Daily stories

I'm stepping on all the cracks, because I know he doesn't want me to and I'm not in the mood for his stupid games. I can feel his little hand pulling and pushing at mine as he dances around them. It's easy for him to keep those little feet to the middle of each paving stone. Doesn't he realise how much harder it is for me? He's played at wearing my shoes enough times.

Normally when I am in a bad mood I reassure him: don't worry, Daddy isn't upset because of you. It's not your fault. But today it is his because of him, so I stay quiet and step on cracks, until I hear a little sob, and the next crack I step on opens up and swallows me.

She married in her great grandmother's wedding dress, sewn up from the parachute that saved her great grandfather's life. Something old, and borrowed from the war museum that kept it pristine. They would add a photo of the day to the exhibit, and she would tell them how marriage was like a parachute jump, a great adventure but with something holding you safe. But as she walked to the altar she heard the silk whisper: in case you need to jump.

It was a hot day, but it was cool in my hole, with water round my ankles and shade from the walls. I had brought a few things down, book and snacks and water bottle; it was getting awkward to climb out. Hard work, but fun. I rested my head on the sand. The children playing up above were muffled, like a dream.

The walls were weeping, and I thought how alive seawater seems, and yet how cold. I saw the slip just in time to know I couldn't stop it. The children went silent. The sun went out. The sand was too heavy to struggle with; I couldn't even open my mouth to drown. But there was a strong hand pushing through the sand, reaching to me. Grasping tight and cold around my ankle. Pulling me down.

She opened up the little box of left-behinds. There she kept eggshells and plum stones and the punched-out frames of board game tokens. A milk tooth nestled inside the lost-wax mould that cast her ring. All the little in-betweens, the punctuation of life. She tucked the letter inside, and closed the lid.

There was something in the stone. We all knew it: there was something wonderful inside, if we could only crack it open. But it's not an easy thing to break a stone in two, and it's harder still to keep hold of it long enough to try. I was the lucky one, in the end. I scored it with a chisel, then let all the strength I had left fall on it in one great blow. It shattered into fragments. I was half blind from it. Inside, there was nothing.

All around me are things you mended. A soldered patch on the hot water pipes. Embroidery on the worn knee of my jeans. An apostrophe added in neat black ink to each unsent invitation. There are so many things that you can do. There are so many things I can't. It makes me want to break something.

"Why do we go round so many churches?" Edie was whining, but she was doing it quietly. She respected the place; it was her dad she wasn't sure about. He gave the question some thought. It was one he had asked his mother many times, in grand cathedrals and little village chapels. She had talked about beauty and history and architecture and tradition, and said he would understand when he was older. And now here he was, older than he ever thought he would be, dragging his daughter past candles and stained glass and looking for the same thing his mother always had been: an answer to the question, "Why do we go round so many churches?"

The tattoo artist refused, at first. Said the words were too cruel, that she had a duty of care. But she understood they were better on my skin that in my mind. We put them on my left flank, where it's tender. I never look. You don't need to look, when something's safe.

It was the fanciest place I had ever stayed, a proper country pile. When I went down to breakfast I announced myself to the lads: "Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick." There was another guest sat across the dining room, an older woman, dressed all in yellow. She looked daggers at me. She looked ropes, lead piping, revolvers. I took my breakfast up to the room. It didn't feel safe downstairs.

It had been a sixty-year campaign, and just him for most of that. Him and his chart of constellations – new ones, ones that made sense. He knew when he began that he might get nowhere, and he thought he had accepted it, but now he felt his heart wearing out it all seemed harder. It was the world he felt for, stuck with its old way of looking at the sky. It would be all the same to him when he was gone. He would see the stars close up, and they would look completely different.