Daily stories

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 boot. He stamped and stamped, like a child with no pudding. When he was done she sauntered away, as hard and as beautiful as ever, and left him to suck his swelling finger.

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 silver watch that needed winding. I couldn’t look him in the eye any more: he was so much taller, just from standing straight, I wound up looking up his nose. So I stopped looking altogether. A few weeks later I came face to face with him in a lift. He was thinner than ever, and slumped, and ragged, and his eyes stared blankly ahead. I reached out to touch him, and felt cold, smooth glass.

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 had knocked me down. Sometimes I think of falling again: falling carefully, so I can see is who. Instead, I try to help people up.

By the time they discovered what I had stolen, I had the redundancy money out in cash and I was well beyond their reach. It was a good payout, ex gratia, as they say, which means “don't ask any awkward questions”. Nothing like what the other lot would pay for what I stole, of course. But I didn't sell it. I kept it under my bed, and imagined them all squirming to help me off to sleep.

The city was unchanged, although it had been twenty years since he walked there. The same signs on the same buildings; the same fashions in the same shops. On the steps of the station he saw the coffee he had spilled running for the train. He looked at his hands, and at his face reflected in a window pane, and all the change fell upon them at once.

They will put adverts in, Nell told me. They will put adverts in your electronic eyes that you can't look away from, and adverts in your brain-chip that you don't even know are adverts. You will suddenly crave an ice-cold Coca Cola, and it will feel like it comes from you. I knew all this. I knew it would be much worse than she thought. But it was that or dying.

Zia trained crows and I trained squirrels, and that's how we kept in touch: his messages dropped on the table where I left pumpkin seeds, mine carried off in little grey paws. Most of our friendship was badmouthing the other's choice of familiar, all in good fun. But after a time, things soured. Our notes grew cold, then angry, then cruel. One morning I caught a squirrel, paper unfurled, scratching away with a stubby bit of pencil. On the fence, a crow laughed, ha ha ha.

Someone set a great flywheel spinning where my heart should be, ready to shake me to pieces if I tried to stop still, ready to tear the fingers from anyone who touched me. You could hear it whirring in quiet moments, a long low groan echoing up my throat. Every task I turned it to just turned it faster, thermodynamics shattering against the force of it. It needed something stronger to slow it: a pair of arms, and a wash of gentleness.

Something roared and ripped in the return chute, but it was deep enough in the dark that I could pretend ignorance. They were good books, most of them. One I hadn't read before it came due, and that was a shame. But the system is what it is, and it takes all of us to keep its wheels turning. Soon there will be new books on the library shelves, bright white and filled with pretty words for us.

Mr Grey's summer club cost a pebble to get in. Sometimes the kids painted their pebbles gold or silver, or drew little pictures on them, or wrote messages. But you didn't have to. It just cost a pebble, found in the park or in the gutter or on someone's gravel driveway, and if you forgot yours then Mr Grey would give you one to pay with. At the end of the summer we looked back through the window and saw him tipping them out from a great blue bucket, and feeling the weight of them all, and smiling.