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 phones and laptops and routers so that we would need them again. We all had to go and buy postcards and stamps, and write thankyous to aunties and greetings to old friends. It felt good, in a way, but we posted them carefully, frightened for our fingers.
Daily stories
A tiny story every day.
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 thrown my coin. I dashed around looking for a piano, and found one in a grand old bookshop, old and (I could now tell) out of tune. The music poured out of me. I haven't played much since. I suppose if I had been all that interested, I would have learned without wishing.
"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 whether he meant it. We all felt the romance in the idea as he half-sang it down Brewer Street, but after, we thought of the cold and the wet and his trussed-up body flopping over the side like a sack of coal. Bleak. Nobody wanted it, and nobody really thought he wanted it. But the idea of those words in our heads at the crematorium was bleaker still.
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'd never find enough that we could use. The boy put a brave face on it: he found smiles and stars and hidden creatures in all those blemishes, and he stuck them on the page without complaining. But I looked at his collage, and all I could see was mess.
We got the thick duvet and the big coats down from the loft. We bled all the radiators and had the boiler serviced. We cleared leaves from the gutters, piled up firewood, harvested potatoes. We started writing Christmas cards. Anything to pretend we would still be there when the winter came.
Fresh brewed like the day, and like the day, they had no time to drink it in. They left it on the counter, steaming, and the day drank it instead. When they came home it was half-gone, stale and strong like them. They warmed it in the microwave and swallowed it down. It kept them awake when they should have been sleeping. They read poems and drew flowers and talked with friends across the ocean. They drank in the night.
My father collected the murderous kind of spy gadget. No clever codes or microdots, just hidden knives and poison rings and beautiful things that were guns. All the most thrilling toys a boy could be forbidden. By the time he left them to me, I had outgrown my fascination. All I wanted was to read his old diaries, and get to know the man inside. When I opened the first volume, it gave a click. There was an empty space where the explosive charge should be.
It grew dark, and they began to wonder what they had done with the day. Not nothing, surely: most of them were sore all over, and those that weren't were sore in the head at least. But when they looked, they couldn't see where all that soreness had gone. The darker it got, the harder they looked, and the less they saw; until they collapsed into sleep, and the sun rose. It shone on everything they had built, but none of them were looking.
My guitar string broke. My shoelace snapped. My belt fell to pieces, and there was a little shred of torn floss stuck between my back teeth. Everything that had been stretched out too tight and narrow had given up at once. For a while I lived in slippers and elastic-waisted pyjamas and played a little flat. I loosened.
"I feel like my head's turning inside out," I said, but saying it made me think of pictures I had seen and scrolled past quickly, pictures of heads turned inside out that didn't feel like anything any more. It's not my place to say a thing like that, I thought. But my head still hurt. It hurt more.