Daily stories

The leopard in the library scared people away. There was no pretending otherwise. She stalked the shelves while you were browsing and made it very hard to concentrate. But she had never hurt anyone, and she always had her library card hanging from her collar, and she read and read and read without so much as creasing the pages. So the head librarian said she could stay, and that made me feel safe.

We got one last crop from the garden, those soft white berries that don't grow anywhere else. I put them in boiling water to take off their thin, bitter skins, then cooked them down to a thick jam. Winter air curled in through the open windows, and I turned my face away from the steam. Afterwards, I scrubbed the pan and the spoon and put them back in their place in the garden shed. I peeled off my gloves and dropped them in the bin. I put the jar at the back of the larder with the others, in case I ever needed it.

I was worried about the yellowing around my fingernails, a dirty sort of yellow, like I had been smoking all my life. I was worried about the skin cracking at the corner of my mouth, and the taste when I woke, and the way my tongue felt too big by the evening. I was worried about head neck shoulders back stomach hips legs knees ankles feet toes, worried just about being a thing in the world. I was worried that I worried too much. What got me in the end was something quite different.

I spent forty minutes tucked in the little booth, drawing on my ballot paper with the stubby pencil. Nobody can look at you there. It's not allowed. They have to leave you alone to make whatever mark you choose. I drew a different thing in every square, six of them ugly and one of them beautiful. Then I folded up my paper and pushed it through the slot into the darkness. Tonight they will unfold it, and they will have to look at it, and make me count.

Lightning struck the spire, then stayed, stretched across the sky like a nerve. On cold days it stretched out taut and thrummed in the wind; on warm days it curled lazily around the sky. Before long we found we were navigating by it, without thinking: it framed our space the way the bells framed our time. And the easiest place to navigate to was the church, so blinding bright inside that you could not step through the doors.

Jenny always joined in with pass-the-parcel, so I wrapped the ring box up in golden paper and made that the big prize in the middle. Haribo friendship rings in some of the layers, just to drop a hint. Of course I checked with her sister and her niece first. I don't know what happened. The Wi-Fi must have gone down or something. But Jenny wouldn't let us take it off the kid. I suppose that's why I love her.

We had been waiting for the train a very long time. A few of the songs we sang had become favourites: one about the train that would come one day, most about the things we had done while we were waiting. On Saturdays we played a game, throwing coffee cups at the departures boards in three teams. Wednesday was market day, and Sundays were spent in quiet contemplation of the timetable. I fell in love, but it was not to be. At last, the train came, and I found I had bought the wrong ticket.

The dull dread had drained from his limbs while he slept. It must be in the sheets somewhere: he sprang up to go about washing them. Crisp, fresh linen for a crisp, fresh day. They dried double-quick in the sun, and as he watched the low wind fill them he thought of great sailing ships on a calm blue sea. He wondered where all that fear and misery had come from, but it didn't do to dwell on it, with a whole wonderful life to be getting on with.

Beneath his feet, unnoticed, the earth began to crack in two.

I took the little box you made me out to the garage, where the wasps build their nests. Such light, papery things they make. It will take them decades to get through it. At the end of each winter I cut down the empty nest and hang it gently from my ceiling. All your beautiful inlaid details, spread out above me. You take up so much space.

We sat and watched the paragliders circling above us, and I told her what my brother had told me, about how the geological fault that built the cliffs they sailed from was still moving the landscape today, and the paragliders were the only way to monitor the shifting ground. Halfway through I realised it was a lie, one of those soap bubble lies that survives until you touch it. But she believed it, just as I had, and I let her. So does that make me a liar?