Scattering

A Day at the Zoo

Mark Taylor — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:00:27 +0100

We had a wonderful day at the old zoo, seeing all the different habitats. We felt the heat of the reptile house and bathed our feet where the penguins once swam. It's astonishing to think that so many different creatures lived so close to us. We ate the last of our honey on dense, dry bread, and looked at the photographs, faded but beautiful.

Living nightmares

Mark Taylor — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:00:30 +0100

For just one week I lived my nightmares. Went to work in my pants and let deadlines breeze past my bare skin. Sent the wrong words to the wrong people. When they asked me to leave, I drove home from the back seat. When such absurd fears become real, they lose their hold over you. I sleep dreamlessly now, but I hope to wake up soon.

Secret language

Mark Taylor — Sat, 02 May 2026 06:00:56 +0100

For my birthday she gave me a book about secret languages. What it means to wear a certain flower or colour or perfume. How the way a letter is folded might show love, respect, contempt, forgiveness. I turned the pages and looked at the reused silver gift wrap it came in, and I wondered: what does this mean?

Punishment

Mark Taylor — Fri, 01 May 2026 06:00:36 +0100

When Sadie was bad they sat her in front of the mirror. To stare into the mirror at any other time would have been dreadful vanity, but to do it in shame was quite different. It fascinated her to see her iris move, her nostrils twitch with breath, her skin curve and fold: so much complexity, and not a wisp of badness in it.

Helicopter

Mark Taylor — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 06:00:59 +0100

We spent a happy afternoon arguing about the helicopter, he that it was a model close by, I that it was real but distant. We talked about flight time and engine noise and rotor speed and all sorts of other things we knew nothing about, and the wronger we felt the harder we argued, until the sun began to set and we compromised. It was a half-scale helicopter, monkey-piloted, a middling way away.

Submarine

Mark Taylor — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 06:00:42 +0100

In my eighth year under the sea I began to dream about leaks. I knew that I was dreaming because I saw the water coming in, heard the trickle, felt the wetness in my socks. If there was truly a leak it would be over faster than waking, my little world smeared flat by the weight of the ocean. I worried that a slow leak in my dreams meant death slowly growing in my body. I did not want to die sealed up tight. Give me the catastrophe, that I might feed the deep like a whale fall.

On the grid

Mark Taylor — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 06:00:29 +0100

I wished to live in grids from the first time my birthday was marked on a calendar, from noughts and crosses to chess to go. In school I loved when they brought out graph paper in maths, or even for handwriting practice: fitting all those curls and scratches into perfect squares. I hated when they brought it with the scrap paper for a wet playtime, and it got drawn on howsoever. I dream of enclosed fields, of a square apartment on an American city block, a pixel-perfect image of the world. Or failing that, I might make do with prison.

Sour

Mark Taylor — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 06:00:56 +0100

The sweetshops had grown more competitive all through summer, carrying on long after the children calmed. The sourest sweets in the village, the country, the country, the world. The proprietors were seen on social media with tears in their eyes and smiling, bleeding mouths. A boy went in for jelly babies and they added a scoop of citric acid to the bag. By the end of the holidays, both were closed: one owner bankrupt, one laid out with chronic indigestion.

Laundry day

Mark Taylor — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:00:59 +0100

Laundry day, all heat and steam and detergent, cracking hands so they threaten bloodstains on shirts. Everything cleaner than when it was new, and a slick film on the fingers that makes you shudder at your own touch. Soap in the air, mouth, eyes, like we are being cleaned from the world. But fresh sheets tonight, and sharp collars on Sunday, to calm our red skin.

Skylight

Mark Taylor — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 06:00:44 +0100

There was no big crash when it shattered, only a sound like hailstones pattering across the lobby, and the hum of the outside pouring in. Everything was much brighter, suddenly. I hadn't realised how dirty the skylights were. It made you want to look up, straight up, with wide open eyes to watch the falling glass.

After the demolition

Mark Taylor — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:00:37 +0100

After the demolition there was so much sky in the sky that the dust didn't seem to matter. We sat in evening sun where once we were in shadow. We had learned how these things that seem part of the shape of the world can vanish like an ebb tide. Nobody had lived there anywhere, we thought.

