Daily stories

You spent Christmas day in the woods outside my house, screaming at crows and chewing on the feral snowberries. Dizzy and sick by the afternoon, just like the rest of us, you lay down in the wet leaves and shivered yourself warm. We took you a turkey sandwich and a cup of sugary tea. You crept back in that night, and on Boxing Day morning you beat us all at Scrabble. Until next year.

We finally knew the date again: our jailer had given us Advent calendars, handmade from plain grey board, a ballpoint drawing behind each window. There was disagreement among us about whether he had given them out on the last day of November or the first of December. There was disagreement, too, about whether we could trust him at all: perhaps, out there in the light, it was midsummer. But the scratchy, uncertain star behind the first window was all the promise I needed.

With the snow and the mist, it was hard to tell which way was up. I stood on my head and wheeled my feet in the air, and I seemed to be making progress, but then my ears went numb. So I lay on my back for a while, and things felt soft and easy. When the sun set, the fog went with it, and I could find my way by the stars.

We burned the warehouse when there were fires burning everywhere, and fireworks in the streets. It caught easily, no petrol to leave a residue. One firework through the window. Of course we knew just where to throw it. We planned it all out, but the insurance company never questioned any of it. They just paid out. Like they always knew our place would burn down.

It was a dismal old cookbook, everything brown and grey and set in jelly, but it was all we had left of her. We made it all. Every grim dish of hard-boiled pork, every sickly marshmallow salad. It didn't bring back so much as a whisper of her. But it was absolutely delicious.

A year later, I made my way to the appointed place. The Green Knight was waiting in the dawn mist, axe in hand. I knelt, and bared my neck, and he struck my head clean off. He posted it that afternoon, Epic Beheading Prank GONE WRONG! Knight Gets Karma After One Year, two million views for my grimacing face, top comment "0:21 this dudes wearing a green gurdel, bet he thought it was magic". When I returned to Camelot, head in hands, they were all watching it and laughing.

The pumpkin wouldn't rot. We had promised Benjamin that it could stay on the step until it started to smell, but it looked better than ever. The scuffs I made trying to get the top off had healed up. It must have been the cold weather.

One day, I left the house to find it glowing in the dark December morning. I looked at it, and it turned towards me, and its horrid little mouth said "Merry Christmas". My boot went out to kick it away, but I stopped myself. We promised Benjamin.

A week into the job, I still hadn't met a person. I was working my way through the induction training: uncanny voiceovers about health and safety and data protection, backed up by questions a block of wood could answer. Automated emails delivered accounts, reassurances, and promises of tasks to come. Then payday came, with payslip but no pay. With no manager to my name, I found the head of HR on the company website and fired off an email. No reply. Looking longer, her photo was uncanny: an emptiness behind the eyes, and not in the way of my last job's HR manager. I searched her up, and a few other staff, and found nothing. Fake people, fake company, fake job. Lying in the next day, I still felt guilty.

The alarm had been ringing for twenty minutes, but nobody knew what it was for. "It has the rhythm of catastrophe," opined Jeremy, "but not the timbre." Jenny closed her eyes and raised a finger for quiet. "I heard something like this once before," she said after half a minute. "I think it was for 'man overboard'." We were not at sea, but we thought this got us closer. We decided to take five minutes to write down our ideas. Then we would reconvene and discuss. But it was very hard to think with all that noise going on, and by the time we came back together, it had stopped.

The ghost-hunter had a battered buzzing gadget, a metal thing from the seventies with a chunky handle to support the weight of its huge batteries, and a wand on a coiled wire. He said the tricky thing was calibrating it. The dead are everywhere, you see, so it takes just the right level of sensitivity to find the spirit you're looking for against the background haunting. He traced the shape of a frail young body in the air, the piezo howling. What do we do now we've found it? we asked him. He shrugged, and tucked the wand back in its holder. Just sit, and know she's there, he said.