Daily stories

I dreamed I was a clownfish, tucked up safe in my anemone. I woke tasting brine, the night sweats running over my lips, but I was safe. I wondered what unfelt poison was protecting me.

Brian came back into the kitchen, and through glances and smothered smiles we all agreed not to mention the pancake stuck to the ceiling. He took up his place by the cooker, and we waited for it to come down on him. It stayed up there for forty days. By the time it fell, Brian was gone, and I was going, and it landed, mid-viewing, on the landlord's bald head.

Between her driving licence and her Tesco Clubcard she kept a razor blade. She imagined a thief sliced to the bone, his blood staining the cash like a bank vault's dye packs. She began leaving her handbag open in bars and walking home alone. She left her wallet on the wall outside the supermarket. It came back to her in the post three days later, with a rust-brown circle on the leather.

There was a fox on the bus, and nobody else noticed because he had somehow got hold of a broadsheet newspaper and was reading it quietly on the back seat. I could see his little amber paws holding the pages. He seemed out-of-place, to me: the back seats are for smoking and snogging and dead arms. But I suppose that is only school buses, and I have grown up now. Outside the Crown Court he folded the paper, put it on the seat beside him, and disembarked. The rest of us were appalled. He didn't even thank the driver.

The mug was filled with chocolates and said "BEST TEACHER EVER". Ted wasn't sure about it. The mug made him think of Miss Smithson and her wide, safe smile. It made him think of Mr King, who he had been scared of, but who had helped when he broke his arm in the playground. It made him think about cards that said "To a special son" and "To my wonderful wife", and about how it only seemed to be wrong to lie sometimes. He ate a piece of the chocolate, and that made him feel better.

He took a book down from the shelf, saying as he did so, "A mind, like a gun, must be kept well oiled." He had never held a gun; was not quite sure where the oil went, or what might happen if it was neglected. He had looked at pictures, and imagined what gun oil might smell like. He realised one Christmas that he was imagining the smell of his auntie's sewing machine oil, and had to change it to something more like diesel. None of that mattered, since he wouldn't read the book either.

I learned to cook sitting in my bedroom, guessing what was cooking by the smells drifting up the stairs. Later, when the house was quiet, I would slip down to the kitchen in bare feet and hold the spice jars to my nose, and learn which aroma was cumin and which was ginger and which was garlic. For years I cooked without salt or sugar, without any of the things I couldn't smell and didn't see. I had to learn all over again, but that doesn't mean forgetting.

I dreamed I was a mayfly, skimming over the water and not knowing my brevity until wakefulness came. Then I feared to die. I thought that dreaming of a life so short might mean my body knew that it was dying, too. But a mayfly's life is longer than a dream. I woke with my wings still beating.

We remained calm. We walked and did not run. We awaited instruction. Somewhere in the world were serious but friendly people in reassuring uniforms who would tell us what to do, and we, for the good of all, would obey. And soon we found them. We watched them through the window of a locked door, running with the crowd and not looking back.

When they opened him up they found a puzzlebox in his ribcage, halfway solved. They peeled away the blood vessels and lifted it to the light. It was hard, with gloved hands, to feel the subtle click and give of its mechanisms, and the dried-up stuff of life had stiffened its subtle joints. But they could see how close it was to being solved. How close he had been to being saved.