Daily stories

After the demolition there was so much sky in the sky that the dust didn't seem to matter. We sat in evening sun where once we were in shadow. We had learned how these things that seem part of the shape of the world can vanish like an ebb tide. Nobody had lived there anywhere, we thought.

I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. Straight away an unseen mechanism takes up the tension, easing it away little by little. The next day, I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. The mechanism clicks, and somewhere I will never go, something happens. If, one day, I do not turn the key, the spring will slacken and the mechanism will slow and stop. I would never do it. But I might, any day now, put the key into its hole and turn and turn and turn until something snaps.

On my birthday I took a pass-the-parcel to work. We spend the team meeting passing unwanted crap around the table anyway: we might as well get a Chewit when the music stops. It was a wonderful birthday, an unexpected afternoon in the sun. And if management or the bomb squad ask any difficult questions, I will say: I am older now, and wiser.

I learned to paint one colour at a time, squeezing the last of the blue from the tube as I saved up for orange. At first it annoyed me to see the red of my tomatoes and have only the green of the vine to paint with. In time I found there was a little of each hue in everything. At last I sold a painting, and with the little money I made I bought five pretty little tubes. I squeezed a little blob from each, and watched them on the palette, daring me to mix them.

While the machine warmed up, we watched increasingly complicated time-travel movies and challenged each other to explain them. We thought we were preparing our minds. But we were wrong to believe a journey in the machine would be explicable. Now our worlds all have different histories, and my mother was a pine tree, and my heart is younger than my head when it had always been the other way around.

There was a shudder in the walls every morning in the old house. "Don't worry," my uncle said, "it's just the pipes, where the Creature lives." He was always like that. He didn't know how much kids can believe. He didn't know I'd crawl out of bed before dawn and sit by the radiator, looking for something to talk to.

Through slatted blinds I read the landscape plotted out on graph paper: the treetops rising steadily on the horizon; the sky squeezed out by rising land; and at the end of the x axis, one big square column, a mode far from the median. I understood, until he pulled the cord and the blinds rattled up, and I could no longer see the shape of things.

All week we gambled on ladybird spots, betting chocolate bars and pints and twenty pound notes. On the last night we found a wildlife book in Gary's room, in among his winnings, with the page on ladybirds turned down at the corner. 7-spot, 2-spot, 4-spot. I'd always thought it was random. Serves us right, I suppose, for not being curious.

The mosquitoes were biting, but they weren't biting me. Was it something in my blood, or the scent of my skin? Was there some poison in my veins that they could taste even before landing? I slapped where they should have been, and scratched until I made the welts I was missing. I scratched until the blood came, and I saw what was wrong with it.

We were blowing dandelion clocks all afternoon, the seeds streaming from the stems and never running out. There would be weeds all over our mother's perfect lawn, making it more beautiful. But they didn't grow, for we blew and blew and never found the time.