Mark Taylor

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

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,

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

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

It was a dismal old cookbook, everything brown and grey and set in jelly, but it was all we had left of her. We made it all. Every grim dish of hard-boiled pork, every sickly marshmallow salad. It didn't bring back so much as a whisper of her.

A year later, I made my way to the appointed place. The Green Knight was waiting in the dawn mist, axe in hand. I knelt, and bared my neck, and he struck my head clean off. He posted it that afternoon, Epic Beheading Prank GONE WRONG! Knight Gets Karma After

The pumpkin wouldn't rot. We had promised Benjamin that it could stay on the step until it started to smell, but it looked better than ever. The scuffs I made trying to get the top off had healed up. It must have been the cold weather. One day,

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,"