder way. The stars would have been different there.

but when we checked beneath the tree it was gone, must have been healthier than it looked I suppose, or else one of the neighbourhood cats got to it. We stood there, me with the saucer, her with the milk, and the little one started crying, and we weren’t sure

Management had held a big meeting and determined that the tide needed firmer KPIs. The Head of Monitoring had them drawn up, along with a new data dashboard. They sent it all down to the beach. When the tide came in, the Head of Monitoring got a special award. With regret, they had to make the moon redundant: after all, it wouldn’t be needed to let the tide out again. It is a very complex thing, to manage the tides.

We climbed and climbed, and when our heads poked up out of the branches the world had changed. We couldn’t see grandma’s house, or the road, or even the church tower. Strange creatures grazed in the field, and there were new, bright stars in the midday sky. We hoped it would all come back when we climbed down. I was anxious to go and check. But not quite yet.

She heaped it up in great piles: rubble here, ashes there. The few good things she had left seemed invisibly small; she tried not to think of them. She took a brick in each hand and sunk herself into the ash pile. She could eat stones until it all blew away and never run out. There is always an abundance of something.

Snow fell at the summer barbecue, perfect snow that clumped to itself but only melted in mouths. We pulled the parasol over the hot coals to keep them from being smothered. The kids built castles and threw snowballs and then warmed their fingers back up in the sunshine; the grownups packed beers around the feet of a snowman. None of us thought it strange until years later. We remembered how the hot weather made a fistful of snow down your top so much colder.

Three weeks into my solitude, I began to feel I should be bottling my piss. That’s what you do when you’re a recluse, isn’t it? I’ve seen it in films, although I can’t call to mind which ones. I gave it a try, but I just couldn’t make it work. I can’t even do this right.

He knew he could do it better than them. Even now, with all the cuts on his fingers and the glue in his hair and the slivers of something stuck under his skin, he knew it. He just needed to ask one of them for help. Just with the first bit. He reached for the courage he had always known was there, and drew a breath. But he couldn’t do it.

kaleidodazzle sawblade fades and there is time to get home before the pushing at the eyes, on the bus with strained nod like the pain has come already, tight face to say it’s not my fault i’m not more friendly. beep of the card reader scoops down into my stomach. engine heat scoops down further. sun swinging past the windows through my closed fingers to make more zigzag lines and i feel the push before the pushing, maybe too weak to get off at my stop. find me a dark spot in the bus depot, nest me in, bring me a sausage sandwich in the morning.

It was the first time I had been allowed to work the big machine. I had begun to think the training was a cruel joke, that it would go on forever and there would always be some new thing to learn. But two weeks’ shadowing was the last step, and now the foreman had fixed the badge to my chest that showed I was an operator. I remembered them saying that three quarters of injuries on the big machine happen the first week you work it. I remembered it as my hand was pulled into the gearing. And I wondered why they never told me what the big machine was for.

If it takes ten men working together ten hours to dig a ten foot by ten foot by ten foot hole, how long will it take one man working on his own to fall it it and knacker his ankle? A few seconds, it seems—but that’s like only counting the last spadeful of earth. It took years to get me this distracted and unobservant and clumsy. An expert can do things in moments that would take a novice days. And it takes real expertise to miss a ten foot by ten foot by ten foot hole. Anyway, I’ve got some time to think about it. How long will it take one man working on his own to climb out?

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.

Day one in the new job. I see my old boss sat behind the new boss’s desk. No sign of the thoughtful and charming woman who interviewed me. The company has taken over all the contracts I was most looking forward to being rid of. My chair squeaks when I sit back, announcing to the office that I am lazing, just like my old one did. In the afternoon meeting, my new old boss puts a photo of Anita on the projector. Anita, who I used to sit next to, who I shared snacks and stories and paracetamol with, the one person I was sad to leave behind. This is our competitor, he says, scratching at her eyes with the laser pointer, and we are going to crush her.

I had forgotten what little French I learned in school, so before we went I bought a tape. None of it was familiar, but that’s how forgetting goes. I got my tongue around it much better than I ever did in my lessons. I had more reason to learn, and I felt proud of myself. When we arrived, I could see in people’s faces that they didn’t understand a word. But they all did as I said.

Things fell together. Clothes healed at the seams; forgotten friends drifted back into my life. I came to expect it. I looked at shards glittering on the pavement and thought: the glass is already unbroken. Stirred batter separated into flour and eggs and milk. Stones rolled uphill. Everything stopped burning. Even the stars.

Before the concrete set we all pressed our hands into the surface, so there would always be something of us there. When we went back there were two hands missing; three that had outgrown their palmprints; one that was a knuckle short on the ring finger. But mine filled the hollow as though I hadn’t lived a day since the concrete set.

My dishwasher was out of salt, and the annoying thing about my dishwasher is that once that light goes on, it will not do anything until you put the salt in. Apparently it would break the machine. I don’t see how. I didn’t have any salt. I tried weeping into the reservoir, but I just can’t get that upset about dishwashers. I had to pay someone else to do it for me.

In the dream I am in the Crystal Maze. I got locked in on the first game and my teammates will not buy me out. I sit in my damp jumpsuit while they finish their adventure, triumph in the Crystal Dome, and go on their bungee jumping experiences. They remember the day fondly, bringing out their souvenir crystals at family gatherings and using it as their interesting icebreaker fact. But non of them remember me. I hear other teams running past my door, until one day the programme is cancelled, and the maze falls silent.

It was a still day, and there were waves in the grass. I had invented a hundred explanations for it. I had worked out how there could be a breeze at ground level and nowhere else. I had imagined helicopters about to land. I had gazed out at it for so long I began to think the waves were in my head, an optical illusion or the beginning of a migraine. I think if the grass had only been still, I could have borne staying inside.

Their love was young, but they had gathered many things to it. A ticket stub; a headphone splitter; a shiny new front-door key. A feather he saw and thought was beautiful. A charm she saw that would keep them safe. They gathered these things and brought them to the safe place in the tree, his gifts woven into hers, her gifts woven into his, to build their nest.

On the morning of our wedding day I discovered she had never had a crumpet. I can love someone who has not eaten a crumpet. Of course I can. But should you marry someone who has managed to keep that fact from you almost until the ceremony? That sounds accusatory. I mean, should you marry someone when it turns out you don’t know them as well as you thought? The worst part was, she didn’t seem to think it was serious. In fact, she got quite angry.

Dan decided to be the kind of man who eats roadkill. Resourceful, thoughtful. In touch with nature, but in a gritty way that didn’t shy from the realities of wildness: red in tooth and claw and a smear down the tarmac. He put a spade and a coolbox and a roll of extra-strong binbags in his boot. Serial killer shit, Amy called it. He smiled at that. The first fox he butchered had him sick for a week. But he was that kind of man, now.

When it was over she felt like a dandelion clock, ready to break into a hundred pieces when the wind blew. It was too much, to hold on to all those pieces, but to let go of them was more. She closed her eyes and bowed her head and waited. As the sun fell low, someone raised her to their lips and blew, gently. She scattered, and landed, and grew, and she granted them a wish.

He walked home by the side of the golf course and was always afraid of a stray ball catching him in the head. Never mind if it was night: that just meant he would never see it coming, and nobody would see him fall. Every step jarred through his body to the back of his skull, where he felt the impact that never came. But it saved him two minutes, so he always went that way.

It was so hot I thought I might melt, the way your kid’s favourite toy does when you try to clean it in the dishwasher. Misshapen and bubbling, but still recognisable enough to make a loved one cry. I thought I might melt just enough to turn brittle when I set again, to look OK and then crack a month later. I thought I might melt, but I didn’t, and the weather turned again.

The book was soaked from cover to cover. She could try to separate the pages now, and feel them disintegrate between her fingers. Or she could let them dry until they were fused together. She thought of ancient scrolls scanned with X-rays, and the blobs of tissue on the ceilings of school toilets. It had been a special book, a gift. She threw it back into the pond. The animals would know what to do.

I have lost a seven-league boot. I’m not sure if I look stupider taking one enormous step and then one normal-sized one, or doing seven-league hops. But I have to choose one or the other. The thing could be anywhere.

For fourteen years, my father has been trying to sell his game show concept, Pardon the Dogshit. He will not tell you what Pardon the Dogshit involves. He will not listen to any suggestions about a change in title. He has pitched it to TV and radio, and for a time he intended to stage it independently at the Edinburgh Fringe. My father is a wonderful man, kind and loving, respected in his day-job and active in the community. But Pardon the Dogshit will be his legacy, he says. It was going to pay for my house. Now it will pay for my children’s houses. And when he finally sells it, he won’t let them put his name on it, because he doesn’t want us to live his shadow.

The prince hopped around his pond for three days, waiting for a princess he could tempt with a kiss. As the sun rose on the fourth, he was snatched up by a crow. The witch had thought of that: his soul passed to the bird, and he went soaring off. The freedom of flight was almost worth the pain of his frog body dying.

His new wings carried him to the castle, where the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was playing with a golden ball. He landed a little way away and watched—watched the wrong thing, it turned out. A plump ginger cat that never caught much of anything got its jaws around his throat. His mind poured into its belly along with his bird blood.

He dropped the ruined crow and padded over to the princess. She scratched between his ears, and he purred. This was his chance. He biffed her lowered nose gently with his forehead; she smiled and planted a gentle kiss between his eyes. He felt the cat’s skin stretch and split as his true body returned to him.

On the fifth day, they found him guilty of witchcraft on the princess’s favourite cat, and took his head off.

I tried very hard to learn to ride a unicycle, but I never managed it, so instead I tell every unicyclist I see how much of a stupid waste of time it is. You don’t see unicyclists that often, admittedly. But you can find them online. Sometimes they have meetups you can show up at. You can always find a unicyclist to make fun of, if you’re willing to put the effort in.

