This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

“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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• Schooling by Heather McGowan, which appears to be out of print in the UK but is well worth picking up if you spot a second-hand copy. Its stream-of-consciousness style reads like a memory, in which feeling and character are vivid but never certain.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Only As Prescribed

On the morning of the funeral, halfway through shaving, with the foam still covering the left of his face, John stole one of his wife's beta blockers. Snipped a tidy square out of the sheet with nail scissors and tucked it his phone case. With razor clutched awkwardly between ring finger and pinky he opened out the map-creased leaflet and read about not taking unless prescribed, looking for the side effects to make sure he was safe really. Silly to print side-effects on pills for anxiety, he thought, but there are rules about these things. Shaving the left side he thought to himself in the mirror that the cut away corner would tell on him. An empty cell would be just another pill that Heather had taken before she got better. Besides, she hadn't counted even before they were retired to the back of the cabinet, she was always running out and then going into an unmedicated panic about it. A neat, square cut spoke plainly of her husband, who feared more precisely, who lined up the point of his scissors so as not to leave an unsightly nick in the packet, while the razor swung loose from his hand.

When he had rinsed with too-warm water from the cold tap, all his pores half-closed, he went back to the cabinet and turned the sheet over so that a glance would only show the intact corners. He had forgotten that Heather always ended up opening medicine packets from both ends, so that the pills slid out and you could only find the empty box.

⁂

This week I had the pleasure of reading a few of my daily stories at Speak Easy, a really lovely spoken word open mic night here in Manchester. If you're in the area I highly recommend it: it's joyful and eclectic and welcoming and warm.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• Bee by Claire Preston. I developed a long fascination with bees while at university, where I was taught by Claire Preston. Shortly after the bee-fever took me I found myself wandering downstairs in a local bookshop, to a section I rarely visited, where the first thing I saw was this book. Of course I bought it immediately, but for some reason I never got around to reading it until now. It's a delightful tour of the many places bees nest in our culture.
• 'The Crossing' by David Frankel, the latest Little Uncertainty from Uncertain Stories. These stories are available free in bookshops across the UK, or as a bonus when you buy an anthology. 'The Crossing' is a taut little story which uses a hint of horror to show the inhumanity of borders.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Dad Dancing

The dancing began at seven pm with a reticent first shuffle, before the beckoning bride, a steady set of floor-fillers, and the arrival of pre-drunk evening-only guests set the party mood simmering. Ecstatic uni friends and indifferent cousins jostled for space with ballroom enthusiasts trying a little too hard. And dotted here and there, loosening their ties and keeping close to their pints, there were dads, each dancing his own dad dance for his own dad reasons.

🕺

Martin never saw the point of dancing. He loved music, and prided himself on listening widely and without snobbery. He felt a good beat in his bones, but never the urge to shake them. He might tap a foot, or a finger; he might, now and then, in a moment of wild abandon, air-drum. But to dance was a distraction. Dancing wasn’t listening, and listening was the point.

When Kitty started dancing, two months after walking, Martin was thrilled. Not about the dancing, sweet as it was, but because it was the first flicker of interest she had shown in any music not directly produced by her mum. She had chewed on crayons to Charles Mingus, rolled a Duplo car back and forth to the Stones, and turned her back on CBeebies when the presenters started singing. The nearest she came to an emotional response was filling her nappy. But when ‘Blame It on the Boogie’ came on, it was like it had come with a software update. She stood completely still for a minute or so, then exploded into a cacophony of limbs and didn’t stop for half an hour except to shout ‘Again!’. Whether it was the song, the stage her ever-growing brain had reached, or the weird orange powder on her melty straws, something had changed her.

After that, Kitty could pick out the rhythm of a car radio carried on the wind from a mile away. She danced to ice-cream van chimes and the ten-second loop of her toy mobile phone and the rain on the roof of the conservatory. She sought out music like a bee seeks a flower. She rarely had far to search: from that first frenzy of movement, Martin had saturated her in it, playing all the grooves he wanted to cut into her brain, trying to cram in all he could before she decided she preferred jumping or climbing or hiding handfuls of dirt between the sofa cushions.

