A Felling

It's been an exciting week for the gadget-fiend in me, as I took delivery of my Zerowriter Ink. If you have been eyeing up the Freewrite but you appreciate either open source or having some money left, give it a look.

With my new gadget, I have prepared for you another story about a sad boy near a tree. I didn't do this on purpose and I will try to write about something different next week, although I can make no promises.

This week's daily stories

Monday

The city was unchanged, although it had been twenty years since he walked there. The same signs on the same buildings; the same fashions in the same shops. On the steps of the station he saw the coffee he had spilled running for the train. He looked at his hands, and at his face reflected in a window pane, and all the change fell upon them at once.

Tuesday

By the time they discovered what I had stolen, I had the redundancy money out in cash and I was well beyond their reach. It was a good payout, ex gratia, as they say, which means “don’t ask any awkward questions”. Nothing like what the other lot would pay for what I stole, of course. But I didn’t sell it. I kept it under my bed, and imagined them all squirming to help me off to sleep.

Wednesday

After my fall, a little crowd gathered. Someone helped me stand and someone laughed. Someone brought me a cup of tea and someone picked my pocket. There were streaks in my eyes and blood in my mouth and I couldn’t tell who was holding me up and who had knocked me down. Sometimes I think of falling again: falling carefully, so I can see is who. Instead, I try to help people up.

Thursday

I began to look thinner in the mirror. I told myself I shouldn’t worry, but that just gave me two things to hate myself for. The next week I saw my reflection’s fingernails: smooth, unbitten. Manicured? He began dressing better than me, and his wrist grew a big silver watch that needed winding. I couldn’t look him in the eye any more: he was so much taller, just from standing straight, I wound up looking up his nose. So I stopped looking altogether. A few weeks later I came face to face with him in a lift. He was thinner than ever, and slumped, and ragged, and his eyes stared blankly ahead. I reached out to touch him, and felt cold, smooth glass.

Friday

She came back as a beetle, tough and iridescent, and something in her remembered what it had been like before. She set out for revenge. He marvelled at all her colours, and when he reached to her she bit him. But that was not revenge. Revenge she found under his boot. He stamped and stamped, like a child with no pudding. When he was done she sauntered away, as hard and as beautiful as ever, and left him to suck his swelling finger.

Saturday

If you did as they liked, they carved your name on a little brass plaque and set it with the others in the hallway. You felt pleased, for a month or a year or a decade. You liked that there was a woman paid to come and shine your name up bright each week. But sooner or later, you came to wish that you could take it down, scrub it out, at least let it tarnish. The sparkle of that hallway was the worst of it: the way it made us all seem proud.

Sunday

I had a fine set of ghost’s teeth fitted, there when you want them and gone where you don’t. No brushing, no flossing, no sores. And so much kinder than teeth extracted from the living. But they felt wrong in my mouth: like they would bite me in my sleep. I went back to the dentist, but he said they could not be extracted. I would have to call a priest.

I have been reading...

• The Secret Commonwealth by Phillip Pullman. What with one thing (the birth of my son) and another (a global pandemic) it took me a long time to get round to this, but I was reminded of it at the weekend by friends rereading it before The Rose Field. I'm glad I waited: there is much in this novel that speaks to me more now than it would have in 2019.
• The Ones Who Flew The Nest, a short anthology from Fly on the Wall Press. This caught my eye for its first story, Katie Hale's “You Can Let Yourself Be Swept Away or Else Become the Flood”, in which “a young woman falls in love with a Goose and grows wings”: I recently wrote a story (which you haven't seen yet) about transforming into a goose for love. I'm grateful the coincidence took me here: all four stories are very fine.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: A Felling

The boy was sitting still now, and Steven was worried he would get cold. That was how kids were. Running around refusing their coats, and then, bam, it all came over them at once and they started whinging as though it was anybody’s fault but their own. The boy gave a sniff, unnaturally long and deep to Steven’s mind. Like he was gearing up to scream.

He didn’t scream. He just looked up at Steven, and said, “This is taking ages.”

Steven drained his can and crushed it in his hand, just enough to show it was empty. He put it with the others. Should be bagging them up as I go, he thought. If we have to run there won’t be time, and then we’d be littering. And there’d be fingerprints. Should be bagging them up as I go. Shouldn’t be drinking at all. Shouldn’t be here.

“Come back on your own if you want,” Steven said. He regretted it straight away, the way he usually did when he spoke to children. For one thing, he really thought the boy might do it. “Look, I’ve got to think about the best way to do this. You don’t want to end up underneath, do you?”

“I could go and stand over there,” the boy said, pointing off into the dark.

“Well, I don’t want to end up underneath it either. So just let me think.”