They woke on Sunday morning seeing through each other’s eyes. She thought she had gone blind, until her panicking woke him and she saw herself, sat up in bed. They spent the morning stumbling about, closing their eyes because being blind was easier, or else putting their heads together to get a view that almost made sense. It was months before they felt they functioned again. But on the Sunday their sight returned to the right eyes, it felt like a loss.

With careful saving, close attention to dropped change, and a little light theft, Sally had accumulated one thousand four hundred and twenty-two pence, along with a little foreign currency she hadn’t much use for. She kept it in an old ice cream tub under her bed. Every few days she counted it, and most times she got the same number. But today, when she slid the tub out she could feel that it was too light. She would get a little broken toy from the charity shop in exchange, and that would be the end of it. She put the tub back, pretending it was heavy. She didn’t want to count it.

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.

Donald lost his leg at the knee by trying to peel a hard-boiled egg while driving. It was a stupid thing to do, but he had done it a hundred times before without incident. He would knock them on the steering wheel until the shell was well shattered, and then slide the skin off one-handed with his thumb. So it wasn’t the egg that betrayed him so much as the complacency. When they came to cut him out they found him nibbling at the yolk. For the shock, he said. Now he drives an automatic, and peels his eggs before he sets off, and tries not to think of the other driver, who eats hers through a tube.

There have been four or five opportunities for me to let go of the kite since I first caught hold of it and it lifted me into the air. A tree or two; a pile of straw; a huge inflatable at a summer fair. At all of them, I hesitated, and then the chance was gone. Now I am out over the sea, and flying steadily lower. Soon my heels will skim the waves, and not long after I will fall, and then I will drown. But without my weight, the kite will fly high again, and it will be beautiful.

The snake was getting restless. She had been a gentle thing, to begin with, but she did not like her new keeper. She got scrawny rats these days, and was brought out only to frighten people. And frighten them she did, though she was gentle. Her keeper’s eyes and voice made sure of that. But she could be gentle with him, too. Gentle as venom.

They set the warm black stone into the floor when they built their house. It was not enough to keep the place truly warm: they still lit fires in the winter. But they were never truly cold, either. When they had no wood for a fire, they made their bed above the stone, or put the frozen water-jars there to thaw. It was like having some great animal’s body to heat them. But it had teeth they could not see.

His fires would never catch. There was not enough airflow, or the wood was damp, or he hadn’t built it right. Not enough kindling. Too windy. It was embarrassing. He was supposed to be a man. But they always died away, until he went through half a box of firelighters. Not today. This one burned so merrily that nothing was going to stop it, and he was just beginning to regret lighting it.

He rowed out to the island, then shoved the boat back out onto the lake. It drifted along the shore for a bit, threatening to run aground, but eventually it floated off. He supposed the hire company would recover it. He picked his way into the wood to begin his hermitage. A nice young couple were picnicking there. They insisted on taking him home.

I’ve been up in a hot air balloon a hundred times and we’ve never had to decide on someone to throw out. We just go up, float around for a bit, and land again. Sometimes the weather turns and we have to come down a bit early. Once we missed the landing zone. That’s it. And now the crew all know me. I could even make myself handy, in a pinch. There’s no way I’d be the one to get thrown out. So how am I supposed to know I matter?

He knew he was dreaming, because it was snowing in summer, and the snow was neither cold nor warm, and it tasted of lemons. He knew he was dreaming because the girl he was talking to had died when he was young, and the drinks in their hands refilled themselves. He knew he was dreaming, because he didn’t have his phone and didn’t care, because his watch didn’t tell the time, because it had been days and the sun had never set. But he knew what dreaming felt like and what it didn’t, so he knew he was awake.

She had put one of those funny foreign coins in the pinball table, and it must have been worth more than she thought, because she was getting game after game. She was meant to meet her parents at the cafe soon, and every time the ball went down the drain she hoped that it was over just as much as she hoped it would carry on. When you hoped for two opposite things, you ought to be happy with whatever you got, but somehow she was always disappointed. She hammered at the flippers as another ball went down. It had been forty minutes, and she wasn’t getting any better.

He had been up the tree for four hours when he started to feel the pressure in his guts. He had planned for everything else. He had food and drink, and straps to hold him if he nodded off, and big empty wide-necked passata bottles to piss in. But this, somehow, he had forgotten. There were twenty hours left. There was sunshine glowing through the young leaves. There were well-wishers picnicking below, and two in the branches with him. He was going to have to give the sponsorship money back. He was going to get a new nickname. But that could wait, a little while. For the moment, it was beautiful up there.

He wished he had faked a less dramatic death. Something common and well-known and entirely his fault. It had worked—worked perfectly—and he should have been happy. But it riled him to see them campaigning every day, trying to raise awareness and never understanding how unaware they were. He knew they would make it about themselves.

The bolt cutters looked a little suspicious, so he put them in the bag. It was dawn when he arrived at the bridge where the lovers fixed their padlocks. “Bad breakup,” he told those who stopped to look. Then he waited a minute or two for them to move on, and started cutting again. When he was finished, the bag was too heavy to take home, so he heaved it into the river. The one lock he left behind shone in the morning sun.

He had heard about the grains of rice on the chessboard, but he didn’t believe it. He read the numbers over twice, four times, eight times, but he didn’t trust them. Numbers lied all the time. So he got down the old chessboard, and went to the shop for a bag of rice (a big bag—no, two big bags, he wasn’t stupid). He started in the corner, one two four eight. By the time he reached the last square, he was feeling pretty pleased with himself.

She encased the bee that killed him in resin and wore it round her neck. Neither of them had known about the allergy. It was as though that bee had been made for him, destined for him. She supposed all deaths were like that: you survived everything else. The creature changed in strange ways, even sealed up as it was. It darkened and turned more translucent. She imagined that one day it would slip out and fly away, and then she would feel safe without it at her heart. She told people she wore it to mourn him, and they believed her.

The radio was acting strange. Instead of static between the channels, there was music, slow and lilting and played on instruments she didn’t recognise. It was there when she tuned in, too, underneath whatever was playing. It was only on her set, the one her father had donated to the charity shop and she had bought back. Some high-power pirate station, she supposed. Hopefully it would be shut down soon. She taped an hour of the music, just in case.

The man in front bought the last bag of clams. She paid quickly for her bunch of parsley and caught sight of him on the street, stepping into the charity shop. There was condensation beading on the carrier back where the ice pack sat. He browsed the poetry books: four minutes looking at last year’s A-level texts and anthologies of First World War poets, like he was counting the letters on the spines. She followed him out and down the street, through the market, through the park. He forgot the clams at the bus stop, but she had already followed him on board.

Jenny had always wanted to shoe a horse. She liked all the different ways it sounded. I shod a horse. When I was learning to shoe a horse… The thing about shoeing a horse is… One year, for her birthday, she tried it. They asked if she wanted to ride as well, but she was too frightened. She didn’t enjoy the shoeing much, either. But the talking about it—that was just as pleasurable as she had imagined.

Outside the registry office, falling blossom had mixed with thrown confetti. Petal and paper and plastic, all of it announcing something beautiful and new. Danny swept it from the steps, making neat little piles for his dustpan. It wouldn’t do to have the next couple slipping. Out of the piles he rescued a shiny golden heart, a perfect pink flower, a blue circle that reminded him of an iris. He slipped them between the pages of his New Testament, and went on down the path, to scrub away the bird shit.

All these words have been written already. I could erase them, burn them out like dead flesh, but why? To have been is to be. The only change is making something new.

Something was beeping, high and short, like a dying smoke alarm. But it was everywhere he went. At home; at work; in the big green field at the end of the road. Somewhere—everywhere—the batteries were running out. There was nothing to do but ignore it.

Making the card had been easy. Glue and glitter and felt tips and even some pressed flowers. One of the grown-ups had brought those in a special box, and each of them got to choose one. Some of the children weren’t good writers, so the grown-ups had brought beautiful stickers with “Happy Mother’s Day” printed on, which made it even easier. It was going to be much harder working out what to do with it. He was too proud of what he had made to stick it in the bin. But who was he supposed to give it to?

Is, was, will, might, ought. Did any of it matter? It was all just talk, all coloured with falsehood. A film over the world like the one her mother had on her eyes, slowly blinding her. She drank the potion down and felt it all melt away: every word she had ever known, and the ways to put them together, and the way a little sound could conjure up an entire person she would sooner forget. It left a taste on her tongue. She couldn’t say what it was. But she could feel it.

Change came all at once. Her mother stopped criticising and her father started talking to her. She received appreciative emails from her boss. Drivers were calm and thoughtful and generous. Junk mail stopped arriving. Men came to her street and fixed the drains and the potholes and cleaned up the litter. No more was dropped. The chocolate biscuits her grandmother always used to have reappeared in the shops. For a week, she was suspicious. For a month, she was happy. Than everything went back to normal.

Only when the rain stopped did I realise that I should have tried to collect it. I didn’t have much by way of time, or materials, or expertise, but I should have tried. Instead, I had lain on my back and let it rinse the dust from me. I had opened my mouth wide and caught a few sweet drops. I should have been scrabbling in the dirt to preserve another mouthful or two, for when the rain stopped. But lying there, cool and wet and alive, I could not find a drop of regret in me.

The first time I went to see Mr Silver, I took a tin of warm ginger biscuits and a fish supper. I was seven, and I was scared of his big beard and his dog. We ate all the biscuits before I went back home—before they even cooled down—and afterwards I was still scared of him, but in the fun way I was scared of the high branches of trees.

The last time I went to see Mr Silver, I wanted to take another box of biscuits, to make things neat. But that didn’t seem quite right. So I left them at home, to share with the boy next door who hides when he sees me.

“Be or don’t be, then,” someone shouted from the back, “make your bloody mind up”. There were a few nervous laughs and quiet tuts, and more than a few people took the opportunity to get their coughs and fidgets out. On the little church hall stage, Hamlet paused. Suddenly, it was there, in his eyes; his shoulders; the way he breathed: he didn’t know what to do.

