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Mark Taylor

https://markiswrit.ing

Lift

After two hours in the lift, someone answered the emergency call button. You need to think more positively, they said. This idea of being trapped is keeping you in the lift. When you feel stuck, take ten deep breaths. Ask yourself: why do I believe this thought? And try to

Lost cat

Dad was sitting in a folding chair by the open kitchen door, looking out into the dark. He was worried he had upset the cat and she wouldn't come home. "Of course she'll come home," I said, "Don't worry." He

Grit

There was the tiniest piece of grit in the salad, and she bit down on it every time: a boulder between her teeth, the way things feel big in the mouth. When she was done chewing she rolled it to the tip of her tongue, and then to a finger.

Shots Hereat

Here is a story about a bar with an oddly-phrased advertising message, and an uncertain, unsteady friendship there. I was about 80% confident that I saw this sign through a bus window, but I am increasingly convinced that I must have misread it. This is the power of fiction: to

Three Squares of Dairy Milk

At school I learned that if you share your chocolate with someone every day, it doesn't make them like you. It just makes them expect chocolate. Of course there's learning and learning. I still seem to end up with no chocolate and someone spreading rumours that

Tin can telephone

We put two cans on a piece of string and stretched it tight. You said I had to pull good and hard, or you wouldn't hear me. With that distance between us, with the smell of baked beans in my nose instead of the smell of your mum&

Night of the living postboxes

At night the postboxes came alive, great red columns stomping down the street, little red cuboids squirming out of walls like lambs from their mothers. We hadn't fed them enough. They swallowed up all the paper they could find, and when that didn't satisfy they swallowed

Wish

I made the wish, clear and true, and my fingers tingled. When I flexed them, they moved with freedom and precision: I felt I could have plucked a fly from the air. My hearing had changed, too. I heard tones and rhythms and melodies from the fountain where I had

Bury me at sea

"Bury me at sea!" He was drunk when he said it, and none of us knew he was dying, least of all the man himself. But he said it a lot, and he didn't say much else before he went. It fell to us to decide

Collage

The boy had to make an autumn collage, so we went out gathering leaves. Together on the ground they look so perfect; it's only when you look up close that you see all the flaws. Tears and spots and nibbled holes, and edges already rotting. I thought we&