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A week into the job, I still hadn't met a person. I was working my way through the induction training: uncanny voiceovers about health and safety and data protection, backed up by questions a block of wood could answer. Automated emails delivered accounts, reassurances, and promises of tasks

The alarm had been ringing for twenty minutes, but nobody knew what it was for. "It has the rhythm of catastrophe," opined Jeremy, "but not the timbre." Jenny closed her eyes and raised a finger for quiet. "I heard something like this once before,"

The ghost-hunter had a battered buzzing gadget, a metal thing from the seventies with a chunky handle to support the weight of its huge batteries, and a wand on a coiled wire. He said the tricky thing was calibrating it. The dead are everywhere, you see, so it takes just

A nail half in. A board primed and unpainted. A window open, just to let the air in, with the snow blowing through. Pencil marks on walls and a dust sheet on the floor. A glass, empty but for the fine white residue that clings to it. A radio still

The continental buffet breakfast was truly unlimited. You turned, or blinked, or just shifted your attention, and all the bread and cheese and meat and pastry was back in place like you had got up early for once. We did what we could, filling bags and touring the city to

I didn't think school fairs gave goldfish as prizes any more, but apparently this one did. All the parents were holding a fish in a bag, most of them pulling a face to say I don't really agree with this, but the kids were so excited.

Jenny gave Dave his birthday present in an intricate puzzle box, knowing he would never get around to solving it. But Dave knew how she was: he knew there would be nothing inside. So he solved it the day he got it, ready to fill with treasure and give back

I went out in the storm in all the old clothes I'd shrunk out of, and my big hat tied tight to my head, and I let it blow me away. Once the wind takes you, everything feels calm: the air and the wind and your little body

After that Christmas our snowmen stopped coming to life. Coincidence, I said. You can't fall out so hard it kills the snowmen. It was probably pollution, like every other thing: the changing climate, or the dust from the new road, or the way the LED streetlights flatten the