To the best of my knowledge, I am still, to this day, the only man to have driven all the way across Britain, east to west, without stopping. Not for petrol, not for coffee, not even for a wee, and let me tell you, people always laugh when they hear that last bit. They say an Englishman’s home is his castle, well, they came up with that one before they invented cars. People think it’s just a matter of pointing your arse at the rising sun and putting your foot down, well, let me tell you, it’s a bit more complicated than that. There’s route planning, fuel efficiency, time of day even. It took me seven goes but I did it. It was a while a go now and I don’t like to go on about it too much. But since you’re at the BBC, maybe you could put me in touch with someone about it?

Is there another road that goes to the same town? One without tolls or those tricky narrow tracks. One where you can stop by a clear stream and paddle while your packed lunch goes down. One where nobody ever crashed and died, or hated themselves for not dying. Is there another road, one I never took before? If there is, I’ll come home.

“Been anywhere nice this summer?”, she asked. I thought about the weeks on the space station spent biting my lip to keep from howling, hating the place I had always wanted to go more than I have ever hated anything. I thought about the wedding, the one I ought to have got this haircut before, not after. The one where I didn’t quite have my Earth-legs back yet, and the couple hated me because everyone wanted to talk about space. I thought about sitting in this familiar chair with its familiar smells, being tended to by hands that I have trusted since I was a boy. “Yeah,” I said, “Yeah, I have.”

“Have they finally got rid of her?” They had not, in fact, finally got rid of me. I had simply tidied my desk before leaving the previous evening, and been delayed by a broken-down bus that morning. But for one absurd moment, I felt guilty about stepping round the corner and shattering his hopes. There was excitement in his voice that you don’t hear enough of. As a kindness, I waited long enough that he would think I hadn’t heard.

To anybody else, it would have seemed quite unremarkable: just a little square of scrubland, too small to build on. But he loved to perch on the little wall and watch unwanted things grow. He loved to see the rough beauty that broke through when nobody else was looking. It was the first warm day of the year, and a few hundred metres away the park was thrumming with human life. Here, all was quiet. When the butterfly he was watching drifted away, he drifted with it.

A little later, the butterfly drifted back in the company of a girl in scuffed blue trainers. She stepped over the little wall and sat in her favourite place that nobody else knew.

Why would they put a sword in there if they didn’t want you to try pulling it out? He put both hands on the hilt and braced a foot against the stone. It felt good to heave on something, to feel all his body set to one purpose, an unbroken chain of force from the palms of his hands to the soles of his feet. But then the sword began to move. He let go so quickly he almost flew backwards.

But for the stone in her shoe, she would have made her train. She ran on it knowing that it would take too long to stop and tip it out. As long as she didn’t mind the pain, she could run fast enough. She felt her foot start to slip as her heel turned bloody. Beneath it, the stone shifted, until it was at the ball of her foot, right under the bone. She landed hard on it, and the shock took her down. It was a little thing, no larger than a teardrop. Her other foot was fine.

Flesh, in pencils, paints, or Plasticine, had always meant pink with a little yellow, the colour that outlined him and his brother and his sister and his parents. It always seemed a little odd to him, since it didn’t match the flesh of his neighbours and friends or even his uncle Den. But one day someone told him that we’re all the same colour inside, and so he thought that must explain it: people like him just happened to be the same colour all the way through. These days he was wiser, and he felt foolish when he recalled those childish ideas. But he couldn’t shake the idea of flesh as a pale and pink and squishy and elemental, made of nothing but itself, and of his own being somehow truer than other people’s.

Dead straight and faster than a diving hawk, the arrow cut through the air. It shouldn’t have. It was just a twig, unshaved, unstraightened, unfletched. The bow it flew from was a short branch strung with old yarn. But their wind was kind, and even the turn of the Earth seemed to wish the quarrel to its mark. The wish came true, and the man fell, howling. He clutched between his legs. The ground ran purple with dropped squash.

Like it or not, the dark magic of Karvhald the Soul Render is here to stay. However attached we might be to our old lives, our warm fires, the colour of the sky, the flesh on our bones, we cannot afford to be left behind. But the needs of Karvhald’s world-beating spirit furnaces must be balanced against the feelings of those whose cattle and offspring are to be hollowed out by them. So today, we are introducing a bold new voluntary code of conduct for the soul rending industry. A new presumption of consent will power up our crucial sorcery sector, while a robust opt-out process will address the concerns of parents and innocents. The future is with us, and it is Karvhald: it is only right that we bargain with him for a prosperous Britain.

Out in the vegetable patch, the boy is digging again. There cannot be so much work to do. I have kept a garden before. I used to keep this one. The plants grow themselves. He is avoiding me. He is out there turning the same soil all day to avoid his duty. It’s an insult to our generosity, and to the great abundance that spills from the earth. I’ll make him regret it. We’ll enjoy our crop alone.

“Them old truths ain’t gonna last,” she told me. She never spoke like that: she was always very proper. It made me wonder where she got it from. It made me trust her, too: because she had listened and remembered; because she herself had trusted someone who wasn’t like her. By the time I saw the hokey old film she got it from, our old truths were already long gone.

Burn the meat and everyone is too polite to mention it. Burn the planet and it’s much the same. It’s enough to make you wonder what else you can get away with burning. I keep a box of matches in my bag just in case, wrapped up in plastic for when it rains. Since I have to eat the meat and live on the planet, I don’t get them out much. But I like to know that whatever else the world has to be, it doesn’t have to be cold or dark.

Them and us. It was always them and us, until things got worse, and it became them or us. But the more we blamed them, and the more they blamed us, the worse it got. The more we hurt them, and the more they hurt us, the worse it got. Soon, there won’t be enough left to have a “them” anymore. Soon, there won’t be enough left to have an “us”.

Erase the tapes. We need the space. It’s true, I’m sure, but all the same I wonder: why make space on these tapes, and not others? Who tears the labels from them before they are handed to me? Why are some of us fired and others forgiven for the same transgressions? Why aren’t similar facts about different people in the same transmissions? Today, I came prepared with blanks in my bag, their labels stuck on and torn off again. I pop the write-protect tabs off the condemned cassettes, and make the exchange.

“Could you pass the… er… thing?” Amy asked. “The, um, that, you know.” The word had gone. The whole concept had gone: she couldn’t describe the thing she wanted, couldn’t picture it, couldn’t imagine why she might have wanted it in the first place. She was snapping her fingers trying to remember. People were laughing. People were guessing. None of it meant anything to Amy. But the want was still there, and powerful. She looked down the table, arm outstretched. Silent, smiling Erica placed it in her waiting palm.

“I before E”, they told me, time and again, and because those were the only times anyone said I could come first, I became a wonderful speller.

Already, she was too far away to hear me, so I wasted neither breath nor time on calling out. I just ran. I barely had time to notice she was moving before it was too late. I knew that if I didn’t think, didn’t even think in that bodily way that told me running so hard would kill me, that I would catch her. I knew a moment before I planted my foot that I was about to turn my ankle.

Written on the ceiling of the guest bedroom was “SLEEP TIGHT.” Just like that, in black block capitals with a full stop, the kind of decorative feature that makes you fear the ceiling is going to descend in the night and press you like an apple. It was just one thing, but it made the rest of the room seem sinister, so that I had to put the candles and the cuddly hotdog in a drawer. I slept as well as could be expected. In the morning, the words were gone.

Been anywhere nice? they all ask, one by one, when I come back from leave. I tell them all something different. Yes, thanks, I’ve been to the moon. No, just been strung out in an opium den for a fortnight. I’ve been on a cheesemaking course. I’ve been hiding in your airing cupboard. Just one of them, I tell the truth. She doesn’t believe me.

Have you seen it? Have you seen it shining brilliantly in the sky? Have you seen it and felt the deep sense of peace that comes over you? Have you seen it, a colour that has never been seen before by human eyes? Have you seen it? I haven’t.

Words appeared on the surfaces of everything, tiny and tightly wrapped, without a gap between them. He cut open an apple and found words all through the flesh. He cut open his fingertip and found words in the blood. The doctor called it hallucination. But what did she know? She was only words.

These are my hands. Every scar on them is a mark of weakness or stupidity: the tool I didn’t know how to hold; the slab I should never have tried to lift. Every scar they lack would have been a mark of noble toil or sacrifice. Blood spilled honourably. They have neither killed nor saved. They do not hurt. But they itch, sometimes.

All I can do now is ask. Ask the manager. Ask the caseworker. Ask the trees and the sky and the air. Ask the world to turn. Ask myself to turn with it. This is all I was ever doing. This is all I could ever do.

I felt the liquid seep into my sock. Nothing to do done: a moment’s inattention, and the day was ruined. I tried not to cry. I didn’t succeed. I pushed my damp foot into my shoe and heard the little things that lived between my toes rejoice. On my way out the door, I set the apartment alight.

My capsule, powered by a spacetime distortion drive of my own design, touched down on Pluto just as I received word that it had been declassified as a planet. The whole thing was ruined. You can’t announce your galaxy-conquering genius from a a second-rate dwarf planet. But stepping out and looking around, I couldn’t blame them. The place was a dump. Even the locals agreed.

I forgot which book operated the secret door. Embarrassing, but not a disaster. I resolved to try each one in turn. The trouble was, I kept getting distracted by the books. Every time I pulled on one I had to read it again. When I got the the last book, I remembered: I never had a secret door. I had just read about it, in one of the books.

The daffodils, I told them, would double every year. No need for seeds or cuttings: where one had bloomed last year, there would be two this year. They thought this was beautiful. They had never heard the story of the grains of rice on the chess board. No, I told them. We have to pull them up, stamp them down, burn them away, now, before they overrun everything. Cut them down and display them if you insist on thinking them beautiful, but on no account let them grow.