Winding up

Mark Taylor — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:00:49 +0100

I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. Straight away an unseen mechanism takes up the tension, easing it away little by little. The next day, I put the key into its hole and turn until the spring tightens. The mechanism clicks, and somewhere I will never go, something happens. If, one day, I do not turn the key, the spring will slacken and the mechanism will slow and stop. I would never do it. But I might, any day now, put the key into its hole and turn and turn and turn until something snaps.

Office birthday

Mark Taylor — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:00:03 +0100

On my birthday I took a pass-the-parcel to work. We spend the team meeting passing unwanted crap around the table anyway: we might as well get a Chewit when the music stops. It was a wonderful birthday, an unexpected afternoon in the sun. And if management or the bomb squad ask any difficult questions, I will say: I am older now, and wiser.

Learning to paint

Mark Taylor — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:00:39 +0100

I learned to paint one colour at a time, squeezing the last of the blue from the tube as I saved up for orange. At first it annoyed me to see the red of my tomatoes and have only the green of the vine to paint with. In time I found there was a little of each hue in everything. At last I sold a painting, and with the little money I made I bought five pretty little tubes. I squeezed a little blob from each, and watched them on the palette, daring me to mix them.

Time machine

Mark Taylor — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:00:10 +0100

While the machine warmed up, we watched increasingly complicated time-travel movies and challenged each other to explain them. We thought we were preparing our minds. But we were wrong to believe a journey in the machine would be explicable. Now our worlds all have different histories, and my mother was a pine tree, and my heart is younger than my head when it had always been the other way around.

Pipes

Mark Taylor — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 06:00:18 +0100

There was a shudder in the walls every morning in the old house. "Don't worry," my uncle said, "it's just the pipes, where the Creature lives." He was always like that. He didn't know how much kids can believe. He didn't know I'd crawl out of bed before dawn and sit by the radiator, looking for something to talk to.

Graph

Mark Taylor — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:00:07 +0100

Through slatted blinds I read the landscape plotted out on graph paper: the treetops rising steadily on the horizon; the sky squeezed out by rising land; and at the end of the x axis, one big square column, a mode far from the median. I understood, until he pulled the cord and the blinds rattled up, and I could no longer see the shape of things.

Ladybirds

Mark Taylor — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:00:38 +0100

All week we gambled on ladybird spots, betting chocolate bars and pints and twenty pound notes. On the last night we found a wildlife book in Gary's room, in among his winnings, with the page on ladybirds turned down at the corner. 7-spot, 2-spot, 4-spot. I'd always thought it was random. Serves us right, I suppose, for not being curious.

Unbitten

Mark Taylor — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:00:28 +0100

The mosquitoes were biting, but they weren't biting me. Was it something in my blood, or the scent of my skin? Was there some poison in my veins that they could taste even before landing? I slapped where they should have been, and scratched until I made the welts I was missing. I scratched until the blood came, and I saw what was wrong with it.

Dandelion clocks

Mark Taylor — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:00:58 +0100

We were blowing dandelion clocks all afternoon, the seeds streaming from the stems and never running out. There would be weeds all over our mother's perfect lawn, making it more beautiful. But they didn't grow, for we blew and blew and never found the time.

Cherry blossom

Mark Taylor — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:00:34 +0100

A person can drown in as little as an inch of cherry blossom. Nose and throat plugged, and you imagine that if you can cough it up it will make a fluttering pink cloud, but all it makes is a thick wet splat. All the beauty was gone when you tried to breathe it, and you only tried to breathe it because there was nothing else left. You have spoiled the spring insisting on air, but air is better than beauty, and it will be summer soon.

Offerings

Mark Taylor — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:00:38 +0100

Dad said you must always give the seagulls one chip, as an offering. Mum said you mustn't encourage them. So chips at the seaside meant a choice about who to betray. There was no third option: to throw half a chip, or one soaked to inedibility in vinegar, would betray them both. It was only going back home, fully grown and accustomed to making my own choices, that I noticed: she always threw them a chip, and he never did.

Meetup

Mark Taylor — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:00:13 +0100

When they met up on a Saturday they only played the games she couldn't win, and then they made fun of her for caring. She practised until she could beat them, and they made fun of her for that, too. She brought new games, ones where you worked together to solve problems or make something beautiful. She knew what would happen. But she was storing up all the awful things about them, ready for the lonely Saturdays to come.

