Daily stories

It starts with a careful scraping of spade against tarmac, lifting the flattened body from the road. Then a hiss, almost musical, as the special pump gets going. A few moments of silence. The unscrewing of lids. The striking of a match. A crackle like treading on glass. And then a squeak, and a huff, and a snuffle, as the hedgehog pads away into the bushes.

I had one foot on the railway track when the alarm sounded for the level crossing. I could keep on forward or I could turn back, and it was obvious which I should do. I would clear the crossing in a few steps and be on my way. But the way back was shorter, and a train was coming. and those big CCTV cameras were watching me. My back foot itched to go forwards and my front foot yearned to turn back. I stood still as a sleeper but I felt I was spinning. There were lights everywhere: flashing on the signals, spinning behind my eyes, coming down the track.

The sack of iron chain in the storeroom was too heavy to move. You would have to haul the lengths out and around the tight corner to get anywhere. In the bottom of the sack there were a few loose links, and those were all we needed for the job. Someone said we should cut a hole in the sack to get at them, and perhaps we should have. There was a sack of spare sacks in the storeroom. But I wanted to pull it all out, link by link by link.

Grandma had wolf's teeth on the end of her knitting needles. It seemed to make things harder, but she wouldn't take them off. She said she ate up the wool and it turned to socks inside her, and then she wondered why nobody wanted to wear them. But she still smiled when she gave them to you: two rows of little points.

Among the strange things that live at the bottom of the ocean there drifted a little lost starling. She didn't understand that she should be unable to breathe. She didn't understand that the terrible weight of the water should crush her hollow bones. She pulled herself along with her delicate wings, and ate pinprick creatures that glowed softly, and learned the slow calls of the deep. One day there was a shimmer in the darkness, and she swamflew up and up and up until she burst out into a sky thick with her sisters and brothers. She joined that great murmur, but could never quite fit in their wide dark pattern: her belly full of light, her lungs full of saltwater and sea-song.

You spent Christmas day in the woods outside my house, screaming at crows and chewing on the feral snowberries. Dizzy and sick by the afternoon, just like the rest of us, you lay down in the wet leaves and shivered yourself warm. We took you a turkey sandwich and a cup of sugary tea. You crept back in that night, and on Boxing Day morning you beat us all at Scrabble. Until next year.

We finally knew the date again: our jailer had given us Advent calendars, handmade from plain grey board, a ballpoint drawing behind each window. There was disagreement among us about whether he had given them out on the last day of November or the first of December. There was disagreement, too, about whether we could trust him at all: perhaps, out there in the light, it was midsummer. But the scratchy, uncertain star behind the first window was all the promise I needed.

With the snow and the mist, it was hard to tell which way was up. I stood on my head and wheeled my feet in the air, and I seemed to be making progress, but then my ears went numb. So I lay on my back for a while, and things felt soft and easy. When the sun set, the fog went with it, and I could find my way by the stars.

We burned the warehouse when there were fires burning everywhere, and fireworks in the streets. It caught easily, no petrol to leave a residue. One firework through the window. Of course we knew just where to throw it. We planned it all out, but the insurance company never questioned any of it. They just paid out. Like they always knew our place would burn down.

It was a dismal old cookbook, everything brown and grey and set in jelly, but it was all we had left of her. We made it all. Every grim dish of hard-boiled pork, every sickly marshmallow salad. It didn't bring back so much as a whisper of her. But it was absolutely delicious.