The egg cracked, and the outside spilled in, and the inside spilled out. Where there had been two things, the world and the egg, now there was just one. We had lost something by the breaking, I thought. But it was something we were always going to lose. And it was better to have lost it while the egg was fresh.

A great crack opened in the earth. Inside I saw glittering buildings and plentiful orchards. Unworldly music drifted up on the warm air. And there were people, looking up in terror at the rift that had appeared in their sky. Around me, I heard shouts and moans of fury. The road would be closed for weeks.

Now and then when the air lifted away above us I would drift over new ground and settle somewhere unfamiliar. These places were all much the same: the same plants and creatures growing among the same stones and sand, just shaken about into a different arrangement. I would get used to this new place, bounded all around by rocks and above by that unsteady border with the air, and then everything would move again. Sometimes I see crabs scuttling away into the air, and I wish I could follow them. But what would be the point? There’s nowhere to go except another pool.

He lived on a huge train, all joined in a loop on a circular track. When he tired of going around one way, he would slow it, stop it, and go round the other. Most of the time, he looked out onto the landscape. When he felt lonely, he looked in, and watched the other carriages. From time to time, he would slow the train to walking pace, and stride along in opposition to its motion. It was the only time he spent still. “Oh yes,” he told his friends, “I’m always travelling.”

They had replaced Kendra with a robot. Not to save money: they just didn’t want her around. So every morning, she put on her sleek white costume and light-up mask, and set off for the office before anyone arrived, and pocketed a support fee that was somehow higher than her old salary. It was hard, staying roboticall silent around colleagues he liked. But her manager was so much nicer to her than he used to be.

I got to the shop before it opened. I watched them bring out trolleys and A-boards and raise the shutters. It was like watching a flower open. A beautiful, vibrant thing. But I was going to be late, so I walked down the road to the little Tesco, and as I went my shopping list fell out of my pocket.

At the very centre of each sunflower was a liitle black eye, like a camera lens. At first I thought they really might have been cameras. There are cameras in everything these days. But they weren’t. Just the sunflowers, taking an interest. They no longer turned to face the sun. They turned to face passing cats and pretty faces and each other. They turned to read the words on the signs and graffiti and billboards. They watched everything we did, for a week or two, and then they turned away.

I would like to become a shopping trolley. (If I were a shopping trolley, I could be useful when I felt like it and lock my wheels up when I didn’t, and that would be better.) But regrettably, this is beyond the capabilities of even our most advanced science. As such, I am on the lookout for a wizard or a sprite who, if they take against me, will transform me into a shopping trolley. When I find them, I will antagonize them until the job is done. There is a man outside the supermarket I have heard threatening people with curses. But I don’t know how those people manage to upset him. The two of us seem doomed to get on famously.

You must never turn the covers of a book all the way back on themselves. The story will start to spill out. You will meet people who remind you of its characters. Events uncannily like those in the plot will happen around you. You will think more and more like the narrator. The world will come to resemble what the author believed or feared or hoped it might. You must never do this to your books. I do it, all the time.

I used to get 20p for doing the pots. 50p for washing the car or raking up the cuttings after my dad mowed the lawn. A pound for polishing his shoes, as long as I didn’t get any on the carpet. Two pounds the time I defrosted the freezer. A fiver to hide mum’s cigarettes. A tenner to hide Uncle Jim’s whisky. Two hundred pounds when Grandad died. And he always insisted on doing the washing up, so it earned me a few extra 20ps, too.

When I was nine years old I buried myself in the good dark soil in the garden, up to my shins. I thought it would make me grow tall, like a tree. My parents indulged me. They brought me squash and sandwiches until it was time to go to bed. I wanted to stay there all through the week’s holiday, and go back to school the tallest boy in class. They said I had to pull myself up or they would do it for me. But they couldn’t. I hadn’t grown a hair taller. But I had grown roots.

The ghost in my house whispers the end of the book I’m reading into my ear while I’m trying to sleep. The ghost in my house eats all the peanut butter and doesn’t even throw away the jar. The ghost in my house orders junk on my credit card. The ghost in my house texts hutful things to my friends. The ghost in my house left the oven on, left the hob on, left the taps running. The ghost in my house needs to make me cry, because he can’t.

I stop to pick a flower. When I pull on the stem the ground pulls up with it, flips all the way over, sends me tumbling through a trapdoor. I am still holding the flower, dangling from it in the dark over who knows how vast a drop. My skin turns to silk. I drift, petal-like, on the currents of the earth.

This is how they do it. They arrest you on a 72-hour security hold. While you’re in the cell, they put up a speaker that plays state secrets on a loop. Knowing state secrets is a strict liability offence, so as soon as the hold is up, they give you the recognition test. You fail, and they bundle you off to the hole for the rest of your life, which is brief. The test results are published, and everyone applauds what a good job the security services did of dealing with you.

To beat them, you have to keep your mind far enough out of the room that the knowledge doesn’t go in. I had been practicing, so I knew I could do it. Let all that noise pass me by in a blur. At last, a use for sitting through all those literature lectures. So after 72 hours plus the long wait at the testing facility, they let me go. When I got home, there was a letter waiting on the mat, informing me that my name had been classified as a state secret.

The urge was always there in me, to be eaten by a sea monster. A kraken or a giant squid. Something unknowable. It would pull me down to deep places unfelt by human skin, and make me a part of itself. I am ready to throw myself into the ocean. But most of the time, we are pulled apart by ordinary fishes.

When the hot air balloon started plummeting I didn’t think much of it. The pilot didn’t seem concerned. She was hardly even moving. I had never been up in a balloon before, and it was such a strange experience that the sudden drop might have been perfectly normal. Someone in the basket screamed. How embarrassing, I thought. The ground rushed up towards us.

It was in the shed the whole time. Everything I ever needed or wanted, right at the back of the shed. I could get my fingertips to it, even. But it was really jammed in there, and I couldn’t tell quite what was pinning it. Still, there it is. All I need to do is clear out the shed.

Next weekend, maybe.

We’re all sitting in the claw machine waiting for someone to come along and take us home, and the guy next to me whispers, “You know it’s rigged, right? Most of the time, they choose you and the claw doesn’t even work properly.” I don’t believe it. Who would do such a cruel thing? But I watch the people come to the machine, and try to rescue one of us, and shrug and give up when we drop back to the bottom. And I think, that would be crueller, that little shrug, if it was in their power to do more. And I start to wonder who put the glass around us in the first place.

I type on a long feed of paper, which enters my home through a slot in the wall, spools around the platen of my typewriter, and disappears into the ceiling. Sometimes the fresh paper arrives with words or marks already on it, and I advance past them or type over them or work them into my writing according to my whim. After the paper slides away above me, I forget about it. It goes off to wherever it is going, and I go on typing. The ribbon dried up months ago. On a sunny day, I can make out the impression of my words. Now it is my job to wear the letters off the typebars.

At the bottom of the ocean were the stars. Far away behind the sky were strange sea creatures with glowing skin. At the back of the big scary book was a friendly voice. On the other end of the phonecall my questions were answered. In the spot on my back that I can’t quite reach I felt an intense loneliness.

A kind man explained to me what an egg was. Everyone else got confused or angry. They thought I was making fun of them. I think the kind man was confused too. It took him a while to explain. He kept going back on himself, like he’d never really thought about what an egg was before and he was having to explain it to himself. But we figured it out. By the end, I understood. He even got one out of his pocket to show me.

I still have all of your letters. They stuck to my hair and my clothes; I breathed them in; they drifted up into the clouds where I am told nothing is forgotten. I tipped them out onto the soil. I cut the flowers that grew, kept them for a week, put them on the compost heap and back onto the soil. I grew tomatoes and ate them with so much black pepper you would have laughed at me. I coughed up a little piece of your goodbye. Sometimes those little drawings you made in the margins fall in the rain. Your words must be spread all across the world by now, so that I have them with me wherever I go.

I heard it on the radio. I heard them whispering it in the crackles when the signal dipped. I heard it somewhere under the music and I heard it in the quiver of the newsreader’s voice. I heard it on the radio when I had the volume down too low to hear, because I was afraid that somebody else would hear too. I heard it echoing in the deafening click of the power switch. I heard it on the radio when the radio stations stopped broadcasting. I heard it in the radio when my radio smashed against the pavement.

It took four of us to get it out of the house. It would have taken more, but four was all we had. It was heavy and it was awkward and we got it stuck in a doorway for forty minutes, although that included a tea break. For a while we thought about giving up. We would have done, if there had been more of us. If it had been easier. Instead we pinched fingers and scraped knuckles and stubbed toes until we got it out onto the street. Then we had a whole other problem.

I have felt my shoes were on the wrong way round for twenty years. I know they aren’t. I’ve tried them the other way round and it doesn’t work. I wonder if I bought shoes that are the same for both feet, like a medieval peasant, I would feel better. I’m sure there are things I could do, if I could only work out the problem. It’s either in my feet, or in my head, or somewhere in between.

You’re a thorn in my side. I must have torn you off some plant or other as I pushed past, and now you’re stuck in me, and it will hurt more if I pull you out. I wonder what precious thing you were protecting by hooking in to me?

He learned Braille, just out of curiosity, and discovered the whole thing was a ruse: all those signs and labels were just notes about his personal failings. He looked up the inscrutable symbols on his laundry tags: each represented a different complaint about his character. He studied French and Greek and Mandarin. Everyone was talking about the irritating way he inserted himself into conversations. He went out and listened to the birds. He already knew what they were saying.

Kara’s phone was scared of flying. When she idly browsed holiday destinations, it would heat up and the charge would drop. If she opened SkyScanner it vibrated, full strength, until she closed it. The “aeroplane mode” toggle just wouldn’t work at all.

