Mark Taylor

The cranes swang around on the horizon. That was all they did. There was nothing to build with, and never had been. But swinging the cranes around was good fun for the bored young men they paid to do it, and the sight of them on the horizon helped us

You're like a knife, she said. I thought of how I used to cook all her meals, slicing vegetables into little flowers for her. I thought of the nasty cut I got trying to open a plastic package with my teeth. I thought of all the tips bent

The day I left my job all the world's lost things started coming to me. It started with socks in the laundry, odd socks in colours I'd never owned. Keys in my pockets for cars parked who-knows-where and houses soon to have the locks changed. Coins

The train was a hundred miles long. You got on at the back, and you made your way down the length of it, and once you got to the front you had reached your destination. It was never delayed and it was never cancelled, and in the first dozen or

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

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

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

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

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