In my eighth year under the sea I began to dream about leaks. I knew that I was dreaming because I saw the water coming in, heard the trickle, felt the wetness in my socks. If there was truly a leak it would be over faster than waking, my little world smeared flat by the weight of the ocean. I worried that a slow leak in my dreams meant death slowly growing in my body. I did not want to die sealed up tight. Give me the catastrophe, that I might feed the deep like a whale fall.
Daily stories
I've been writing a tiny story every day since October 2024. You can read them here.
I wished to live in grids from the first time my birthday was marked on a calendar, from noughts and crosses to chess to go. In school I loved when they brought out graph paper in maths, or even for handwriting practice: fitting all those curls and scratches into perfect squares. I hated when they brought it with the scrap paper for a wet playtime, and it got drawn on howsoever. I dream of enclosed fields, of a square apartment on an American city block, a pixel-perfect image of the world. Or failing that, I might make do with prison.
The sweetshops had grown more competitive all through summer, carrying on long after the children calmed. The sourest sweets in the village, the country, the country, the world. The proprietors were seen on social media with tears in their eyes and smiling, bleeding mouths. A boy went in for jelly babies and they added a scoop of citric acid to the bag. By the end of the holidays, both were closed: one owner bankrupt, one laid out with chronic indigestion.
Laundry day, all heat and steam and detergent, cracking hands so they threaten bloodstains on shirts. Everything cleaner than when it was new, and a slick film on the fingers that makes you shudder at your own touch. Soap in the air, mouth, eyes, like we are being cleaned from the world. But fresh sheets tonight, and sharp collars on Sunday, to calm our red skin.
There was no big crash when it shattered, only a sound like hailstones pattering across the lobby, and the hum of the outside pouring in. Everything was much brighter, suddenly. I hadn't realised how dirty the skylights were. It made you want to look up, straight up, with wide open eyes to watch the falling glass.
After the demolition there was so much sky in the sky that the dust didn't seem to matter. We sat in evening sun where once we were in shadow. We had learned how these things that seem part of the shape of the world can vanish like an ebb tide. Nobody had lived there anywhere, we thought.
I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. Straight away an unseen mechanism takes up the tension, easing it away little by little. The next day, I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. The mechanism clicks, and somewhere I will never go, something happens. If, one day, I do not turn the key, the spring will slacken and the mechanism will slow and stop. I would never do it. But I might, any day now, put the key into its hole and turn and turn and turn until something snaps.
On my birthday I took a pass-the-parcel to work. We spend the team meeting passing unwanted crap around the table anyway: we might as well get a Chewit when the music stops. It was a wonderful birthday, an unexpected afternoon in the sun. And if management or the bomb squad ask any difficult questions, I will say: I am older now, and wiser.
I learned to paint one colour at a time, squeezing the last of the blue from the tube as I saved up for orange. At first it annoyed me to see the red of my tomatoes and have only the green of the vine to paint with. In time I found there was a little of each hue in everything. At last I sold a painting, and with the little money I made I bought five pretty little tubes. I squeezed a little blob from each, and watched them on the palette, daring me to mix them.
While the machine warmed up, we watched increasingly complicated time-travel movies and challenged each other to explain them. We thought we were preparing our minds. But we were wrong to believe a journey in the machine would be explicable. Now our worlds all have different histories, and my mother was a pine tree, and my heart is younger than my head when it had always been the other way around.