It had all started when she watched “Flight” and “Sully” in the same weekend and her Netflix decided she was only interested in air disaster films. Now she couldn’t scroll past a photo of a plane: the screen would freeze, and she would be left staring at it. She tried navigating to the airport with the maps app, once, just to see. She ended up back at her own front door. She would have to get a new phone. But she was scared to do it.

The forgotten apple in the bottom of her bag had birthed a thriving population of fruit flies, who followed her wherever she went. She strode down the street, bold and elegant and surrounded by flies. They were so small that people didn’t notice them from a distance: they would stop to talk to her, and then find a fly crawling into their ear or up their nose, and she would watch them try oto pretend it was not there. At the end of the day, she tucked the apple behind the photocopier and blew the flies a kiss as she left.

She jumped in the puddle and kept sinking. With three feet of water over her head she found that she could breathe. I’m a mermaid, she thought. I knew it. But with water in her lungs, she sank and sank. She landed with a crack on somebody’s dropped glasses. It was dark down here. There was no great city of mermaids below the city she lived in . She kicked her legs. She didn’t know if she would make it back to the surface.

Once everyone was asleep, I would go downstairs as quietly as I could and spring all the mousetraps. I took the bait and buried it at the bottom of the kitchen bin. Dad was close to breakdown. He thought he was being outsmarted by rodents. He never once suspected. One night, exhausted from a birthday party, I fell asleep before he went to bed. The next morning, there was a little mouse with a broken neck in the pantry.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Could I be considered please?

Is this still available?

I’ll give you 50p for them.

Can I take just the left one?

Can you deliver to Truro?

Would these fit a six-year-old?

Do you have them in black?

Do you have another one? I want to put them on my dog (he’s got three legs)

Free: baby shoes, collection only, no timewasters.

The grass was up to my knees. I wanted to shrink down into it, to explore it like a forest and see who I would meet, but I knew that if I did I would never return to my usual size. So I walked on, in big strides landing on my tiptoes, trying to break as few stalks as possible. When I got to the path, I realised I could have turned around and gone another way.

The people who lived here before me planted flowers in the front yard, and now I’m the butterfly man. The kids stop on the way to school and look at them while their parents tug on their arms. If I come out to go to work, they ask me quesitons. I don’t know anything about butterflies, so I ask them what they think, and then I resolve to buy a book about butterflies but I never do. I don’t look after the flowers, but they seem to keep growing anyway. I’m not a very good butterfly man. But I’m glad it’s what I am.

The lights all went out very suddenly. For a moment, before my eyes adjusted, I thought I had died. Then the world reappeared, in soft greys and gentle edges, seen best where I wasn’t quite looking. I turned off all the switches, so I would not be dazzled.

On the day he finally caught a pigeon, he realised he had no idea what to do with it. Better hold on to it, he thought. Just in case. It flapped and wriggled and shat in his hands, but if he let go, it would fly away, and it would all be for nothing. One day somebody asked if it had a name. No, he said. It’s not mine. I’m just holding on to it until I work out what to do with it.

Grieving, she cursed them with love in her heart. Not to die: to be transformed, into birds, squirrels, mice, rabbits. Creatures of the earth who would not hurt her again. And she smiled as she felt the feathers sprout from her skin.

She pulled up a flower and began plucking petals. Loves me, loves me not. Loves me, loves me not. A mile away, thinking of her, he felt his heart go back and forth.

There was a doorway to another world at the bottom of Cedric’s toaster, which wasn’t terribly helpful. Sometimes when he peered down there to extract a stuck crumpet he saw strange creatures cavorting. He once attempted a conversation with a sort of leopard-man, but the thing didn’t seem to hear him. He worried about insects with unseen diseases passing up through the slots and starting a pandemic of which he would be the first victim, so he kept the toaster covered when not in use, and trusted in the heating elements when it was. He supposed that a scientist or an explorer would send down endoscopes or tiny robots. Cedric was just grateful not to have to empty the crumb tray.

There was once a miller who boasted around the kingdom that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king sent soldiers and had the miller and his daughter brought to the castle. There he had prepared a huge room full of straw. “Spin this into gold for me,” he said, “or I will have your heads.”

The next day, the king returned and found the straw woven into beautiful crowns. “These are not gold,” he said. “No,” said the miller, “but look how much more like gold they are today than they were yesterday. But we cannot spin gold with so little straw and just one wheel. We will need much, much more.”

So the king sent his soldiers to gather more straw, and more spinning wheels. The next day, the miller presented him with a single gold coin. “This coin would not even buy the spinning wheels I provided you,” said the king. “No,” said the miller, “but this is just the beginning. We will need much more straw, and all the spinning wheels in the kingdom, perhaps more. And also some gold would help.”

So the king sent his soldiers to bring all the straw and all the spinning wheels in the kingdom, and he set the people of the kingdom to work building more spinning wheels, and he opened up his treasury to the miller. The miller, who always seemed to be a day or two away from finally spinning all that straw into gold, became rich and powerful and loved. Outside the castle window, a funny little man named Rumplestiltskin watched, waiting for the day the king’s patience ran out.

When I go to leave the house I find my suitcase is too heavy to lift. I open it up and take things out: a couple of books; a battery pack. I close it up again. Still I cannot lift it. My train leaves in half an hour. I open the case again and heave everything out onto the bed. I do it in one great armful. It is not difficult. My things are light. I re-pack, just the essentials: half the clothes and my washbag. I fasten the case. It is heavier than before. Leave it, I think. I have my phone and my wallet and my keys and my tickets. I can buy what I need when I get there. I go to the front door, and find I cannot turn the handle.

When I was six I could turn a perfect cartwheel. Legs straight up, one smooth motion. It felt like magic. I’ve no idea how it looked from the outside. I know I knocked mum’s best vase of the mantelpiece once. These days, all I can imagine is how it would look from the outside. I don’t know what it feels like at all. My mum’s best vase, with the chip glued back into the neck, sits on my mantelpiece now. I take it down and wrap it safely in a blanket before I begin.

Two snowmen are standing in a field. One says to the other: “Can you smell carrots?” The other says: “Wow! A talking snowman!” Both laugh so hard their heads fall off. They look up at the sky and at their own towering bodies for a while. Before long, a passing crow spots their currant eyes: rare sustenance in the frozen landscape. It snatches them up, one, two, three, four, and the snowmen become part of it. Over a day or two, the snow melts, but the snowmen melt last. Their heads disappear first, and then their bodies. It tickles when a mouse nibbles at their fallen carrot noses. They are absorbed into the soil to nourish the spring bulbs just coming through. They evaporate into clouds, and fall as rain, and begin again. A little of them is in each of next year’s snowmen, each of next year’s flowers, each of next year’s people. From time to time they remember the carrot thing, and giggle.

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The woman at the corner shop let me buy cigarettes because she knew they were for my mum. The man didn’t. He never even said no: just pretended he hadn’t heard me. It made me feel so stupid. I would peek through the window as I went down the street, trying to see behind the counter, hoping that the man was there.

Edith could devour books. She could swallow down the pages and absorb the words. It gave her heartburn to do it, but it was quick and it was thorough, and when she was finished she knew the book like she had read it ten times over. But she didn’t do it often. It left nothing over for anyone else. And besides, nobody was writing books for people like her.

There was an honesty box for the eggs. Sometimes, he took eggs and didn’t pay. Sometimes, he paid and didn’t take eggs. It was all the same to the chickens, he thought. Particularly since he always came back later and stole the money anyway.

When he was five he lost his birthday balloon. The knot on the weight slipped, and it drifted up over their street. He thought it would disappear into the clouds, but it didn’t: it hung in the still air all afternoon, as he remembered it. That night, his mum told him a story about all the adventures his balloon had been on, and how everything it saw as it flew meant something wonderful that would happen that year. In truth, it came down a few miles away and a cow choked to death on it. That, it turned out, really was an omen of the year to come.

With a firm and concerted effort he was able to fall in love with a piece of paper. Unmarked, off white, recycled. He loved the grain, the little flecks of darker material, the way the light wept through. He wanted it with him always, of course. If he could not take the whole sheet, he wished he could tear off a corner, slip it in his pocket, and feel it between thumb and forefinger in difficult moments. But he knew this was an unhealthy way to be with his love, and that it would wear the paper down to dust. So he kept it safe at home, and in time the fear of fire or flood that clung to him whenever he was out diminished. Still, at times he pondered: might an outsider, looking in, not think he had bought himself only difficulty, with all that effort? Some might, perhaps. But only those who had never been in love.

Now that everyone hates me I can do what I like. Nothing to lose. I can lie and cheat and steal and they’ll all shrug their shoulders and say it’s just what they expected. But they won’t. I’m going to be good and kind and wise in weird, quiet ways. It won’t change their minds and it won’t make me the bigger person. But I’ll enjoy watching them twist their little heads trying to work out why those things I do are terrible.

In the dream, he arrived at work and found he was only in his underwear. Everybody was so kind. They checked he was OK; they cleared a meeting room so he could have privacy. By half past nine they had cobbled together an outfit for him from spares and gym bags. They gave him the day off, and drove him home, and made sure he got a GP appointment. He was disappointed to wake up.

Some days she felt she would like to transform into a snail, with a shell on her back and a green, greasy body that nobody wanted to touch. Her mother used to throw snails over the fence into the neighbours’ garden. She would have liked that, too. Everybody kept away from snails, but when they heard that crunch underfoot, they felt the guilt of it. That would be best of all.

He slipped on a banana skin in 2009 and never stopped. One foot planted on the peel, the other waving around, trying to keep him balanced. He had skidded in and out of jobs and marriages (well, not out of the second one, yet). He had slid through places he never dreamed of visiting. One of these days, he hoped, he would come to a stop.

It had always bothered me: why, on that beach when I was seven years old, did that man come and kick down my sandcastles? What did a grown man want from such pointless, bullying destruction? The thought came up in any moment of peace, like an aching joint you feel when you try to go to sleep. So when I invented the time-machine, I went straight back to that beach and kicked the castles down myself. I didn’t like to see my little face crumple, but at least now, I know why I did it.