Stump and tree

Mark Taylor — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:00:23 +0100

The stump I like to sit on was once her favourite tree. I sat on it and thought of time worked backwards. How angry I would be to see them come and put that trunk over my seat. How I would resent her for playing in the branches and getting younger by it. How the rest of us would come undone, too.

Paste

Mark Taylor — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 06:00:08 +0100

"What's in the sandwiches?" she asked, and he said "Paste", and after a minute or so of waiting for him to elaborate she said "What kind? Wallpaper?" Chewingly he answered with a question: "What do you know about wallpaper paste? We've never redecorated since you were born." And that was true, the house was faded almost to grey. She peeled up one damp slice that left a layer of itself clinging to the paste like a half-stripped wall. Sniffed. "I think it's fish." He shrugged. It was the jar they had left at the back of the fridge, label soaked off. He hoped it was fish, if that's what it smelled of.

Pine cones

Mark Taylor — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:00:13 +0100

We knew that Auntie Lisa must be rich because there was a huge bowl of pine cones in her hallway, and pine cones were rare and precious to us. Dad said that she picked them all up herself, one for each walk she went on, but nobody could have walked that far or that often. Not with a bad leg and a stick. We cleared her house one warm October. For all her riches, that bowl was the one thing we fought over.

Good words

Mark Taylor — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:00:50 +0100

In a little note on his phone, Kev wrote down all the words he found redolent but didn't quite know the meaning of. Mangrove. Bucolic. Redolent. One day things would get desperate, and he would start looking them up. Behind one of them would be an escape. Now, while there was hope, he read it and was grateful that there were things in the world deserving of such names.

Cereal

Mark Taylor — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:00:35 +0100

Breakfast was stars in milk, the two galaxies swimming together. The brilliance of the stars showed the true yellow in the milk, just as the dark left where we filled our bowl showed how blue the night had been. There were stars left up there still. The sky still lived. But we were hungry, and one bowl could not fill us.

Holiday traffic

Mark Taylor — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:00:54 +0100

Danielle set off at eleven o' clock on the bank holiday, hoping to catch the traffic. With luck she would get five hours, sat on her own, phone in the glovebox, while the queues raged around her. She would put the traffic report on the radio and enjoy being part of the problem. But something terrible must have happened, and she made it there in two hours flat.

Mess

Mark Taylor — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 06:00:35 +0100

I got a little dab of ink on my finger, which spread to my page and my sleeve and my face. I got mustard on my shirt and ketchup at the corner of my mouth. I slipped walking through the park, grass on one knee, mud on the other. I was a disaster, more colourful than I have ever been.

Acorn boy

Mark Taylor — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 06:00:23 +0100

The fairies sealed her son inside an acorn, and so she sat and watched all through the autumn, trying to see which one was him. She gathered them in sacks, and threw sharp stones at squirrels. Her palms itched through the winter as the acorns cooled under the soil. In twenty years there will be a forest where there had been nothing, and she will sit under the branches and remember him.

Space

Mark Taylor — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:00:38 +0100

Danny wouldn't let us paint or put up wallpaper. "It makes the room smaller," he said. "We've little enough room as it is." He took the walls back to brick and ripped up the carpets and stood there in all his space. But he left those heavy curtains that blocked off the whole bay window, and the bracken growing over the front door.

Frogs

Mark Taylor — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 06:00:26 +0100

Caring for the frogs in the garden kept me afloat, for a while. I sloped the edge of the pond for them, dropped logs in the water as resting places, and felt I was building up somewhere I could breathe. When they moved into the house it got harder: puddles on the carpet, tadpoles in the bath. I didn't want pondweed in my bed and those strange eyes watching me. I didn't want to wake choking on frogspawn. I didn't know what I was choosing.

Beehive

Mark Taylor — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:00:50 +0100

We lived in sliding frames, like kept bees. When they needed something from us they pulled us out and scraped us open. The little that was left they gave back for us to rebuild. A bee in smoke is too busy escaping the fire to use her stinger. The arrangement is for the good of everyone, the keeper says from behind his mask.

