Only As Prescribed

I have been on holiday this week, and so have little to no idea what is going on in the world. Apologies, therefore, if any of the week's stories appear insensitive in light of recent events. Although unless a lot of stars have gone missing, it seems unlikely.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

Danielle set off at eleven o’ clock on the bank holiday, hoping to catch the traffic. With luck she would get five hours, sat on her own, phone in the glovebox, while the queues raged around her. She would put the traffic report on the radio and enjoy being part of the problem. But something terrible must have happened, and she made it there in two hours flat.

Tuesday

Breakfast was stars in milk, the two galaxies swimming together. The brilliance of the stars showed the true yellow in the milk, just as the dark left where we filled our bowl showed how blue the night had been. There were stars left up there still. The sky still lived. But we were hungry, and one bowl could not fill us.

Wednesday

In a little note on his phone, Kev wrote down all the words he found redolent but didn’t quite know the meaning of. Mangrove. Bucolic. Redolent. One day things would get desperate, and he would start looking them up. Behind one of them would be an escape. Now, while there was hope, he read it and was grateful that there were things in the world deserving of such names.

Thursday

We knew that Auntie Lisa must be rich because there was a huge bowl of pine cones in her hallway, and pine cones were rare and precious to us. Dad said that she picked them all up herself, one for each walk she went on, but nobody could have walked that far or that often. Not with a bad leg and a stick. We cleared her house one warm October. For all her riches, that bowl was the one thing we fought over.

Friday

“What’s in the sandwiches?” she asked, and he said “Paste”, and after a minute or so of waiting for him to elaborate she said “What kind? Wallpaper?” Chewingly he answered with a question: “What do you know about wallpaper paste? We’ve never redecorated since you were born.” And that was true, the house was faded almost to grey. She peeled up one damp slice that left a layer of itself clinging to the paste like a half-stripped wall. Sniffed. “I think it’s fish.” He shrugged. It was the jar they had left at the back of the fridge, label soaked off. He hoped it was fish, if that’s what it smelled of.

Saturday

The stump I like to sit on was once her favourite tree. I sat on it and thought of time worked backwards. How angry I would be to see them come and put that trunk over my seat. How I would resent her for playing in the branches and getting younger by it. How the rest of us would come undone, too.

Sunday

When they met up on a Saturday they only played the games she couldn't win, and then they made fun of her for caring. She practised until she could beat them, and they made fun of her for that, too. She brought new games, ones where you worked together to solve problems or make something beautiful. She knew what would happen. But she was storing up all the awful things about them, ready for the lonely Saturdays to come.

I have been reading...

• Schooling by Heather McGowan, which appears to be out of print in the UK but is well worth picking up if you spot a second-hand copy. Its stream-of-consciousness style reads like a memory, in which feeling and character are vivid but never certain.

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This week’s story: Only As Prescribed

On the morning of the funeral, halfway through shaving, with the foam still covering the left of his face, John stole one of his wife's beta blockers. Snipped a tidy square out of the sheet with nail scissors and tucked it his phone case. With razor clutched awkwardly between ring finger and pinky he opened out the map-creased leaflet and read about not taking unless prescribed, looking for the side effects to make sure he was safe really. Silly to print side-effects on pills for anxiety, he thought, but there are rules about these things. Shaving the left side he thought to himself in the mirror that the cut away corner would tell on him. An empty cell would be just another pill that Heather had taken before she got better. Besides, she hadn't counted even before they were retired to the back of the cabinet, she was always running out and then going into an unmedicated panic about it. A neat, square cut spoke plainly of her husband, who feared more precisely, who lined up the point of his scissors so as not to leave an unsightly nick in the packet, while the razor swung loose from his hand.

When he had rinsed with too-warm water from the cold tap, all his pores half-closed, he went back to the cabinet and turned the sheet over so that a glance would only show the intact corners. He had forgotten that Heather always ended up opening medicine packets from both ends, so that the pills slid out and you could only find the empty box.

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