The Puffin Guide to Drawing

This week, a story about art that won’t quite come out right. This isn't the story I planned to send you, but the first one wouldn’t quite come out right. I didn’t notice that connection until I started writing this introduction, which I suppose shows one of the reasons I need to write stories: I’m not self-aware enough to think about these things otherwise.

Do take a moment to look at some pictures of puffins. They are a very reliable day-enhancer.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

From the very top of the tree, you could see out across the whole forest, but nothing that was happening within it: the world beneath was hidden under leaves. But some of the creatures seemed to see deeper. Every movement below came together to ripple the branches just so, and they could read it.

From the bottom of the tree, you could not be sure how far you saw through the dense lines of trunks. But what was there rustled and sprang and called like life itself. And some of the creatures seemed to see further, like the forest was all one thing.

I liked it best nestled in the boughs of the tree, wrapped up close, seeing nothing else at all.

Tuesday

Flat on my back, spilled beer seeping into my shirt, I was thinking: they can all tell. Everyone can see this is the first punch I’ve ever taken. They are looking at me on the ground and thinking: what else hasn’t he done? My jaw didn’t hurt too badly. There was enough blood in my mouth to spit out in a casual, tough-looking way. I could still turn this around.

Wednesday

A new way of living. That’s what we were promised. That’s what we had longed for, all the long days. A way that would connect us. We gave up everything, and did it gladly, because there wasn’t anything we wanted to keep. But it’s not a new way of living, after all. It’s the same old way, with a different man in the big chair.

Thursday

Glyn did amateur dramatics in his old school hall, under the direction of his old school drama teacher. It felt like a nightmare, sometimes, standing around before rehearsal under those same fluorescent lights but talking about jobs and backaches. But then the run came round, the audience filed in, the lights went down, and the joy of being someone else hit all the harder.

Friday

We didn’t have all the pieces, so we had to invent our own rules. Two scrappy little armies, one of them mostly pawns, but the pawns were so battered you could tell each one apart. We gave them names, skills, stories. From time to time they would switch sides. One day we found a pristine set, all boxed up. It smelled of pine and paint. We turned out the pieces and lined them up. It didn’t look right. Not like a real fight.

Saturday

I went back to the old church most days. You could find me on my knees, head bowed. I had dropped something very precious there, and in the dim light it was hard to search for. Of course, I knew I would never find it. It had probably been sucked up the nose of their worn-out Henry Hoover the day I lost it. But it was a place of hope.

Sunday

She had all her broken things arranged on the kitchen table: phones, friendships, hopes, hoover. Clothes and cares all gone into holes. She set to work with needle and thread and screwdriver and solder, one by one, the only way to do anything. By the time the sun went down it was all working, more or less, but some of it rattled when she shook it, and she had a little box of parts left over. She put them in the drawer, to mend the next things.

I have been reading...

• The Rose Field by Philip Pullman. I'm going to keep my counsel rather than risk spoiling anyone's thirty-year reading journey, but if you have read it and have thoughts, my inbox is open.
• “Colors From Elsewhere” by Rachel Khong, the latest from One Story. I really enjoyed this story, in which familiar ideas collide into something quite new and beautifully rendered.

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This week’s story: The Puffin Guide to Drawing

Marsha was trying to draw puffins. She had come to the island specially with her bag of inexpensive drawing things; arranged to stay all day while the people from the boat tours came and went. The puffins were wonderful things to capture in pencils, she thought: the monochrome of their bodies and the sunshine splash of beaks and feet.

But they wouldn’t come out right. They came out like the puffins she imagined as a girl, like little penguins, a foot and a half tall. Indelicate. They came out as the mascot on the spine of an adventure story, somehow flat and featureless, however much she shaded their little round bellies or softened the wispiness of a stray feather. When she added the things around them to the scene, the rocks and grass and flowers, they still looked the same size. It made the plants look strange, enormous.