I had been staring at the wall for half an hour, finding faces and animals and horrors in the wallpaper, finding the places where it repeated and being unable to forget them. The wall now looked like great clumsy tiling, the same sheep and rabbits and demons again and again. I wanted to rip it all down, or splatter it with paint, or simply set the entire waiting room alight. When my name was finally called, they would have to treat me for the wallpaper-induced migraine first. I was so glad I had left my phone at home.

Rain stopped play. Smith, who would have suffered a career-ending knee injury that afternoon, played on for many successful years. Two old friends who had arranged to meet never found another date that worked. The couple who would have split up on the drive home kept on resentfully for a decade longer. The hot dog van outside the ground, always on a knife-edge, went out of business; many cases of food poisoning were averted. A seven-car pileup never piled up. Danny Crawford did not miss his wife’s early labour. A dozen unfaithful partners each had to cancel their rendezvous. A snail was stepped on; another was not. The dry earth was watered.

The little screw always fell out. Whenever I screwed it back in, it loosed itself again, like there was nothing in the the screw-post for it to bite into. It found its freedom and rattled around in the case until I fished it out and put it back. Eventually, I gave up on it. Its absence didn’t seem to do any harm. But I folded it up in a little piece of paper and taped it to the side, just in case.

I decided I would walk around the field: a bit of fresh air and movement, while I worked out what to do about it all. I thought and thought, until my troubled soles had dug out a great furrow that I walked along the bottom of. Until I had uncovered tree roots nad ancient coins and creatures hiding from the winter. By the time I had worked it all out, the hole was too deep to climb out of. All I could do was keep walking around in circles.

It would be the greatest heist of the century. Everything was prepared. He had a collapsible bag stowed in his pants. He had deleted his Facebook account. He had studied the map on the museum’s website. He didn’t need to get away with it forever: just long enough to make the delivery. He would be remembered through history as the man who returned the Parthenon Marbles. Only they turned out to be bigger than he expected.

I have thirty-nine photos of the empty bird feeder, one or two of them with a little brown blur in the corner where something has just flown away. You can flick through them and watch the seeds disappear and the fat balls crumble. I swipe from one to the next and imagine the bird visiting in between, taking its share. Imagine, not remember: I never quite saw them properly. I was too busy taking pictures.

He liked Shredded Wheat because it reminded him of the great hay bales he used to see through the windows of his parents’s car. But he didn’t eat Shredded Wheat anymore, because it was Nestlé. So instead, he crept into the field after sundown and started on the nearest bale, first as it came, and then with the honey and nuts he brought in his gym bag. He ate until sunrise. By then he was seven times the size, swollen with hay, ready to burst. He knew he would not get over the stile for a week. He lay down and waited to be weatherproofed in black plastic. He thought of his mother-in-law’s wickerwork trivets, and how much they reminded him of Shreddies.

It was early February: the shortening nights didn’t feel shorter, but the lengthening days felt longer. Scrooge had been avoiding the books. He had been avoiding the business altogether, leaving it to Bob and paying him more again for the responsibility. To give out prize turkeys and charitable donations was a wonderful thing: to be a man of business in a city of squeezing, covetous sinners was something rather different. It shook the fragile grasp he had regained on his soul. And what if he could not live in this new way? What if expenses climbed, and the debt he forgave was just the sum needed for Tiny Tim’s doctor? The spirits had shown him the cost of a closed heart. Scrooge feared the cost of an open heart was greater, and that he must come to understand it alone.

But not alone—never alone, now. For there was the cost, but here was the profit: that he could seek comfort from the spirits of the living.

On Christmas Eve, the last window of my advent calendar leapt down and ran out into the street. I gave chase, swift-slippered, my dressing gown billowing. The day was cold and clear, and passers by called “Merry Christmas!” as I pursued the fleeing card rectangle along the pavements. It was small and nimble, darting through fences and dog’s legs, but on the straights I had the advantage. I finally ran it down on the school playing fields, when it encountered a puddle too large to go around. Between being caught and being soggy, it chose being caught.

“I’m sorry,” the window said. “I ran because I’m ashamed. I don’t have any chocolate inside me.”

I reassured it, and fearful but brave, it swung open. The chocolate inside was shiny and fragrant and rich and perfect. We walked home together, singing carols.

The Santa train derailed, and as my false beard detached I saw the hope in the children’s eyes turn to fear. Santa will save us, they had been thinking. His reindeer will haul the train into the sky to safety. Now they saw both truths at once: that Santa wasn’t real, and that we were all going to die. I grabbed at the beard, as though it would help, and just as it came away entirely I heard the jingling of bells. The carriage steadied, and flew up into the stars.

I cultivated the world’s largest mushroom, so that I could sit on it and fish, like a little gnome. It was quite incidental that the thing grows so dense and rapid that it can meet the protein needs of half the world. It was quite unintentional that the thing grows so uncontrollably that it covers half the world. But there are so many lovely places to sit now.

There were once two friends who started making yoghurt after seeing a video on the internet. They didn’t like yoghurt all that much, but it seemed like magic, so they thought they would try it. They worked apart, so that if one batch went wrong, they could compare notes to work out why. Before long it got competitive. More yoghurt, thicker yoghurt, tangier yoghurt. There was less and less room for anything else. Eventually, one of them would have to quit, or open a yoghurt business. That’s the Jones’s Spiteful Yoghurt brand story, and it’s still why we make yoghurt today.

Mister Crimvis Squib had wrapped all of his presents, most of the tins in the cupboard, five of his shoes, his pillow, his left leg, and the cat. He had wrapped several things that he couldn’t remember what they were. He had, perhaps, got a little bit carried away. But wrapping things up was his favourite part of Christmas. He piled everything under the tree, except for his left leg, which ne needed to walk on, and the cat, who had mostly unwrapped herself and was curled up under the tree anyway. In a few days, he would have to unwrap it all and wrap the presents back up again. He was looking forward to it. For now, he stuffed his stocking with the last lot of wrapping paper to use as a pillow, wrapped up the rest of himself, and fell into a long and contented sleep.

Sometimes, halfway down the hill, when the sledge was still picking up speed and there was so far still to go, she felt that it would never stop. And then, one day, it didn’t. She went hurtling across the park, past snowmen and kids with chilly fingers, and out into the street. She flew between parked cars and garden fences and discarded Christmas trees. She shot out into the fields and over them, taking great jumps from hills, sheep parting at her approach. She skimmed over the ocean until she reached land again. Faster and faster and faster, until she could circle the Earth in a single night.

Ground down to powder, but it takes more than that. When you grind a thing to powder it gets stronger. Sometimes it gets explosive. Grind it till you can’t grind any smaller and then what can you do? It’s all over you then. It’s jamming up your gears. It’s wearing you down. And when you seize up, they’ll scrape it back out of you, unchanged. You could have left it alone to begin with.

The kids got me with a snowball, right on the back of my neck so it dropped down into my coat. I shrieked, and they laughed at that, so I laughed along. “That was a good shot,” I shouted over to them, and they landed another one smack in the teeth. I wanted to keep on pretending I wasn’t upset. But it was Christmastime, so I gave them what they wanted.

I crawled deep into the leaf-drift, where I would only be found by small creatures who understand the warmth of dark spaces. I thought I would rise up as a leaf-man, a spirit of the forest. But the leaves melt faster than you imagine, and I melted with them, into the earth.

At night I find new constellations. A thousand stars can trace uncountable paths, and the longer you look, the more stars you see. In the darkest hours, there are so many that the sky is a clear canvas. As the year turns, the pictures I have made pass and return. There is always something to make, even here, lashed to my rock.

The invitation came with directions to a recommended car park, which I followed until our car was teetering on the edge of a terrifying abyss. A sign said, “PLEASE PAY AND DISPLAY”, and taped over the top, “NO CHARGE FROM NOVEMBER 1742”. There was a smell in the air like when you’re toasting marshmallows and yours catches fire and it was the last one in the bag. Not wanting to make a fuss, I shifted back into first and drove us over the edge.

My friend got hold of a “Baby On Board” badge, and he wore it on the tube every day. He thought it was funny. But more and more, he found that there would always be someone who gave him a seat. They’d rather give their seat to some dickhead than keep it from someone who needed it. For a little while, he thought that was funny too. Then one day, someone got on who looked just like him, and they had a badge as well. So Mick tried to give them his seat, but they wouldn’t take it. And nobody else offered. He had to pretend he was getting off at the next stop. Turns out the man can feel shame. He still wears the badge. Just on the inside of his jacket.

After the fourth time her finger grew back, she accepted that she was just built that way now, like a starfish. She got a family bucket from the chicken shop, figuring she needed it. This changes everything, she thought, as she sprinkled paprika salt on the chips. But she was lucky after that. It never really came up again.

I am building my volcano lair. It’s big and scary. It will show I am a threat. I’ll fill a tank with sharks. I’ll hide out here and wait until they send their spies and secret agents out to stop me. They’ll ask my what my plan is as I dangle them above the magma, and I’ll drop them straight in. When you have a volcano lair, you don’t need a plan.

The moon started visiting regularly. She said it hurt that we never came to see her any more. That more of us took pictures and fewer of us talked to her. We felt a deep sense of goodness, knowing that the moon wanted our friendship. We didn’t mention to her what the tidal forces were doing to us. But she felt it too. The cracks were growing.

There had been something about a chicken. It had been red, or gold, or purple: some colour suggesting luxury. And though it hadn’t laid golden eggs, he had been certain it would bring him prosperity. Wise eggs, was the phrase in his mind. Wisdom eggs. It hadn’t been a dream. It was a thought from that half-awake state where new things seem true, which made it hard to shake off. He knew that he probably ought to. But he didn’t want to let the promise of the chicken go.