Migraine

Mark Taylor — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:00:43 +0100

Behind my eye the migraine sits, angry that it cannot push the ball out if its socket and escape to purer air. It has such colour and such shape to it, it seems a pity it should be locked up inside my drab old skull. I put a hand to my face to comfort it, and whisper to it in the dark, knowing it will not outlive the day. Darling migraine, you will miss all the beauty of this world except your own: jagged, iridescent, painful.

Clownfish

Mark Taylor — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:00:56 +0100

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.

Pancake

Mark Taylor — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:00:50 +0000

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.

Razor blade

Mark Taylor — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:00:29 +0000

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.

Bus fox

Mark Taylor — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:00:40 +0000

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.

Best teacher ever

Mark Taylor — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:00:18 +0000

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.

A mind like a gun

Mark Taylor — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:00:08 +0000

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.

Cooking lessons

Mark Taylor — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:00:08 +0000

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.

Ephemeroptera

Mark Taylor — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:00:11 +0000

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.

Evacuation

Mark Taylor — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:00:23 +0000

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.

Puzzle box

Mark Taylor — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:00:51 +0000

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.

Rollercoaster

Mark Taylor — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 06:00:46 +0000

The rollercoaster stopped before the drop, with the harnesses digging into our shoulders and our faces tilted to the ground. I thought: how can it break down here, when all it has to do is fall? The longer we hung there, the more I hoped they would winch us back or walk us out. My need for gravity had bled out of me. But then we fell.

After the flood

Mark Taylor — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:00:36 +0000

After the flood, when everything was rearranged, we left things as they were. The cars haphazard in the streets looked much as they always had. Less so the ice-cream van in my garden, which gaped its serving window down into the mud and wouldn't chime no matter what we tried. I planted in the sediment that lay over the Co-op car park, recalling my Year Five topic book on the Nile. Nothing sprouted. That silt was all plastic scraps and spilled petrol and concrete, and the wrong type of shit.

Old leaves

Mark Taylor — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 06:00:27 +0000

A cluster of brown leaves had clung on all through winter and into the spring. Amy, always thoughtful of things smaller than herself, was afraid that they would stop the new leaves coming through. My voice pressed at my throat to reassure her, but I stopped, and stooped, and bore her up on my shoulders so she could reach to tear the dead leaves down. The old may fall away for the new, but doesn't always. I would not have her complacent. Let her own hands clear the way.

Garden

Mark Taylor — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:00:33 +0000

Through hedge archways and little doors in walls, I passed from one part of the garden to the next. Each was laid out the same, down to the flaking paint on the bench. In one it might be spring, everything in bloom: in the next it was winter, the bench recoated in white and a smiling snowman next to it. One showed the garden as it was at night, the sky always perfectly clear and full of stars. My favourite to walk in held a frosty morning, with the sun risen just enough to sparkle on the grass but not thaw it, and everything silent but the birds. I walked and walked, but could never find it.

Blackberrying

Mark Taylor — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 06:00:48 +0000

Right in the middle of the brambles, where neither arms nor birds could reach, was the plumpest blackberry I had ever seen. I came back with my scratched arms and my thick gloves and my secateurs. I cut and cut, but my prize only seemed to retreat deeper into the prickles. My gloves tore and my secateurs broke and my arms bled. When I gave up and turned around, the briar had closed up behind me.

Big wet dog

Mark Taylor — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 06:00:44 +0000

On rainy days there was always a big wet dog in the café, so much damp fur spilling over its eyes and nose that infrequent customers generally mistook it for a coat. Nobody brought it: it whined at the door when the rain started, and walked in circles near it when the sun came out, and on dry days it was never seen. If the rain lasted past closing, it slept by the radiator. All the people of the café knew that one day it would rain and the dog would not come, and they would share an unspoken grief. But they were wrong. The big wet dog outlasted all of them.

In the new world

Mark Taylor — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 06:00:46 +0000

In the new world, we made our homes in the mouths of huge carnivorous plants. They seemed not to notice us. We were like nothing else in that strange country. The plants were good hosts: they dissolved the carapaces of the local creatures and, getting all they needed from those tough parts, returned the meat to us. Back home, I found I could not sleep without the sweet scent of their lure, the gentle pulse of their motion, the prickle of their hairs at my back.

