Limited Visibility

Things are breaking and shattering and falling this week, but there are also new colours. Perhaps this means something. There's a birthday, too, which definitely means something: it means it was my birthday. If you would like to give me a present, you can pass Scattering on to a friend, or write a tiny story of your own.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

While the machine warmed up, we watched increasingly complicated time-travel movies and challenged each other to explain them. We thought we were preparing our minds. But we were wrong to believe a journey in the machine would be explicable. Now our worlds all have different histories, and my mother was a pine tree, and my heart is younger than my head when it had always been the other way around.

Tuesday

I learned to paint one colour at a time, squeezing the last of the blue from the tube as I saved up for orange. At first it annoyed me to see the red of my tomatoes and have only the green of the vine to paint with. In time I found there was a little of each hue in everything. At last I sold a painting, and with the little money I made I bought five pretty little tubes. I squeezed a little blob from each, and watched them on the palette, daring me to mix them.

Wednesday

On my birthday I took a pass-the-parcel to work. We spend the team meeting passing unwanted crap around the table anyway: we might as well get a Chewit when the music stops. It was a wonderful birthday, an unexpected afternoon in the sun. And if management or the bomb squad ask any difficult questions, I will say: I am older now, and wiser.

Thursday

I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. Straight away an unseen mechanism takes up the tension, easing it away little by little. The next day, I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. The mechanism clicks, and somewhere I will never go, something happens. If, one day, I do not turn the key, the spring will slacken and the mechanism will slow and stop. I would never do it. But I might, any day now, put the key into its hole and turn and turn and turn until something snaps.

Friday

After the demolition there was so much sky in the sky that the dust didn’t seem to matter. We sat in evening sun where once we were in shadow. We had learned how these things that seem part of the shape of the world can vanish like an ebb tide. Nobody had lived there anywhere, we thought.

Saturday

There was no big crash when it shattered, only a sound like hailstones pattering across the lobby, and the hum of the outside pouring in. Everything was much brighter, suddenly. I hadn’t realised how dirty the skylights were. It made you want to look up, straight up, with wide open eyes to watch the falling glass.

Sunday

Laundry day, all heat and steam and detergent, cracking hands so they threaten bloodstains on shirts. Everything cleaner than when it was new, and a slick film on the fingers that makes you shudder at your own touch. Soap in the air, mouth, eyes, like we are being cleaned from the world. But fresh sheets tonight, and sharp collars on Sunday, to calm our red skin.

I have been reading...

• The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud (translated by John Cullen), a novel narrated by the brother of the man murdered in Albert Camus's L'Étranger. Leila Aboulela did something similar in her play The Insider, which appears in the anthology The Things I Would Tell You. Daoud's novel adds some extra wrinkles: L'Étranger exists within it, but written by Meursault, and there is a degree of ambiguity to the narrator's claimed identity.
• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, my book club's Beltane pick.

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This week’s story: Limited Visibility

I had stopped midway over the bridge to admire the effect of the fog. It came down suddenly, as thick as I had ever seen it, and you couldn't see the ends of the bridge, or the town at either side. Couldn't see the water below, and even the sound of it was dulled by all the white it was wrapped in. There was only the steel walkway under my feet and the steel rail under my hands and the chipped green paint with red showing beneath to make it all seem real.

By the dial of my watch I knew I ought to go on, but I had so turned myself around trying to see the view in all its aspects that I couldn't say which way was onwards. There were no lights through the fog to guide me, no pattern to track in the worn paint. I thought of Robert Frost, and of the footprints I had made by my arrival, and how nobody walked half the bridge. But the day had been dry until the fog came, and now the walkway was evenly patterned with little dewdrops, except in the circles I had made by my turning. There was no track to see but that.

It would have taken a few minutes to resolve my uncertainty. Choose a direction and walk, and see what emerged, if anything still could. But the choosing was impossible, the ways both being blank. And if I had chosen, I did not believe then – do not believe now – that I could have walked straight, even suspended on that line in the empty sky.