Daily stories

The next morning I didn't remember, but I could feel it, the way you feel the grit in your eye long after it washes away, the way you taste the dirt in your mouth after you spit it out. I had a long, hot bath, a walk in the park, a cinema trip, another drink. But there's no more forgetting what's forgotten. When the teeth of my fear closed on me, there was nothing left but to remember.

We were caught twice over: once by the shrinking, and again by the web. Fear not, I said. A barrier has fallen. We can reason with the spider now. We can show it all that we understand of the world. But of the world we were caught in, we understood nothing.

I lived on the new moon and he lived on the old. I had only footprints and broken things to tell me what he had learned. What are we to do, so far from home but always tied to it? What are we to do with just thirty days in the sun? It is dark for him now, and I never met him. A small mercy.

Ben and Emily loitered on the pier, mugging people of their doughnuts. Just one from each bag, mind, and if you said no they let you be. But very few said no. Most admired the cheek of it, and besides, a bag of five was too many. After another success they licked the sugar from their lips and their fingers, ready for the next. They were starting to feel queasy, but neither wanted to be the one to call a stop.

The band played on as the bandstand sank into the lake. One last show, by the light of headtorches and battery-powered lanterns: the warden, as angry as anyone, would have let them play regardless, but there was a general will to spare him the trouble. When their boots were full of water and mud and unfunded splinters, they waded out, instruments held over their heads like rifles. There was one final round of applause, barely heard over the cracking of timber.

We had a wonderful day at the old zoo, seeing all the different habitats. We felt the heat of the reptile house and bathed our feet where the penguins once swam. It's astonishing to think that so many different creatures lived so close to us. We ate the last of our honey on dense, dry bread, and looked at the photographs, faded but beautiful.

For just one week I lived my nightmares. Went to work in my pants and let deadlines breeze past my bare skin. Sent the wrong words to the wrong people. When they asked me to leave, I drove home from the back seat. When such absurd fears become real, they lose their hold over you. I sleep dreamlessly now, but I hope to wake up soon.

For my birthday she gave me a book about secret languages. What it means to wear a certain flower or colour or perfume. How the way a letter is folded might show love, respect, contempt, forgiveness. I turned the pages and looked at the reused silver gift wrap it came in, and I wondered: what does this mean?

When Sadie was bad they sat her in front of the mirror. To stare into the mirror at any other time would have been dreadful vanity, but to do it in shame was quite different. It fascinated her to see her iris move, her nostrils twitch with breath, her skin curve and fold: so much complexity, and not a wisp of badness in it.

We spent a happy afternoon arguing about the helicopter, he that it was a model close by, I that it was real but distant. We talked about flight time and engine noise and rotor speed and all sorts of other things we knew nothing about, and the wronger we felt the harder we argued, until the sun began to set and we compromised. It was a half-scale helicopter, monkey-piloted, a middling way away.