Before long, she wasn’t content to dance alone: daddy had to dance too. And Martin wasn’t going to risk her losing interest, so he complied, dancing as best he could. His mind was never on dancing: it was on Kitty, and the joy of all that music pouring into her. Until he realised that the joy and the music and the love were pouring back out again with every movement. There was no Jackson 5 moment when lightning struck him and innervated his hips. But there was a moment when he noticed the change: noticed he was enjoying himself, noticed himself dancing when Kitty wasn’t there. He waved his hands like he was swatting flies, grinned his biggest, stupidest grin, and queued up The Contours’ ‘Do You Love Me’.

A few weeks later, Kitty discovered how much fun it was to bash her toy pans together when there was a cymbal crash, or tinkle her tuneless glockenspiel along with a piano part, or shake her tambourine to literally anything. Martin never had the patience to learn an instrument, but for her, he had perhaps too much. When Kitty gave insisted on performing for visitors, Martin insisted on dancing; when she climbed out of bed at three in the morning to play her recorder, Martin climbed out of bed and danced; when she played her first proper gig at the pub on the corner, Martin was there dancing while everyone who knew him pretended that they didn’t. Everyone but Kitty.

Martin still couldn’t dance (though Kitty loved him anyway). Whether he mashed potato or did the twist, his head was still nodding quietly between the earcups of his good headphones. He danced like a man at a silent disco tuned to a different channel. But there at the reception, as Kitty’s band filled the air with love, it didn’t matter. Nobody could quite see what Martin was trying to do with his flapping arms and stiff legs, but they could see it was joyful, and generous, and true.

🕺

Jan is dancing to the rhythm of his internal monologue. If it bears any resemblance to the music being played, it is a second-order effect as he worries along to the beat. But dancing is celebration without words, without thought, without justification or explanation. Dancing is celebration without question or doubt or an unguarded word; an unmediated expression of the joy that is supposed to be in your heart. So Jan dances.

Milena is with her grandparents for the night, the first time since she was born. That means wine and dancing and stopping out, rest and calm and early nights. It means not attending to her every need, and thinking of her every moment. It means uninterrupted adult conversations, and having nothing to talk about but the baby. It means quality time together (outside, in a private corner, while Emily cries guilty tears into Jan’s jacket). It means a strange alienation from a life Jan thought he desperately missed, which he must either acknowledge or ignore. So Jan dances.

Jan realises that he is still dancing to the last song, or possibly the song before that. He hasn’t been listening. A few feet away, Emily is dancing too, much more capably than him. Emily has always been an effortless, elegant dancer. It is as though the music moves and she just relaxes into the currents of it. You have to look into her eyes to see she knows what she is doing, for she dances there, too. But there is no dancing in her eyes tonight. When her eyes are like this, Jan knows he would have to call her name three or four times before she heard him, even without the music. And Jan knows he isn’t going to do it. So Jan dances.

It’s dance or talk.

Yes, she’s a treasure.

Ha, I remember sleep, I used to get that sometimes!

Such a beautiful wedding.

Yes, she’s OK, it’s hard but she’s tough.

I’m always saying going to work feels like a day off now! But I’d rather be at home with them.

I’d better not, got to be sensible these days.

You’ve got three, why didn’t you tell me how hard it is?!

Dance or talk, and the talking is all the same. So Jan dances.

🕺

Amol was always too self-conscious to dance in public. Not that he cared if people thought he was a bad dancer, or even if they made fun of him. The standard of his dancing was of no importance to him, and he knew that even the worst dancer looks less strange on the dance floor than being the only one still sat down. But he couldn’t shake his awareness of eyes on him: other people’s attention, layered between him and the world like patterned glass. When he danced in the shower, the music went straight from his ears to his feet, but on a dance floor every move went through his mind first, adding a fraction of a second’s delay like he was on the end of a video call, throwing him off the beat. He didn’t mind that it made him dance badly. He danced badly anyway. But dancing out of time just wasn’t fun. It felt like his attempts at learning to juggle, with the added frustration that he knew how it felt to do it properly.

