Daily stories

On the lawn of Safflower House, a unicorn lay sleeping. You could see how it rested on the tips of the grass, barely bending them. It must have weighed little more than a sigh. I wanted nothing more than to go out to it, rest a hand on its nose, feed it from my hand, whisper rhymes into its ear. But nobody else seemed to be paying it much mind. They were busy with talk of places I hadn't been and people I didn't know. I watched it through the window, always looking past it like I hadn't noticed it was there. That's how I remember it: a blur, an uncertainty. When we came back from dinner, it was gone.

She was a cat by night, and used to wake with the taste of blood in her mouth, but as her fur greyed all that was too much. In those colder, darker nights, when the cat-dreams came she leapt from her own bed and padded over to the box room. In the daytime, her son never mentioned the strange cat that slept on his bed. Perhaps he thought he dreamed it. When they were older, and the cat-dreams no longer came, he said he had held his tongue in case she didn't let the cat come in any more. She said no, no, no. That could never have happened.

Eventide was a sort of paste, with little crystalline grains suspended in it. You spread it across your eyelids when you went to bed and it kept the dreams off you. Monstrously expensive, but everybody bought it. It was all the more frightening to dream when you were the only one doing it. My mother worked in the Eventide factory, and they would be searched going in and out. The black market got going all the same. Half the time you got the fake stuff, though, and in the end I thought that was even better: you dreamed, but nobody else knew about it.

The leopard in the library scared people away. There was no pretending otherwise. She stalked the shelves while you were browsing and made it very hard to concentrate. But she had never hurt anyone, and she always had her library card hanging from her collar, and she read and read and read without so much as creasing the pages. So the head librarian said she could stay, and that made me feel safe.

We got one last crop from the garden, those soft white berries that don't grow anywhere else. I put them in boiling water to take off their thin, bitter skins, then cooked them down to a thick jam. Winter air curled in through the open windows, and I turned my face away from the steam. Afterwards, I scrubbed the pan and the spoon and put them back in their place in the garden shed. I peeled off my gloves and dropped them in the bin. I put the jar at the back of the larder with the others, in case I ever needed it.

I was worried about the yellowing around my fingernails, a dirty sort of yellow, like I had been smoking all my life. I was worried about the skin cracking at the corner of my mouth, and the taste when I woke, and the way my tongue felt too big by the evening. I was worried about head neck shoulders back stomach hips legs knees ankles feet toes, worried just about being a thing in the world. I was worried that I worried too much. What got me in the end was something quite different.

I spent forty minutes tucked in the little booth, drawing on my ballot paper with the stubby pencil. Nobody can look at you there. It's not allowed. They have to leave you alone to make whatever mark you choose. I drew a different thing in every square, six of them ugly and one of them beautiful. Then I folded up my paper and pushed it through the slot into the darkness. Tonight they will unfold it, and they will have to look at it, and make me count.

Lightning struck the spire, then stayed, stretched across the sky like a nerve. On cold days it stretched out taut and thrummed in the wind; on warm days it curled lazily around the sky. Before long we found we were navigating by it, without thinking: it framed our space the way the bells framed our time. And the easiest place to navigate to was the church, so blinding bright inside that you could not step through the doors.

Jenny always joined in with pass-the-parcel, so I wrapped the ring box up in golden paper and made that the big prize in the middle. Haribo friendship rings in some of the layers, just to drop a hint. Of course I checked with her sister and her niece first. I don't know what happened. The Wi-Fi must have gone down or something. But Jenny wouldn't let us take it off the kid. I suppose that's why I love her.

We had been waiting for the train a very long time. A few of the songs we sang had become favourites: one about the train that would come one day, most about the things we had done while we were waiting. On Saturdays we played a game, throwing coffee cups at the departures boards in three teams. Wednesday was market day, and Sundays were spent in quiet contemplation of the timetable. I fell in love, but it was not to be. At last, the train came, and I found I had bought the wrong ticket.