Emotion Recycling Centre

Mark Taylor — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:00:05 +0000

I set off early to the emotion recycling centre , so it would be quiet. At the barrier a man in hi-vis waved me down. "What have you got?" he asked.

"Anger, regret. A bit of old grief. Oh, and some shame."

"We can't take shame," he said.

I was only really there for the shame. "Where am I supposed to take it, then?" I asked him.

He just shrugged. "It's hazardous. You'll need a specialist service. The rest is OK." And he waved me through.

I dropped my feelings in the relevant containers, and then I glanced around for cameras and fluorescent tabards, before throwing my shame in the place marked "General malaise". I know it was wrong. But I didn't feel too bad about it.

Wearing out

Mark Taylor — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 06:00:22 +0000

Once or twice in the time it takes to wear out a pair of shoes, I might allow myself a small act of destruction. A key dragged along the side of a car, or the last page torn out of a library book. A cigarette lighter held in just the right place. It steadies something in me. But haven't you noticed, the way shoes wear out so quickly these days?

Times when it it hard to tie a tie

Mark Taylor — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:00:22 +0000

There are times when it is hard to tie a tie. In grief or in excitement. When the fingers are numb with cold or slick with sweat. When someone is watching. When your neck is swollen and painful. While driving. When laughing. When you have recently had a cord pulled tight around your throat until your vision clouded. With your arm in a cast. When nobody ever taught you. When an angry ex has shredded all your ties with the kitchen scissors. When you once knew how, but have forgotten.

School reunion

Mark Taylor — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:00:29 +0000

Julia didn't know anybody at the school reunion. She could make out the shape of the class: who has been the popular kids, who had kept under the radar, who had become unexpectedly hot. But that was any school reunion. Where was Adele, with the chewing gum? Where was Gareth, who she felt guilty about hating? She saw names Sharpied on stickers, Isaac and Clara and Maeve: names she had never heard called from a register. She had checked the invitation twenty times. She was in the right place, but surrounded by strangers. And they were smiling, and waving, and calling her name.

The Creature in the Lake

Mark Taylor — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:00:41 +0000

There was something new in the little lake by the playground. Something like a seal or a walrus, huge and whiskered. Something you could imagine might let the children ride on its back. It ate the bags of old food that were sometimes fly-tipped in the park, and it left the ducks alone. We loved it, and we knew it wasn't dangerous, and so we knew that when they came to take it, they would have to come at night.

Break in

Mark Taylor — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 06:00:46 +0000

I am a grown-up now, and I can play in quarries and on building sites if I take care not to get caught. I can't climb fences like I once could, but I can buy bolt cutters with my Screwfix card. I am a grown-up now, and I can fetch my frisbee from the railway line as long as there's no train coming. I am a grown-up now, but I grew up learning to be scared, so I don't break locks or snip fences or put carpets over barbed wire. I just watch, and tut, and wish that I was braver.

Drum

Mark Taylor — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:00:54 +0000

Grandad had that drum up on the wall his whole life, and it felt like I spent my whole childhood staring at it. The fading paint, the real hide stretched so taut it looked alive. I imagined all the things it would summon if I played it: friendly genies in the day, strange monsters when I spent a night on his sofa. Then one winter it was time to clear the place out, and I touched the drum for the first time, to lift it down from its bent nail. I struck it once with the pads of my fingers, and the dry skin split, and nothing came.

Egg collection

Mark Taylor — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:00:05 +0000

In my parents' house there is a drawer of birds' eggs resting in crumpled paper, perfect and protected and cold and dead. I keep them half from pride and half from shame. Even as a boy I knew better. If I hadn't been told not to touch, not to take, not to go hunting, then I never would have thought of it.

Ninety-nine

Mark Taylor — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:00:20 +0000

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.

Rolling shelves

Mark Taylor — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:00:32 +0000

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.

The chalk factory

Mark Taylor — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:00:03 +0000

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.

On a cloud

Mark Taylor — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:00:58 +0000

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.

Skip

Mark Taylor — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:00:43 +0000

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.

Revolt

Mark Taylor — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:00:16 +0000

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.

The Legacy of Mrs Clements

Mark Taylor — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:00:38 +0000

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.

