Daily stories

Jenny gave Dave his birthday present in an intricate puzzle box, knowing he would never get around to solving it. But Dave knew how she was: he knew there would be nothing inside. So he solved it the day he got it, ready to fill with treasure and give back to her. Inside were two tickets to the gig that weekend, the one that had sold out before he even saw it. He didn't mention it, and neither did she. They just met at the venue, and he bought her a drink.

I went out in the storm in all the old clothes I'd shrunk out of, and my big hat tied tight to my head, and I let it blow me away. Once the wind takes you, everything feels calm: the air and the wind and your little body are all flying around just the same as each other. You look down at the ground and think: thank God I'm not down there, spinning around. It set me down a few miles away, not gentle, but fair. I built a little hut, and waited for the next storm.

After that Christmas our snowmen stopped coming to life. Coincidence, I said. You can't fall out so hard it kills the snowmen. It was probably pollution, like every other thing: the changing climate, or the dust from the new road, or the way the LED streetlights flatten the whole world. But there was something else hanging in the air, too, heaviness to hold down something as light as snow. I looked at their gravel eyes and thought: what if they still come to life, and they just can't move? I thought I knew how that would feel.

On the way to work your bike skids on the flattened corpse of a pigeon. You saw it in plenty of time, but that didn't save you: your eyes snagged on the hollow bones, and your wheels followed. As the world flips on its side and you slide along the tarmac, you see the bird kicked up into the air, and then the shattered wings flapping. It pulls left into the sky, and you try to lift your head from the road to follow it, but you are stuck there.

Danny said a mouldywarp was different to a mole: they were clever like people, and if you left them food they would dig up treasure for you. He was always saying things like that, and always leaving food for vermin, too. And now he's rich, and he says it's all because of the mouldywarp king, and I tell him to stop being stupid but he doesn't care. He just laughs and pays for dinner.

She was on the cover of all the magazines: those obscure trade ones that lie untouched on a coffee table while you wait for a job interview; the fifty-six issue limited runs where you build a model of the Titanic; the smudged-toner zines that are the only things still worth reading. She looked different on all of them, but it was always her. I drew a moustache and glasses on her face with the free pen on the front of Puzzler. Nobody knew who she was.

When I want to forget a thing I did, I make myself a trophy, and it goes up on my shelf. It sits next to the plaque I got for falling asleep at work, the cup I won for throwing up on my sister's bridesmaid, the foot-in-mouth shield that gets my name engraved in a new place every few months. On Sundays I take them down and polish them until they sparkle, and I look into the gold and see my face reflected back, smiling.

On the lawn of Safflower House, a unicorn lay sleeping. You could see how it rested on the tips of the grass, barely bending them. It must have weighed little more than a sigh. I wanted nothing more than to go out to it, rest a hand on its nose, feed it from my hand, whisper rhymes into its ear. But nobody else seemed to be paying it much mind. They were busy with talk of places I hadn't been and people I didn't know. I watched it through the window, always looking past it like I hadn't noticed it was there. That's how I remember it: a blur, an uncertainty. When we came back from dinner, it was gone.

She was a cat by night, and used to wake with the taste of blood in her mouth, but as her fur greyed all that was too much. In those colder, darker nights, when the cat-dreams came she leapt from her own bed and padded over to the box room. In the daytime, her son never mentioned the strange cat that slept on his bed. Perhaps he thought he dreamed it. When they were older, and the cat-dreams no longer came, he said he had held his tongue in case she didn't let the cat come in any more. She said no, no, no. That could never have happened.

Eventide was a sort of paste, with little crystalline grains suspended in it. You spread it across your eyelids when you went to bed and it kept the dreams off you. Monstrously expensive, but everybody bought it. It was all the more frightening to dream when you were the only one doing it. My mother worked in the Eventide factory, and they would be searched going in and out. The black market got going all the same. Half the time you got the fake stuff, though, and in the end I thought that was even better: you dreamed, but nobody else knew about it.