Another hot glue burn on my fingers, not so accidental this time: I’m pushing the pieces where they need to go, smearing and shaping the glue before it cools, it can burn me all it wants if it just fucking works. A job I didn’t much care about until it started going wrong, and now I’d tear my life up to get it done. I know because the sun will be coming up soon, and I have work in the morning, and I’ll sit dead-eyed at my desk and come home hating myself for doing nothing all day and hating my boss for not noticing. The glue burns, and it ought to burn badly because it sticks, but it never seems to get too deep, like it just can’t hold enough heat to do real damage, which I suppose is why it melts so easily. In a minute I’ll run the cold tap over my finger just because I know I ought to, and the cold will hurt more than the burn.

I like things in strange containers. A cup of gravel. A vase of beans. Jelly in my pockets. Gets you in touch with the truth of a thing. Too often we mix things up with their containers, like when the cold soup slides out of a can and hold its shape; like when we think the skin is the person. But spilt things are more their wrongness then they are themselves: milk on the table, blood on the floor. Put something where it’s OK, but just not usual, and you can begin to see it clearly. So, that’s what happened. I know you’re angry. You’ll see it. Just look again.

I wasn’t sure if it was a squeaky gate or a whimpering dog, but it was keeping me awake. If it was a squeaky gate then it was insane for someone to be opening and closing it over and over again at three in the morning. If it was a dog then someone had been very cruel to it. So either way, I felt I had a deep and inarguable justification for screaming out of the window. To do so was a moral good. So I lay there until the sun came up, long after the squealing stopped, trying to think of words I could scream that would cover either possibility.

It was built to see the world. To roll through airports and along city streets. To carry everything a traveller might need. It even liked riding the baggage carousel. Now it lived in the loft, full of old coats that would never travel again either. It kept the dust off them. One of its wheels got knocked off on the way up there. Sometimes, a mouse nibbled at its corners.

We ran a sweepstakes on when the last leaf would fall. It had been a mild autumn, but storms were forecast. We had bets right through to February, and mine was the latest. Sometimes, when their day rolled around, people went out and shook the tree. I didn’t mind. I had climbed up and glued a few leaves on long ago.

Yndric was the first tree in the forest, older than the forest itself. It had felt many changes in the air and the earth. By now it was hard to feel what was a change in the world and what was a change in Yndric. The wind seemed to blow more gently in these years: was that the strength in its branches, or the shelter of its brethren?

On the first day of the thaw a wizard came to Yndric, one who had studied within himself so that he might talk with the trees. He planted his open hands in the earth at Yndric’s roots. Men will come, the wizard said. I can give you sight and hearing to know them. I can give you voice and quickness to frighten them. Then you will be safe. Yndric said, You would make me a man to protect me from men. Let them come and be changed into us. Let them grow roots deep in the earth and branches that reach the sky. Let them grow together into a forest. Then we will be safe.

In the dream I step out on to the ice and hear it creak. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I have no choice. If I understood I was dreaming, I would know that if the ice broke I would be awake before I felt the cold. The dream isn’t scary. Scary is waking up in the middle of the ice, with warm sunshine on my face and a long walk home.

For the month of December, I put my medication behind the windows of an advent calendar and pretend it is a little treat, which of course, compared to the alternative, it is. I buy fancy little chocolate pearls and put them in my pill box, and feel a little whisper of pleasant surprise when I tip one out into my hand each morning. It makes the whole ordeal that little bit more pleasant, except on the awful days when habit takes over, and I swallow my chocolate down without tasting it.

Her favourite trick to perform was the one where you take a volunteer’s watch, smash it, and restore it. Cogs and springs everywhere, a nice little show. Everybody understands that it’s a trick, so they don’t mind pretending that the Apple Watch you took off the gentleman in the front row had little bits of clockwork inside. It’s precious, that understanding between performer and audience. It makes things so much more fun. Particularly when she wraps the gentleman’s watch in the handkerchief, and smashes it for real.

I tried my hand at bricklaying. I never thought it was for me. It didn’t fit who I had come to believe I was. But I have watched my friends think that way, and it makes me want to scream at them that they are so much more than they believe. A person can be anything. I will not be held back any longer. Anyway, the wall fell down.

He transformed from the waist down: thick, dark bristles and cloven hooves. I thought: at least I won’t have to pair his socks any more.

When I watch a nature documentary I am torn between predator and prey. I want the cute little thing to escape. I want the majestic hunter to feed its young. I don’t know what to feel. When I watch my neighbour’s cat hunting birds for fun, I cheer for it all the way. It won’t eat them. Usually it doesn’t even kill them properly. It takes them back and leaves them twitching next to its overflowing food bowl, and I smile. I don’t care about the birds at all.

As part of the pact, I spend each Thursday as a decorative glass bead. I have negotiated a compressed working week with my employer, so this is not a huge problem, though somehow it seems that delivery of any parcel sent to me is attempted on a Thursday, while I am a bead. On Wednesday nights I check that the oven is off and I close my bedroom doors and windows. I wonder what colour of bead I will be. I wonder if I am always the same. Sometimes, I hear a magpie pecking at the window.

I shoplifted a few times, for fun. It seemed like the sort of thing a person ought to have tried. Just to show you’ve got it in you. I took a pack of birthday candles once, and burned them all down to the end, one after the other, like I was chain-smoking. It’s easy, when your belly’s full and you look well off and you don’t need to do it. It was easy, then, and now it isn’t.

She floated away on a candyfloss cloud, until she reached the colder air, where water condenses. Before long the floss was sticky and heavy, and she began to fall, sugar-wrapped and helpless. Just as she was giving up, the birds smelled her sweetness, and carried her away.

With a little trickery, you can manipulate a line of ants so that it forms a circle, and the ants march around and around and around with no way to stop. You can stare at the endlessly turning circle until the edges of your vision start to fade and your head droops. You can wake up in an underground chamber, a good source of food and warmth for the larvae. You can close your eyes and hope to be reborn in the diffuse mind of the colony.

When we started playing chess by post I didn’t know how much the price of stamps would go up. I didn’t know how hard it would become to find time to write. But I knew we would never switch to email, or text, or playing online. I didn’t know the game would stretch out this long. I didn’t know we would end up on different continents. I didn’t know we would start losing our grip on the rules. I have known for a long time that you have me beaten, and that I will never resign, and that I would swim the ocean with an envelope between my teeth to deliver my next move.

He carved foul words into ancient oaks; disturbed nesting birds; muddied streams and set fires. He beat the bushes and pulled up new shoots. When he ran out of ideas, he cursed the sun and the moon. Offend the spirits of the forest enough, and they will curse you: they will transform you into a tree, and you can live rooted in that earth for eternity.

For twenty minutes, there was no heartbreak; no grief; no self-doubt. He did not fear climate change or war or disease. For twenty minutes he lived in pure, unmediated connection with his physical self. The world dissolved. And for forty seconds, once he had reached the toilet and fumbled with latch and belt, he felt truly happy, before it all came rushing back.

Mister Crimvis Squib couldn’t remember which bin it was that week. He had lost the little leaflet, and it was too dark to see the other bins on the street, and he had lost the little leaflet. He put out his fullest bin, and covered it in tin foil. When the sun rose, the shiny surface would reflect the colour of his neighbour’s bins. He didn’t know why they had all the different colours, but he didn’t want to get it wrong.

I have been trying for weeks to befriend the crows that live near my house. I have offered them peanuts, raisins, dog food. I am reliable and respectful. I only wish to be brought a paperclip, or a dropped earring, or a button, or a screw. I only wish to hear them caw to me with fondness. I fear these crows have already been befriended by my enemies.

He got on the bus before I could stop him. I don’t know what the driver was thinking. They must have seen me, running and screaming. Or perhaps they never checked their mirrors. I ran at a full sprint, counting on traffic, all the way to the next stop. I staggered on, breathing like the air brakes, vomit in my throat, legs good for nothing. The bus was empty.

He was already having a bad day when the seagull stole his chips. Grabbed up the whole tray in its grubby beak and flew off with it, not dropping so much as a grain of salt. He couldn’t even be angry. Sometimes, the world simply shows you what you deserve.

She strolled down the beach, and shared her chips with him.

I have to press the button or else I’ll never know. Maybe I can’t bear to know, but I definitely can’t bear not knowing, so I have to press the button. I don’t konw if I can do it. It feels like jumping off a bridge. But I have to. I count down from five and at zero, without thinking, I press the button. And I never find out.

I hope the plane crashes. I hope it comes down in the ocean and we have to use the life jackets. I hope I am one of the few who stays calm, the one the crew ask to help his fellow passengers. I don’t want anybody to get hurt. I hope the plane crashes and we all make it home with an incredible story and a payout for emotional distress. I hope the plane crashes, and it is one of those near-death experiences that shocks you back into life. Plane travel, they say, is extremely safe. I wish I knew how to do something dangerous.

I walk over the same hill I walked over yesterday. Then I was just stolling, out for some fresh air, seeking high ground for the exercise and in hope of a view. Today, the directions I should have read sooner send me the same way, treading in yesterday’s footsteps, trading in yesterday’s wandering for a stride that knows just where it is going. I pick up a chocolate wrapper that fell from my pocket. I pick a blackberry that ripened overnight. I come down into the valley, and cross over the river a second time.

—And there’s your free potato scallop.

—Oh, no thank you.

—It’s free.

—I know. But I don’t want it.

—Well, there’s a free potato scallop with every order at the moment.

—Right. Yes. But I don’t want one. I’ve got enough.

—I’ve put it in the bag already. It’s free. I’tll have to go in the bin if you don’t take it. We can’t give it to someone else.

—Well do you want it?

—I’ve been here four hours, I’d rather stick my head in the fryer than eat anything greasy.

—OK. Well, thanks.

—Excuse me, do you want this potato scallop?