Leafleting

Mark Taylor — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:00:41 +0000

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.

No bad ideas

Mark Taylor — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:00:56 +0000

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.

A day on the river

Mark Taylor — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 06:00:05 +0000

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?

Gum

Mark Taylor — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 06:00:45 +0000

I was at the bus shelter with the missing roof, waiting, and I had just sat in gum. I knew that I had sat in gum because a minute before I had looked at the foul grey blob of it clinging to the seat and thought, make sure you don't sit there. But the world span the thought out of me as quickly as it had come, and I sat. The bus came, late, and I waved the driver on. The gum would only become a problem when I stood up, so I stayed, stuck in place, until I could think my way out of it ever having happened.

Cat faceoff

Mark Taylor — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 06:00:28 +0000

The cats stared at each other and I stared at the cats. Slowly, like a leaf towards the sun, one of them turned away. I couldn't say if it was an entente or a surrender. They stayed near each other a while, enemies or friends or some third cat thing that I couldn't understand, until the bang of a bin lid sent them running in opposite directions. I hoped, if there was a winner, that mine had won.

Leaving the city

Mark Taylor — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 06:00:13 +0000

The city receded. Cities, like mountains, don't look smaller as you move away. Instead you see the unbearable scale of them, and they look bigger than ever. As we passed out of sight of it, it seemed to grow and grow, a little larger each time we looked back. It only shrank again when I went back.

Balcony

Mark Taylor — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:00:31 +0000

I found him shivering on the balcony. "I had to get out," he explained, "but I should have gone for the front door." Twenty minutes later and I would have found him climbing down the building. I got him a blanket and a cup of tea, then I moved a few things around, changed a painting over, put a pan of soup on. By the time he could smell it, he was ready to come back in.

Blossom

Mark Taylor — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 06:00:28 +0000

I saw the first hints of blossom, like the branch-tips had been dipped in violet ink. Too soon. I need a few more weeks to hide in the dark, to numb my toes. I am not ready for brighter days just yet. But I saw two daffodils, too, and a sunbeam fell warm on my neck. I cannot stop things getting better.

In administration

Mark Taylor — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 06:00:32 +0000

When I got back home the windows were boarded over. Not a repossession: the notice on the door showed my life was no longer a going concern. I worried about where I would sleep and what I would eat, but as the night passed I found it didn't seem to matter. A little later, a new notice went up: under new management. Some investor had come in to turn the sinking ship of my existence around. I hoped they had a little more nous than the last guy.

Diary

Mark Taylor — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:00:19 +0000

The writing was smaller than usual, and neater too. It sat right in the middle of an empty page, like a signpost. “I know you read my diary.” He thought: she can't know. He thought: it’s a joke, it’s just in case. But he knew that he could never speak to her again. His voice would give him away.

Lunar expedition

Mark Taylor — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 06:00:06 +0000

At night I looked up at the moon, where my daughter was. On the clearest nights I imagined I could see the strange buildings she lived and worked in, the threads of her days pulled out across the surface. I sang to her and wondered if she heard. But as the moon came and went I began to feel I was smothering her, looking up every night. I began to wish for clouds.

Tree

Mark Taylor — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:00:46 +0000

I lived up in that tree when I was a kid. I carved my initials and felt guilty every time I looked at them. I thought I'd cry when I saw it cut down. I thought I'd ask for a little chunk of it, the branch where I used to sit. But the creak and the crash seemed to blow all that out of me. When they were finished I went and stretched my fingers up to the place where my feet used to dangle. A place that would always be there.

Snowdrop

Mark Taylor — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 06:00:59 +0000

I bent to pick a snowdrop, but the stem didn't snap. It drew up out of the soil, impossibly long, and as I pulled I felt the earth begin to tremble with the movement. Up came stones and worms and the roots of other plants, up came the winter's snow and last summer's sunshine, up came all that lay buried until the whole world was there, suspended from a snowdrop, with me stood upon it. I wondered whether spring would ever come.

The Jar of Shavings

Mark Taylor — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:00:33 +0000

He kept the shavings from his woodcuts in an amber glass jar: all the negative space, the places the ink didn't touch. When he shook it he fancied he could see all the choices he hadn't made, all the pictures he hadn't printed. But when he turned it out, it was just dust and mess and things he didn't need, and a jar that could be put to better use.

