The End of Year Rush

Welcome to the last Scattering of the year. It's Sunday, in case you've lost track. I hope 2025 has been kind to you, that your 2026 is a delight, and that you got lots of books for Christmas. If last year's resolutions have recently made an unwelcome return to your mind, this week's story is for you.

This week's daily stories

Monday

We burned the warehouse when there were fires burning everywhere, and fireworks in the streets. It caught easily, no petrol to leave a residue. One firework through the window. Of course we knew just where to throw it. We planned it all out, but the insurance company never questioned any of it. They just paid out. Like they always knew our place would burn down.

Tuesday

With the snow and the mist, it was hard to tell which way was up. I stood on my head and wheeled my feet in the air, and I seemed to be making progress, but then my ears went numb. So I lay on my back for a while, and things felt soft and easy. When the sun set, the fog went with it, and I could find my way by the stars.

Christmas Eve

We finally knew the date again: our jailer had given us Advent calendars, handmade from plain grey board, a ballpoint drawing behind each window. There was disagreement among us about whether he had given them out on the last day of November or the first of December. There was disagreement, too, about whether we could trust him at all: perhaps, out there in the light, it was midsummer. But the scratchy, uncertain star behind the first window was all the promise I needed.

Christmas Day

You spent Christmas day in the woods outside my house, screaming at crows and chewing on the feral snowberries. Dizzy and sick by the afternoon, just like the rest of us, you lay down in the wet leaves and shivered yourself warm. We took you a turkey sandwich and a cup of sugary tea. You crept back in that night, and on Boxing Day morning you beat us all at Scrabble. Until next year.

Boxing Day

Among the strange things that live at the bottom of the ocean there drifted a little lost starling. She didn’t understand that she should be unable to breathe. She didn’t understand that the terrible weight of the water should crush her hollow bones. She pulled herself along with her delicate wings, and ate pinprick creatures that glowed softly, and learned the slow calls of the deep. One day there was a shimmer in the darkness, and she swamflew up and up and up until she burst out into a sky thick with her sisters and brothers. She joined that great murmur, but could never quite fit in their wide dark pattern: her belly full of light, her lungs full of saltwater and sea-song.

?????

Grandma had wolf’s teeth on the end of her knitting needles. It seemed to make things harder, but she wouldn’t take them off. She said she ate up the wool and it turned to socks inside her, and then she wondered why nobody wanted to wear them. But she still smiled when she gave them to you: two rows of little points.

?????

The sack of iron chain in the storeroom was too heavy to move. You would have to haul the lengths out and around the tight corner to get anywhere. In the bottom of the sack there were a few loose links, and those were all we needed for the job. Someone said we should cut a hole in the sack to get at them, and perhaps we should have. There was a sack of spare sacks in the storeroom. But I wanted to pull it all out, link by link by link.

I have been reading...

• I finished Never Again, Doug Nufer's novel in which no word is repeated.* I enjoyed many of the ways Nufer tackles his constraint, but found myself disappointed by the setting and plot, which for such a strange book seemed to hew oddly close to the stereotypical fixations of the American male writer (gun violence, crime, sex, motor vehicles etc). On reflection I think that works: this is a story about trying to escape the habitual ("Do anything once; then, best of all, never again") and being sucked back into it. The content suits the form. All in all, though, I don't think I'm cut out for constrained writing. The world imposes enough constraints on us already.
  * Sadly, the word "landlocked" appears on pages 84 and 93, so with regret I will have to throw the book in the bin.
• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. I don't read the backs of books very carefully (or rather, I carefully don't read them very thoroughly), so I was expecting a sort of gently satirical rural mystery. It's more like if Alice in Wonderland started out with a one-legged farmer murdering a man with a spade. Surprises like this are why I take care not to pay too much attention to the backs of books.

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This week's story: The End of Year Rush

”I started reading it,” Liam protested. “But you know what it’s like this time of year. Everything’s all over the place. And then you go back to work and that’s it, poof, gone out of your head.”

Sally smiled and ruffled his hair, the way she had been doing since he was half her height. “I’m not telling you off, stupid,” she said. “I just think you’ll like it. Read it before you read this one, yeah?”

And this year’s present looked really good. Liam was itching to get into it, in all these unclaimed hours between Christmas and the new year. But his big sister had never grown out of knowing best, so he stared at his bookshelves looking for last Christmas’s book, and when that didn’t work he walked his fingers along the spines so that he couldn’t miss it. It would have helped if he had known what it was called, or who wrote it, or what colour the cover was, or how thick it was. But he would know it when he saw it, he thought.

And so he did, when he saw it in its spot under the bed, carelessly kicked once and gone for a twelvemonth, a little crown of dust and hair making him ashamed two ways. He brushed it down and glanced over the few pages before the bookmark. They had the shadow of familiarity, like being told what you did when you were drunk. No good. Start again. It was the season for it. He pulled out the pagekeeper, wiping things clean with a flourish, the novel’s hero snapping back to that rainy Kyiv street with a dull premonition of how his evening was about to go wrong. Before Liam tucked the press-ganged bookmark into the back cover, he looked it over. A list, written on a torn-off flap from a box of Christmas crackers. Number one: read more.