‘Wild horses couldn’t drag me up there,’ he would say, and he meant it. He had no interest in doing something he didn’t enjoy just because it was supposed to be fun. But wild horses were nothing compared to Ajay, grabbing a handful of jacket in his tiny fist and pulling Amol insistently towards the dance floor. Ajay could drag him anywhere, and though he hadn’t yet learned to say ‘dance’ and struggled even with ‘baba’, it couldn’t have been clearer what he wanted.

So Amol danced, like the two of them did at home, but still aware of the other guests watching (‘So cute!’), still thinking about every step and clap, still always a little behind the beat. And Ajay danced, barely even knowing that other people could watch, but not yet in full control of his little body, still feeling it out, the music still cutting channels from ears to feet, leaving him, too, just a fraction late. And as the lights pulsed and the bass thumped, the two of them danced together, out of time with the whole room, and perfectly in sync with each other.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

Scratched in charcoal on the gate were the words “THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE WOODS”. Reading them made me feel better about things. I tried to imagine the woods without anything in them, and it felt like a hole right through me. I thought they couldn't even be woods. I climbed the gate, and hopped over, and went on my way.

I have been reading...

• A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma. These are very fine, tightly observed stories. I'm not sure they are well served by the cover quote that claims they "transform the very nature of reading", although I suppose that may be true of everything we read.
• Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, which I found so propulsive I read it too fast, and now I feel I need to return to it more thoughtfully. I think that way of reading suits it.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: The Tour Guide

On Tuesdays Arthur gave tours of the gallery. They were not a formal part of his job, which was primarily a matter of pest control, but he was treated with charmed indulgence, and Arthur felt that everybody in a gallery ought to have a stake in the artwork. For his part, Arthur had a stake in everything, particularly the cafe and the garden and the spot in the main atrium where the sun shone down through the skylights.

Arthur generally picked up his tour groups by the front entrance, and this Tuesday was no different. His tours, being unofficial, were not scheduled or advertised: he simply found a lost-looking group and introduced himself. This was the great privilege of working at the gallery: not merely to share the exhibitions with visitors who might feel uncertain or out-of-place or even fearful, but to make them feel at ease. Or more than at ease: at home. Arthur fancied that he was especially well suited to that. Perhaps he didn't have the knowledge of the other tour guides, either the old hands who knew every piece in the collection or the art students eager as kittens, but the visitors never looked at him with glazed eyes, or nodded along so he wouldn't think they were stupid. This was art, to Arthur: an intimacy like the artist's heart beating against yours. He liked to think that, though not an artist himself, he embodied that spirit. He liked to think that's why they called him Arthur, Artie, Art.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• Architecture by Clive Wilmer. Clive died last year; this is his final collection, published posthumously. He was a fine poet and a generous teacher and much more besides, and I'm grateful that he left us these poems.
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny), which, thanks to a couple of long train journeys, is making its last appearance in this section. It's telling that, after 1200 pages and innumerable diversions, I'm tempted to pick this back up and read it all again. A remarkable novel.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: The Last Two Stars

When night fell I looked up at the glow of the sky and tried to find the hole punched in it. I imagined I might see a little patch of darkness, the kind the whole night used to be stitched from. I imagined I might see a star peeking through, and that would make three. Three bright steady stars amidst the haze and the frenzy. Wouldn't that be a sight to see? But the crashed satellite was one pebble taken from a beach. The sky was as full and as empty as ever.

More than a hundred years ago, a bomber came down in that same meadow. We saw photos of it in school, though you couldn't make much out in them. We used to go out sometimes and try to dig bits of it up. Whatever school year you were in, there was always someone a few years above who had found one of the pilot's medals and got rich. The teachers would warn you off, some of them saying there were unexploded bombs, some of them saying if you found a medal it would be a Nazi medal and not worth having. But we knew they'd all been out digging in their turn.