VIPs

Mark Taylor — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 06:00:56 +0000

Mr Manscombe told us that the visitors were important. Well, if they so important as all that, why did they all drive such boring cars? Black, black, and black. If I was important I'd get a car in an interesting colour. They asked us all the most stupid questions you can imagine, and they all looked very thoughtful when they were listening to each other ask, but I'm not sure they heard one word of an answer. Get used to it, Mr Manscombe said when we were grousing afterwards. You'll be seeing a lot more of them. Of course, we never saw them or their boring cars again.

Old Eyes

Mark Taylor — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 06:00:10 +0000

The crew had been carefully selected: no illnesses, no unstable personalities, no physical deficiencies. Caitlin was the one exception, her expertise being irreplaceable: if her glasses broke in the new universe, one of these perfect uniformed men would have to lead her by the arm. They stepped through on a cold February day, into a strange summer, and waited for their eyes to adjust. But the light was different here: it flowed and bent all wrong, through the air, through their eyes. They blinked and rubbed, but it was like seeing underwater. Caitlin took off her glasses, let her old eyes focus, and saw.

Skull Island

Mark Taylor — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 06:00:14 +0000

After ten weeks' journey we came to Skull Island, where we had important business. We found the man we were looking for in a cabin on the hill, the only dwelling in evidence. Our captain took up the matter, pushing through the door without knocking. "You, sir," he said to the startled cartographer, "will answer for this map." The chart which bore his mark showed friendly harbours where there were none, and quiet seas where there were monsters, and nobody but the man who drew it had ever heard of "Skull Island", which our brief survey had revealed was not so skull-shaped as it was shown. "But it would be a tedious occupation," the cartographer protested, "to draw the world as it really is."

Mending

Mark Taylor — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 06:00:43 +0000

She had all her broken things arranged on the kitchen table: phones, friendships, hopes, hoover. Clothes and cares all gone into holes. She set to work with needle and thread and screwdriver and solder, one by one, the only way to do anything. By the time the sun went down it was all working, more or less, but some of it rattled when she shook it, and she had a little box of parts left over. She put them in the drawer, to mend the next things.

Churchgoing

Mark Taylor — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 06:00:29 +0000

I went back to the old church most days. You could find me on my knees, head bowed. I had dropped something very precious there, and in the dim light it was hard to search for. Of course, I knew I would never find it. It had probably been sucked up the nose of their worn-out Henry Hoover the day I lost it. But it was a place of hope.

Chess

Mark Taylor — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 06:00:24 +0000

We didn't have all the pieces, so we had to invent our own rules. Two scrappy little armies, one of them mostly pawns, but the pawns were so battered you could tell each one apart. We gave them names, skills, stories. From time to time they would switch sides. One day we found a pristine set, all boxed up. It smelled of pine and paint. We turned out the pieces and lined them up. It didn't look right. Not like a real fight.

Amateur dramatics

Mark Taylor — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Glyn did amateur dramatics in his old school hall, under the direction of his old school drama teacher. It felt like a nightmare, sometimes, standing around before rehearsal under those same fluorescent lights but talking about jobs and backaches. But then the run came round, the audience filed in, the lights went down, and the joy of being someone else hit all the harder.

A new way of living

Mark Taylor — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 06:00:45 +0000

A new way of living. That's what we were promised. That's what we had longed for, all the long days. A way that would connect us. We gave up everything, and did it gladly, because there wasn't anything we wanted to keep. But it's not a new way of living, after all. It's the same old way, with a different man in the big chair.

Punch

Mark Taylor — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:00:50 +0000

Flat on my back, spilled beer seeping into my shirt, I was thinking: they can all tell. Everyone can see this is the first punch I've ever taken. They are looking at me on the ground and thinking: what else hasn't he done? My jaw didn't hurt too badly. There was enough blood in my mouth to spit out in a casual, tough-looking way. I could still turn this around.

Ways of Seeing the Forest

Mark Taylor — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:00:06 +0000

From the very top of the tree, you could see out across the whole forest, but nothing that was happening within it: the world beneath was hidden under leaves. But some of the creatures seemed to see deeper. Every movement below came together to ripple the branches just so, and they could read it.

