Daily stories

The city was unchanged, although it had been twenty years since he walked there. The same signs on the same buildings; the same fashions in the same shops. On the steps of the station he saw the coffee he had spilled running for the train. He looked at his hands, and at his face reflected in a window pane, and all the change fell upon them at once.

They will put adverts in, Nell told me. They will put adverts in your electronic eyes that you can't look away from, and adverts in your brain-chip that you don't even know are adverts. You will suddenly crave an ice-cold Coca Cola, and it will feel like it comes from you. I knew all this. I knew it would be much worse than she thought. But it was that or dying.

Zia trained crows and I trained squirrels, and that's how we kept in touch: his messages dropped on the table where I left pumpkin seeds, mine carried off in little grey paws. Most of our friendship was badmouthing the other's choice of familiar, all in good fun. But after a time, things soured. Our notes grew cold, then angry, then cruel. One morning I caught a squirrel, paper unfurled, scratching away with a stubby bit of pencil. On the fence, a crow laughed, ha ha ha.

Someone set a great flywheel spinning where my heart should be, ready to shake me to pieces if I tried to stop still, ready to tear the fingers from anyone who touched me. You could hear it whirring in quiet moments, a long low groan echoing up my throat. Every task I turned it to just turned it faster, thermodynamics shattering against the force of it. It needed something stronger to slow it: a pair of arms, and a wash of gentleness.

Something roared and ripped in the return chute, but it was deep enough in the dark that I could pretend ignorance. They were good books, most of them. One I hadn't read before it came due, and that was a shame. But the system is what it is, and it takes all of us to keep its wheels turning. Soon there will be new books on the library shelves, bright white and filled with pretty words for us.

Mr Grey's summer club cost a pebble to get in. Sometimes the kids painted their pebbles gold or silver, or drew little pictures on them, or wrote messages. But you didn't have to. It just cost a pebble, found in the park or in the gutter or on someone's gravel driveway, and if you forgot yours then Mr Grey would give you one to pay with. At the end of the summer we looked back through the window and saw him tipping them out from a great blue bucket, and feeling the weight of them all, and smiling.

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.