Mark Taylor

In my parents' house there is a drawer of birds' eggs resting in crumpled paper, perfect and protected and cold and dead. I keep them half from pride and half from shame. Even as a boy I knew better. If I hadn't been told not to

When she passed the cone back, he found she had taken the entire Flake. There was a little tunnel where it had been, a negative space flecked with chocolate crumbs. Her usual selfishness. He turned to complain, and saw her with ice cream on her nose and the Flake between

I woke in a vast library of rolling shelves, which slid past me propelled by mechanisms unseen. A title caught my eye, and I tried to chase it down, but another bookcase cut across between us, and by the time the way was clear again, the book I was after

Kit had a good job, making sticks of chalk for mathematicians to turn into ideas. It had troubled him at first that for the things he made to do their good work they had to be reduced to dust. But then he thought of all that dust drifting out and

I stepped out onto the cloud. I knew from childhood computer games that it would hold me: the trick is to jump each time you sink, until you make it to the important cloud where you don't sink at all. But it was only vapour, that wrapped me

The driver shook my arm, although I wasn't sleeping. "You can't be in there, mate." "Why not?" I said. "It's my skip. There was nothing in the terms about it." I was a little more brusque than I

In the streets they were calling for impossible things: lush forests unbound by fences, great public halls full of books to read for free, a teacher for every child. Decent enough folk, turned feral by false promises. None of us liked the medicine we had to dispense that day. Myself,

After Mrs Clements' passing, a hollow book was found among her possessions, and in its hand-cut void a silver key and an inscrutable map. Her heirs and their hangers-on spent many years searching for the lock that little key opened, with the dubious help of the map and without

I had forty leaflets left before I could go home and I knew down to the roots of my teeth that I could chuck them all in the bin and the world wouldn't change. They were all heading there anyway. The only difference would be that forty-one people