Daily stories

When she passed the cone back, he found she had taken the entire Flake. There was a little tunnel where it had been, a negative space flecked with chocolate crumbs. Her usual selfishness. He turned to complain, and saw her with ice cream on her nose and the Flake between her teeth, grinning and waiting for him to take his share.

I woke in a vast library of rolling shelves, which slid past me propelled by mechanisms unseen. A title caught my eye, and I tried to chase it down, but another bookcase cut across between us, and by the time the way was clear again, the book I was after was gone. I thought I might search out a few favourite novels, but it was impossible, with everything shifting around. But there were comfortable chairs, and so I took a seat, reached out a hand, and accepted whatever washed past.

Kit had a good job, making sticks of chalk for mathematicians to turn into ideas. It had troubled him at first that for the things he made to do their good work they had to be reduced to dust. But then he thought of all that dust drifting out and settling on the city, coating it with elegant truths, and smiled. A mile a way, at the university, a first year student drew a penis on the blackboard and captioned it “please leave”. Knowing that would have made Kit smile, too.

I stepped out onto the cloud. I knew from childhood computer games that it would hold me: the trick is to jump each time you sink, until you make it to the important cloud where you don't sink at all. But it was only vapour, that wrapped me in white as I fell. It was only in falling – falling and not seeing, wrapped up in fog – that I realised I should have hit the ground already, that something was holding me after all.

The driver shook my arm, although I wasn't sleeping. "You can't be in there, mate."

"Why not?" I said. "It's my skip. There was nothing in the terms about it." I was a little more brusque than I intended, I think because of the cabinet corner poking into my back. I tried to focus instead on the pillow of shredded papers under my head. I lay still, and smiled my it's-OK smile, so practised all the detail had worn away. But after ten minutes he got back in the loader, promising to be back tomorrow. I sat up, and looked around at all the ruined things, and wondered how I might conceal myself.

In the streets they were calling for impossible things: lush forests unbound by fences, great public halls full of books to read for free, a teacher for every child. Decent enough folk, turned feral by false promises. None of us liked the medicine we had to dispense that day. Myself, I would have sooner been in the crowd, calling for a better world. But mine was the burden of wisdom. People could have been hurt.

After Mrs Clements' passing, a hollow book was found among her possessions, and in its hand-cut void a silver key and an inscrutable map. Her heirs and their hangers-on spent many years searching for the lock that little key opened, with the dubious help of the map and without it. Not one of them found, or thought to seek for, the true treasure, which lay in the text she had so carefully trimmed away.

I had forty leaflets left before I could go home and I knew down to the roots of my teeth that I could chuck them all in the bin and the world wouldn't change. They were all heading there anyway. The only difference would be that forty-one people had a better day. But some stupid part of me, the part that used to do the homework over the summer holiday even though nobody ever checked, kept me standing in the cold handing out leaflets to folk who didn't want them. Desperate, I did something make-or-break. I read the leaflet.

I wished that somebody would at least turn over the page on the flip chart. It was unbearable, to have it sitting in the corner while we were chewed out. To be asked “What have you been doing all morning?”, when the evidence was right there in red marker pen. Bagel quoits, crossed out twice. Underneath it, underlined, exclamation-marked, Donut quoits! And to be held in such contempt, when in my heart I was still proud of our ideas.

We spent a day on the river. It was changing faster in those days, finding broad new meanders that took us back almost to where we started, cutting through its own banks so that we never saw places we expected to. It was hardly worth planning the trip: you might end up anywhere. And besides, we thought: why must we draw maps with the land still and the river turning, and not a straight blue line with the land twisting around it?