It was the schoolkids who found the body, of course.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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?

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny). Apologies that this section is getting a touch repetitive. This week's reading has brought me to chapters including "Urchin classification" and "Confusion over the letter U", neither of which is adequately represented in the musical.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Of The World

He walked three miles a day in a weighted suit, specially made. Every day he crossed the bridge over the river and imagined falling in, sinking like a murder weapon. But he could wriggle free. He had seen people under water for minutes at a time, slipping out of handcuffs and straitjackets. He was at least as practised at shrugging off his weighted suit. He was at least as practised at resisting the comfort of panic.

When he did shrug it off, at the end of each three-mile walk, he felt himself stretch out taller. He had read that this happens to astronauts, relieved of the weight of the world. He had overheard people talking about him, that man in the weight suit, not recognising him out of it. But out of it was how he lived most of his life. And out of it, he floated.

⁂

"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.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• "The Jejune Cruise" by Kristopher Jansma, this month's One Story. A fun, charming story, with a strong, clear voice: I almost gave up on it after being irritated by the first page or two, but it is in part the story of its narrator becoming less irritating.
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny). One of Denny's slightly odd choices in this edition is to remove a couple of books and stick them in appendices on the basis that they do nothing to advance the story. I'm not sure that cutting 12 pages does much to pick up the pace of Part 3, or that his suggestion that Hugo could only have left it in for "purely personal reasons" is terribly convincing. But we must allow artists their idiosyncrasies, whether it be going off on a tangent about convents or snipping that tangent out.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Widdershins

She was woken by the rising sun streaming through her window. Her bedroom was at the wrong side of the house for that. It meant that either the turning of the earth or the turning of the time had got itself turned backwards. Neither was convenient. She creaked out of the bed and let herself out into the garden.

It was spring, and everything was holding its breath. On days like this the world could change in half an hour, and so she sat on her smooth oak chair and watched it. It was not a matter of waiting, because the change was always there. It was a matter of settling into it, until she could feel the current of time, whichever way it was flowing.

A bud began to open; a slender branch reached a little further to the sky; a creature with iridescent wings emerged from its pinprick egg. The time was right and the sun was wrong. A shame that it had happened overnight: it would have been something to watch the sun go back on itself in the heavens, like it had forgotten its coat. She wondered about the people half a world away who had seen it. She hoped they had not been too afraid.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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?

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny). Normally I like to have a couple of books on the go at a time, in different forms or genres, but when a novel will occasionally interrupt the narrative to, for example, walk you through the entire Battle of Waterloo, it hardly seems necessary.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Lungs, Larynx, Lips

The first time I heard my sister’s voice come out of that thing, I cried and I couldn’t say why. It was the most natural thing in the world to cry at hearing her again. It was the most natural thing to cry at my baby sister being worked like a ventriloquist’s dummy. One of those things had me crying and I still can’t tell you which.

Joan hasn’t spoken in two years. It hurts me, because she used to talk to everyone. If I were robbed of speech by a bleed on the brain, I’d call that a good excuse. But Joan got all the words that passed me by. She hated foreign holidays because she couldn’t bear not being fluent. And now she’s in there, all on her own. They say she hears us but she can’t understand; that her lips and her tongue and her breath all work but language, the whole structure of it, is gone. And sometimes I wonder: why doesn’t she even try, why does she just sit there in silence? But I try not to wonder that, because the only reason I can think of is that she knows. She knows that now there’s nobody on the planet who speaks her language now.

So it’s hard for me to see her silent. But I know it must be harder for Tony. Admittedly, he’s never been much of one for the wisdom of his elders, but for your mum to be there and never speak to you—well, it’s unbearable even if you never listened to her. Everyone else talks to her like you talk to a goldfish, or a houseplant, or a grave. I talk to her like I used to at night when we were girls, when I knew she was already asleep. But Tony talks to her like she’s going to answer, every time.