—Not really, mate. You couldn’t get me a pie, could you? It’s freezing out here.

Take the money and put it in the bag. Take all the money and put it in the bag. I would like you to put the money into the bag. Money, bag, now. You better put the fucking money in the fucking bag. Would you please fill this bag with money for me. I’d like to make a very large withdrawal. Money in the bag. Money in the bag. Money in the bag.

Christ, I’m going to make a mess of this, aren’t I?

After many years of dedicated, deliberate practice, I have perfected the art of marshmallow toasting. They snap like a crème brûlée; they ooze like a rich caramel. I must have burned forests to get here. I brush my teeth carefully. I read books and visit friends. I’m not obsessive. It is a small thing, but it is mine. There are still arts in this world that have not been perfected. They can be yours.

You can earn money while you sleep this way. The money’s not much, but it’s steady. Dreams are irreplaceable: computers can’t dream the same way we do. So there’ll always be demand. The money’s not much, but it puts a few more hours in the day you can get paid for. It pays the rent, so you have somewhere to sleep, so you have somewhere to dream, so you have something to sell.

And it’s completely non-invasive. You don’t even have to wear anything. The sensors are all in your pillow, and they can pick up your brian activity even when you move around. Amazing, really.

The only change is, it adds a bit of drag. Like how a water-wheel slows down the river a little. It’s just part of how the tech works. You might feel like you’re dreaming less. You’re not, not really: the dreams are there, you just don’t experience them any more. So don’t worry. You’ll still get paid.

He could feel the wine seeping up his trousers, at his heel where the hem dragged on the floor. Not his wine, and not him who had spilled it, but he was sat in the puddle, so who would know that?

At the interval, he would fetch paper towels and mop it up. For now, he sat, and stared into the back of the head of thr man who had kicked his wine over and pretended not to notice. He felt the stain wick up his leg, and he didn’t hear a word.

The Great Blade of Constancy, the sword by which the foretold hero would defeat the coming darkness, resembles the kind of soft foam sword that a kid would have a tantrum over in a gift shop, or an adult would buy for their live-action role-play sessions and paint to look more badass. But the Great Blade of Constancy rejects decoration of all kinds. It will be unchangingly red and yellow until the prophecies are fulfilled. And the foretold hero will be one who can draw on the deepest well of courage, to look extremely silly as they strive to do what they know is right.

Nothing remains of all my useless things but charcoal. Charcoal, to cook, to filter water, to draw, to write. To start again.

Eight paces down the aisle of the shoe shop. Eight paces back. All the time worried that someone will think his shoes are for sale, and there will be a misunderstanding, a scene, as though anyone would want to buy them. Sixteen paces not really sure what he is supposed to be looking for, not really sure what his feet feel like the rest of the time, not really sure if this is how he normally walks. Does his heel hit the ground first, or his toes? Has he tied them too loose, to avoid creasing a pair he doesn’t want to buy? He paces again, then flexes his feet with a thoughtful expression, one that shows the empty shop that he knows what he is doing. And then, because he cannot think of an answer when he imagines the shop assistant asking what is wrong about them, he buys the shoes.

Behold, the incredible Time Shoes! Step forwards, to move to the future! Step backwards, to move to the past! Step sideways, if you need to move around but you want to continue your normal trajectory through time! Strap them on and try! Yes, that’s it! Wait! No! Do not dance in the Time Sh—

At the museum I always look at the same painting. I was going to look at a different one each time I visited; I thought that would make me more appreciative. But I never made it past the first. There is always something more to look at. It would seem a little bit arrogant to move on, like I had finished it. Now, though, they have taken it down for restoration. I am free to move on to the next. But I look at the hook, and the patch of wall, and the little plaque telling me about a painting that is not there but that I can close my eyes and see. I look at the room in which it stood, and in which I stand. I find that there is still more of the painting to see.

Sybil Bushtail

Can whoever has been digging up my nuts PLEASE STOP. I have worked really hard gathering these nuts for the winter and someone keeps coming and digging them up and taking them. THESSE ARE NOT YOUR NUTS. Its already getting cold and if this keeps happening I will not have enough to survive. Honestly when I was a kid people in this forest used to have basic manners and you could leave your nuts in a little pile, you didn’t have to bury them even. It’s not like that these days and it’s a real shame, not wishing to point any finger but I think we all know the place has gone downhill.

Gary Nutkin

alright grandma get over it it’s just a few nuts!! 😂😂😂

I am waiting for the crocuses. When winter ends, they will poke up through the thawing earth to greet the sun, and me. I can make it through the winter as long as I remember that I am waiting for the crocuses.

But while I am waiting, I don’t go out to look. If I went out and looked at the dead earth every morning, then before the shoots pushed through it I would be dead too. I do not look, and so I might miss the first day that the crocuses show their faces to the world again. But I know it is coming. I know it is. There will be colour out there again. And I am waiting.

I don’t know when it started, or how. I just got colder and colder. And then one day, I put my hand to my heart and it wasn’t beating any more. The blood thickened in my veins. It should have been scary. But whatever else I am, I am not scared any more.

It took forever to carve this pumpkin. To get the shape just right; to smooth off the rough edges. And when I painted it, it looked wrong. Just unnaturally orange. I don’t know why people bother carving them. It would have been easier to buy a real one.

Old Mr Pratt was always horrible to the kids who came into his shop. None of them understood why he ran a toy shop, or why their parents let them go in. He would sneer and spit and make fun of you for the toys you chose, even though he had chosen to have them in his shop. He was mean, and he was stupid: every time you went in there, you could trick him into giving you something for free.

One little bird didn’t join the V as it cut through the sky. Nobody had invited him, and he didn’t hear them calling. He didn’t want to seem presumptuous. So he made his own way, little wings and little heart beating hard with no upwash to help him. Somewhere over the ocean, he heard a voice at his shoulder: “Shouldn’t someone else take a turn in front now, friend?” Behind him, the V stretched out like two immense wings.

The morning of the holiday. Cleaning the house, emptying the bins, packing the car. He almost got mixed up and put the food waste bin in among the suitcases; he realised what he was doing just in time. Then he imagined their faces when they arrived at the cottage and found it. The laughter. The full week of ribbing him about it. Them bringing it up every holiday. He tucked the bin into place, and closed the boot.

We went to the hedge maze. Thirty years I’ve been wanting to go to a hedge maze, and never going, and never telling anyone. We tried a corn maze when I was eight, but we had just missed the season. They had cut the whole thing down.

Now we’re here, lost in the middle. We split up and we sometimes hear each other’s voices calling. As I turn at a junction I see you, walking towards me, and I smile and try to stop myself from running.

The slots of the Pop-Up Pirate are getting full and it is simply too nerve-racking to insert another. It might pop, and I will jump higher than the pirate, and the boy will laugh at me. It might not pop, and then pop on his turn, and then he will cry. And I can’t stop thinking about hiding in a barrel, curled up tight, just waiting for one of these blades to pierce my belly. The little plastic sword is trembling in my fingers. Yellow. I choose a place and slide it home. The pirate leaps out into the air, and I catch it deftly, without looking. The boy applauds. I look at the pirate’s little smiling face, safe in my hand.

The hovercar had broken down again. Power to the screen, but seemingly nowhere else: apparently it was some kind of server issue. She wouldn’t have minded, only it was very, very hard to push.

He laced up his golden boots and kicked the dog to death. He took no pleasure in doing it. He did it with all the solemnity the task demanded. And he certainly understood the point of view of those who said he shouldn’t do it at all. But since it had to be done, he thought it best that it be done by him, so that it was done properly. And they were very shiny boots.

After forty years of repression, Simon hacked and sputtered and coughed up a little pellet of pure anger. It was dark grey and oily, with veins of red and purple, and even a little gold, here and there. The government took possession of the pellet without remunerating him: it was felt that to offer compensation would hamper future research. Simon did not complain. When compressed further, the pellet produces a quite astonishing amount of heat. It powers a small region of the East Midlands to this day.

He had bled all the radiators, black gunk and hot water spraying him, a bruise on his thumb from the key on stiff valves that hadn’t turned in years. Bled all the radiators so they got hot right up to the top, then topped off the system so it was back up to pressure and checked them all again. He had bled all the radiators ready for the cold weather, just in case he could afford to turn them on, and it wouldn’t need doing again until after he had to move out.

He sunk into the lake not expecting to be able to breathe. The weed that once tangled his legs now seemed to hold him, gentle and safe and warm. The cold faded gently. His vision sharpened. He felt a peace he had never felt before. When he came to the surface, the sunlight dazzled him; his lungs burned; his skin felt like it would burst.

I was starting to worry that somebody would recognise my shoes. I told myself: if somebody recognises your shoes from under the door of a toilet cubicle, then they’re the weird ones. But when the door’s been locked for twenty minutes maybe it’s not weird to check there’s someone in there, and they haven’t passed out.

And I would never know, because they wouldn’t say anything. If a person has a reason for locking themselves in the toilets for half an hour, it’s generally not something you want to hear about. Maybe I should be glad not to be asked any awkward questions. But if you don’t get asked them, it means people are making up their own answers.

After a while, it was all quiet. I flushed, just in case anyone was still there, and went out to face them: those lovely people, who want nothing but the best for me.

The apples kept falling, faster than they could eat them or stew them or juice them for cider. Faster than they could gather them. They heaped around the trunk of the tree, stinking as the buried ones fermented. And still the branches sagged under the weight of new fruit. Flies and rats came, more each day, and the apples kept falling.

They cut down the tree, and the apples did not stop. They poured from the felled branches even as the stump sprouted anew. They sawed the tree to pieces, and the pieces dropped apples. Some found a little length of branch that produced just one or two each day, and took it home for themselves. But this was forbidden. They piled the pieces in around the stump, atop the rotting fruit, and burned it all. Most of them never tasted an apple again.

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.