Shots Hereat

Here is a story about a bar with an oddly-phrased advertising message, and an uncertain, unsteady friendship there. I was about 80% confident that I saw this sign through a bus window, but I am increasingly convinced that I must have misread it. This is the power of fiction: to can conjure up new worlds, islands of the almost-real, in which we were right all along.

This week's daily stories

Monday

We got the thick duvet and the big coats down from the loft. We bled all the radiators and had the boiler serviced. We cleared leaves from the gutters, piled up firewood, harvested potatoes. We started writing Christmas cards. Anything to pretend we would still be there when the winter came.

Tuesday

The boy had to make an autumn collage, so we went out gathering leaves. Together on the ground they look so perfect; it’s only when you look up close that you see all the flaws. Tears and spots and nibbled holes, and edges already rotting. I thought we’d never find enough that we could use. The boy put a brave face on it: he found smiles and stars and hidden creatures in all those blemishes, and he stuck them on the page without complaining. But I looked at his collage, and all I could see was mess.

Wednesday

“Bury me at sea!” He was drunk when he said it, and none of us knew he was dying, least of all the man himself. But he said it a lot, and he didn’t say much else before he went. It fell to us to decide whether he meant it. We all felt the romance in the idea as he half-sang it down Brewer Street, but after, we thought of the cold and the wet and his trussed-up body flopping over the side like a sack of coal. Bleak. Nobody wanted it, and nobody really thought he wanted it. But the idea of those words in our heads at the crematorium was bleaker still.

Thursday

I made the wish, clear and true, and my fingers tingled. When I flexed them, they moved with freedom and precision: I felt I could have plucked a fly from the air. My hearing had changed, too. I heard tones and rhythms and melodies from the fountain where I had thrown my coin. I dashed around looking for a piano, and found one in a grand old bookshop, old and (I could now tell) out of tune. The music poured out of me. I haven’t played much since. I suppose if I had been all that interested, I would have learned without wishing.

Friday

At night the postboxes came alive, great red columns stomping down the street, little red cuboids squirming out of walls like lambs from their mothers. We hadn't fed them enough. They swallowed up all the paper they could find, and when that didn't satisfy they swallowed phones and laptops and routers so that we would need them again. We all had to go and buy postcards and stamps, and write thankyous to aunties and greetings to old friends. It felt good, in a way, but we posted them carefully, frightened for our fingers.

Saturday

We put two cans on a piece of string and stretched it tight. You said I had to pull good and hard, or you wouldn't hear me. With that distance between us, with the smell of baked beans in my nose instead of the smell of your mum's cigarettes, with the feel of you pulling away from me, I thought maybe I could say something true for once. But when I opened my mouth, you let go of your can and you laughed at the gash mine left on my chin. I have to admit, it was pretty funny.

Sunday

At school I learned that if you share your chocolate with someone every day, it doesn't make them like you. It just makes them expect chocolate. Of course there's learning and learning. I still seem to end up with no chocolate and someone spreading rumours that I wet myself in Geography and had to go home. But at least now, when someone gives me chocolate, I don't feel I have to be nice to them.

A new tiny story goes up every day at www.scattering.ink/daily

I have been reading...

• Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino (translated by William Weaver). A charming, fractal, cosmic, comic little novel in which the titular Mr Palomar grapples with the infinite profundity, banality and silliness of the universe around him. I feel as though I have lots to say about this book, but as Mr Palomar puts it, "It is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible."
• The Weather in Kansas by Crista Ermiya. This short story collection seems to be out of print now, which is a shame. Ermiya's voice is distinctive but never predictable, and I really hope we'll hear from her again soon. (An aside: in 'Marginalia', a character once again handles an old book with gloves, but don't worry: the book is a facsimile and the gloves are of great importance to the story. Come back next week for another edition of the Handling Books With Gloves newsletter.)

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This week's story: Shots Hereat

They were meeting at Shots Hereat. Supposed to be, anyway. Ade had got Jack a pint in, but was beginning to think he'd have to start on it himself. Jack was always late. Worse than that, he always had a good reason.

The bar wasn't officially called Shots Hereat. It had held a few names over the years. Multiple names, multiple owners, and multiple just-off-trend food menus. But the A-board out the front had held steady through it all: no manager had stayed long enough to get round to changing it. The A-board said "SHOTS HEREAT", and Ade thought that was better than any of the names that had gone up on the sign. So they called the bar Shots Hereat, or sometimes just Shots or just Hereat, and often, because it really tickled them, Thereat. Ade would text, "Meet you at 7 Thereat?", and Jack would turn up at eight or nine or not at all, and they would never have shots even though they joked they really ought to, because it wasn't a shots kind of friendship.