Daily stories

Orla watered his plants while he was on holiday, because he had asked and she was nosy. She looked in everything: the books on his shelves, the post on his doormat, the way he rolled his socks. It was a kind of power, like knowing his true name. She didn't notice that the plants were plastic.

Under the ice, he had two moments of certainty. The first came when the panic was about to overwhelm him, and he knew that if he let it go then he would live. The second came when he tasted the cold in his throat, and he knew that he would die. When a hand grasped his collar and pulled, he didn't know anything at all. He thought some creature had a tentacle around his throat. He thrashed and bit with the little strength he had left, until he was on his knees on the frozen lake, unsure if he was gasping air or water.

They told her she should take up painting, for the stress. She painted the new moon, the bottom of a mineshaft, the inside of an oyster. They said she might at least try to take it seriously. She said, there is the pearl, the gold, a world all bathed in earthshine.

On a still night, I can hear them singing from my doorstep. For a week I thought it was my imagination. For a month I thought it was next door's radio. Now I know it's them, just over the lake, singing together for the joy of it. I could take a stroll and hear them up close. I could join them, if I asked. But it is more beautiful this way, drifting over the silent water.

It made him a laughing stock, that book. It would be one thing if nobody had read it, but you see it all over. In charity shops, in remainder bins, next to gurning faces on YouTube. And there I am, trapped in the dedication. Without whom this book couldn't have never been written. The only gift he ever gave me.

Clara and Tom had a wishing-well in their back garden, only there was no hole. It hadn't been filled in, either. It was never there. They got their handyman to come and build a wall and a roof and a crank, and they hung an old bucket from it with a new rope. Turn the handle, and you can hear the bucket go donk on the clay. How can it be a wishing well, I asked them, when it's not even a well? But I suppose they know better than me. They get everything they wish for.

All my life I have been frightened of the stars going out. I suppose I must have seen it on the television when I was small. But now there are a thousand more stars in the sky, and the night is more beautiful than ever. When I stand underneath it I think this ought to frighten me even more. But I can never feel it.

In the dream I am in an exam I haven't prepared for. The usual thing, old anxieties standing in for new. I'm wise to it now, even asleep. At some point, I remember that my schooldays are over, and I fold the paper into an aeroplane, or pull the fire alarm, or just wake up. This time I take the third option. I wake in a cheap plastic chair at a square little table. I have dribbled on the exam paper a little. There are ten minutes left.

By the time her postcard arrived, my house had already burned down. The postie left it on the ash pile where the front door used to be, along with the bills, and a note saying "We tried to deliver your parcel but you were out". A pint of milk sat nearby on the cracked doorstep. When I stopped by to collect it all, a man came up to me. He said he was sorry to interrupt, but how much did I know about Battersea Dogs & Cats Home? I told him it wasn't a good time. He said that was fine, and asked if he could use my toilet.

When they chained the sea-thing we all knew it wouldn't hold. A flick of its great winding limbs would break the chains, or else the foulness it exuded would slip it free or eat the links away. It would roar and drive men mad until they loosed it and offered themselves as the first to be devoured. But we were wrong. It sank to the seafloor with the weight of all that iron, and there it lay, whimpering. We watched it there, until it was gone. And that was the end of us.