From the bottom of the tree, you could not be sure how far you saw through the dense lines of trunks. But what was there rustled and sprang and called like life itself. And some of the creatures seemed to see further, like the forest was all one thing.

I liked it best nestled in the boughs of the tree, wrapped up close, seeing nothing else at all.

Lighthouse

Mark Taylor — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 06:00:36 +0000

After the wreck they stayed in the lighthouse. It was the only shelter with room for them, and though they felt resentful of it for failing to save them, they were grateful for its strong walls when the winds blew again. Gray spent the days hauling scraps of their boat up onto the beach, laying them out just so, finding the grooves where his hands had once rested. He never asked what Blue was doing. She wouldn't come out with him. One day he came back, and she had repaired the light.

Fireplace

Mark Taylor — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:42:13 +0000

She scrunched the letter into a loose ball and threw it into the fire. It was an electric fire, with the flames projected on a little screen, and she would have to pick the paper out later. But for the moment, it felt suitably dramatic. She turned her back and walked away, stopping at the door to decide where she should go. When she came back, the letter had opened itself out. It flickered red and orange, and by the light of those cold flames, she saw she had misread it.

Shame

Mark Taylor — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 06:00:22 +0000

I could charge a good price for my little bottles of shame. With a mister top or a dropper, depending on how you planned to apply it, they were terribly convenient. Everybody knows somebody who needs a little more shame. I heard from people whose spouses had stopped drinking, whose bosses had stopped screaming, whose landlords had lowered the rent. And I heard from people, too, who put a drop on their partner’s pillow just to keep them in line. That was good. It kept the supply up.

Cranes

Mark Taylor — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:00:47 +0000

The cranes swang around on the horizon. That was all they did. There was nothing to build with, and never had been. But swinging the cranes around was good fun for the bored young men they paid to do it, and the sight of them on the horizon helped us remember we were small. After everything, they couldn't bear to let us have a clear sky or a still day. So they swang the cranes, around and around. They would do it until they fell to pieces with the bored young men still inside them.

Knifelike

Mark Taylor — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 06:00:18 +0000

You're like a knife, she said. I thought of how I used to cook all her meals, slicing vegetables into little flowers for her. I thought of the nasty cut I got trying to open a plastic package with my teeth. I thought of all the tips bent up or broke off from being used to pry. I resolved to be more knifelike: simple, useful, true.

Lost things

Mark Taylor — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 06:00:26 +0000

The day I left my job all the world's lost things started coming to me. It started with socks in the laundry, odd socks in colours I'd never owned. Keys in my pockets for cars parked who-knows-where and houses soon to have the locks changed. Coins in a hundred currencies dropped out of my sofa and rolled along the floor. The shoebox under my bed filled up with love notes and photographs. The back seat of my car filled up with phones and laptops and important-looking folders. Clutched in my hand one morning I found a little carved bird, and a note, and I never found out what they meant.

Long train

Mark Taylor — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:00:35 +0000

The train was a hundred miles long. You got on at the back, and you made your way down the length of it, and once you got to the front you had reached your destination. It was never delayed and it was never cancelled, and in the first dozen or so carriages, seats were plentiful. The journey, severely slowed by tucking in to let people come past the other way, took me a week. Now and again I stopped to barter with the weary, bearded men who ran the trolley service. It wasn't the worst train I'd ever been on, all in all.

Ghost's teeth

Mark Taylor — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 06:00:39 +0000

I had a fine set of ghost’s teeth fitted, there when you want them and gone where you don’t. No brushing, no flossing, no sores. And so much kinder than teeth extracted from the living. But they felt wrong in my mouth: like they would bite me in my sleep. I went back to the dentist, but he said they could not be extracted. I would have to call a priest.

Recognition

Mark Taylor — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 06:00:43 +0000

If you did as they liked, they carved your name on a little brass plaque and set it with the others in the hallway. You felt pleased, for a month or a year or a decade. You liked that there was a woman paid to come and shine your name up bright each week. But sooner or later, you came to wish that you could take it down, scrub it out, at least let it tarnish. The sparkle of that hallway was the worst of it: the way it made us all seem proud.