This Is Disco Turtle 🪩🐢

This week, a little story about a tortoise covered in mirrors. You probably shouldn't do this! If you want an ambulatory disco ball, please use a Roomba.

This week's daily stories

Monday

She married in her great grandmother’s wedding dress, sewn up from the parachute that saved her great grandfather’s life. Something old, and borrowed from the war museum that kept it pristine. They would add a photo of the day to the exhibit, and she would tell them how marriage was like a parachute jump, a great adventure but with something holding you safe. But as she walked to the altar she heard the silk whisper: in case you need to jump.

Tuesday

I'm stepping on all the cracks, because I know he doesn't want me to and I'm not in the mood for his stupid games. I can feel his little hand pulling and pushing at mine as he dances around them. It's easy for him to keep those little feet to the middle of each paving stone. Doesn't he realise how much harder it is for me? He's played at wearing my shoes enough times.

Normally when I am in a bad mood I reassure him: don't worry, Daddy isn't upset because of you. It's not your fault. But today it is his because of him, so I stay quiet and step on cracks, until I hear a little sob, and the next crack I step on opens up and swallows me.

Wednesday

“I feel like my head’s turning inside out,” I said, but saying it made me think of pictures I had seen and scrolled past quickly, pictures of heads turned inside out that didn’t feel like anything any more. It’s not my place to say a thing like that, I thought. But my head still hurt. It hurt more.

Thursday

My guitar string broke. My shoelace snapped. My belt fell to pieces, and there was a little shred of torn floss stuck between my back teeth. Everything that had been stretched out too tight and narrow had given up at once. For a while I lived in slippers and elastic-waisted pyjamas and played a little flat. I loosened.

Friday

It grew dark, and they began to wonder what they had done with the day. Not nothing, surely: most of them were sore all over, and those that weren't were sore in the head at least. But when they looked, they couldn't see where all that soreness had gone. The darker it got, the harder they looked, and the less they saw; until they collapsed into sleep, and the sun rose. It shone on everything they had built, but none of them were looking.

Saturday

My father collected the murderous kind of spy gadget. No clever codes or microdots, just hidden knives and poison rings and beautiful things that were guns. All the most thrilling toys a boy could be forbidden. By the time he left them to me, I had outgrown my fascination. All I wanted was to read his old diaries, and get to know the man inside. When I opened the first volume, it gave a click. There was an empty space where the explosive charge should be.

Sunday

Fresh brewed like the day, and like the day, they had no time to drink it in. They left it on the counter, steaming, and the day drank it instead. When they came home it was half-gone, stale and strong like them. They warmed it in the microwave and swallowed it down. It kept them awake when they should have been sleeping. They read poems and drew flowers and talked with friends across the ocean. They drank in the night.

I have been reading...

• Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders. There's a moment in this novel where protagonist Jamie, working on a PhD in eigtheenth-century English literature, handles a rare book "with gloves on, she's not a monster". This seemed like an authorial goof: Jamie ought to know that gloves impair sensation and dexterity, and so do more harm than good. But it's the perfect mistake for a novel driven by characters who are a little numbed and clumsy, who think they know better than they do, and who do harm as a result. Jamie has to learn to take the gloves off, even though it's scary. I think Anders knows that you don't wear gloves to handle rare books. And that is my review of a seven-word parenthetical from the middle of this novel.
• Carmen et Error issue 13.5. I especially enjoyed 'worm song' by Marten Baxter, though this may be because of the elaborate worm-friend lore that my son and I have concocted. Worms are underappreciated, and I salute Captain Worm.
• 'Briar Rose' by Alex Clark and 'Chalklands' by Richard Smyth, two short stories being distributed free to bookshops and cafés by Uncertain Stories. They are fine stories in delightful little books, and you can get them packed in with your order of Broken Ground.

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This week's story: This Is Disco Turtle

This is Disco Turtle. He has little pieces of broken mirror glued all over his shell, and despite his name, he is a tortoise. The name is stuck as fast as the mirrors, and I can hardly complain, my own name being Grace.

Disco Turtle sparkles on a sunny day when he walks down the street. He roams the neighbourhood like a cat, when the sun is out. When it is grey he stays home at number 7, where his mad owner keeps a whole room at just the right temperature. If he is out on the street and the sky clouds over, he is almost invisible, the dull flat world reflecting off his shell, his little head poking out as though from another dimension.