A nail half in. A board primed and unpainted. A window open, just to let the air in, with the snow blowing through. Pencil marks on walls and a dust sheet on the floor. A glass, empty but for the fine white residue that clings to it. A radio still playing. A phone long dead. A pair of boots. The earth still moving beneath.
Daily stories
I've been writing a tiny story every day since October 2024. You can read them here.
The continental buffet breakfast was truly unlimited. You turned, or blinked, or just shifted your attention, and all the bread and cheese and meat and pastry was back in place like you had got up early for once. We did what we could, filling bags and touring the city to feed the hungry. We planned how we could do more. But we didn't understand the magic. We didn't even try. We didn't know what unpayable debts we were billing to our rooms.
I didn't think school fairs gave goldfish as prizes any more, but apparently this one did. All the parents were holding a fish in a bag, most of them pulling a face to say I don't really agree with this, but the kids were so excited. The first bag split forty minutes in, and its resident spent the rest of the day in the hook-a-duck tub. More joined, until the golden shimmer was so enchanting that kids started tipping them in on purpose. We made a quiet exit, before we could be asked to help.
Jenny gave Dave his birthday present in an intricate puzzle box, knowing he would never get around to solving it. But Dave knew how she was: he knew there would be nothing inside. So he solved it the day he got it, ready to fill with treasure and give back to her. Inside were two tickets to the gig that weekend, the one that had sold out before he even saw it. He didn't mention it, and neither did she. They just met at the venue, and he bought her a drink.
I went out in the storm in all the old clothes I'd shrunk out of, and my big hat tied tight to my head, and I let it blow me away. Once the wind takes you, everything feels calm: the air and the wind and your little body are all flying around just the same as each other. You look down at the ground and think: thank God I'm not down there, spinning around. It set me down a few miles away, not gentle, but fair. I built a little hut, and waited for the next storm.
After that Christmas our snowmen stopped coming to life. Coincidence, I said. You can't fall out so hard it kills the snowmen. It was probably pollution, like every other thing: the changing climate, or the dust from the new road, or the way the LED streetlights flatten the whole world. But there was something else hanging in the air, too, heaviness to hold down something as light as snow. I looked at their gravel eyes and thought: what if they still come to life, and they just can't move? I thought I knew how that would feel.
On the way to work your bike skids on the flattened corpse of a pigeon. You saw it in plenty of time, but that didn't save you: your eyes snagged on the hollow bones, and your wheels followed. As the world flips on its side and you slide along the tarmac, you see the bird kicked up into the air, and then the shattered wings flapping. It pulls left into the sky, and you try to lift your head from the road to follow it, but you are stuck there.
Danny said a mouldywarp was different to a mole: they were clever like people, and if you left them food they would dig up treasure for you. He was always saying things like that, and always leaving food for vermin, too. And now he's rich, and he says it's all because of the mouldywarp king, and I tell him to stop being stupid but he doesn't care. He just laughs and pays for dinner.
She was on the cover of all the magazines: those obscure trade ones that lie untouched on a coffee table while you wait for a job interview; the fifty-six issue limited runs where you build a model of the Titanic; the smudged-toner zines that are the only things still worth reading. She looked different on all of them, but it was always her. I drew a moustache and glasses on her face with the free pen on the front of Puzzler. Nobody knew who she was.
When I want to forget a thing I did, I make myself a trophy, and it goes up on my shelf. It sits next to the plaque I got for falling asleep at work, the cup I won for throwing up on my sister's bridesmaid, the foot-in-mouth shield that gets my name engraved in a new place every few months. On Sundays I take them down and polish them until they sparkle, and I look into the gold and see my face reflected back, smiling.