And now she does, and he’s happy. He bought this little gadget that fastens to her top like a brooch, and it talks in her voice, and it calls me “Beely” instead of “Amelia” like only she ever has. It tells us it’s feeling happy or sleepy or tired but never scared. Tony fixed it on her and he started asking all these questions, about the house where he grew up and the music she likes and the time we all went to Dublin together, and it answered them all like it was her, and I thought: “If that’s your mum, why are you showing her off like a kid with a new toy?” But I didn’t say it, because just for once he didn’t look frightened.

He tells me it’s built up out of all her old letters and recordings and diaries and emails and texts, and it can look around at us and at her and work out exactly what she would say. And sure enough, it asks for food just when I think she’s getting hungry, and when I repeated one of her old jokes it jumped in and gave the punchline. I could almost believe it. I’ve seen so many things now that I thought were impossible. But there’s another language that Joan still speaks, even if Tony doesn’t. The language of the eyes.

I’d never say I’m closer to Joan than Tony is, but nobody really knows their own parents. Not if they’re decent parents. Sisters see everything. So I can look in Joan’s eyes and it’s like we’re talking. I could do it when we were young and I can do it now. The eyes might be a little yellower but the language is the same. That’s how I know when she’s hungry or cold, when she wants music or quiet, when she needs me there and when she needs me gone. We used to talk for hours, me with my words, her with her eyes. Until she fell asleep, sometimes, and I just kept talking, like when we were girls. Now that little thing talks back, and her eyes can’t get a word in except for “stop it, stop it, stop”. But if I take it off her, Tony’s phone will buzz and he’ll send an ambulance.

endless endless twisting in here in me, can’t thoughts feelings into a one without it, got him my boy bluff as ever leaping in he never and I he never does, Beely does it all wouldn’t want him to looks at me wanting what I can’t while she but it doesn’t everything at once I hear them but it’s the same mess twisting Beely looks and says I know and he bad tooth hope it gets now I hear this thing too his make believe tongue sounding like I am and better pretend if needs she looks but doesn’t stop it stop

I worry about Tony. He’s stopped telling me when he’s visiting. He says his mum already knows and she can tell me. After he’s been with her he doesn’t talk to me, won’t tell me how she was or if she’s eaten or been to the toilet. He says I can talk to her myself now.

Worrying about him wasn’t supposed to be my job. I was supposed to be the fun spinster aunt, all the good times with none of the responsibility, the one he could always talk to because I wasn’t anyone’s mum. After that, I wasn’t meant to worry about him because we were both busy worrying about Joan. That’s what made the worry bearable: sharing it. Now he’s not worried any more. I have to worry about both of them, and I’m all on my own.

I wish I could take that little brooch off my sister so I could scream at it without her hearing. I wish I could shout so loud that spit flies from my mouth. I wish I could tell it what my life looks like now until I heard her voice say she was sorry. I want to find out if they made it so it can sob.

Instead I’ll make her chicken pasta like I do every Thursday, and like every Thursday she won’t eat it. She never eats it, but it upsets her if I don’t make it. I think she remembers that it used to be her favourite. The brooch doesn’t understand things like that. It saw her ignore it, so next time it said to me: “Thank you, Beely, but I’m not so keen on that.” And every time it sees her leave the bowl only for me to bring out another the next week, it gets more insistent. “You know I don’t like chicken pasta, Beely.” “Beely, why do you keep bringing me this?” It can’t see the look in her eyes. It doesn’t speak that language. And I can’t explain. I can’t talk to it. I won’t do that to my sister.

leg’s fallen got to move but why did we yellow anyway talks now that I can’t understand tingle paint shouldn’t only I read before yellow and sang but asleep and it’ll hurt water must by the clock drink or void books hurts more the longer you leave it always talked foot nonsense before anyway didn’t then blue I think and how we chose blue get brushes know I know me if only I know me that’s not new move then and I don’t read but I sing more

heard it everyone talking visit go so much can’t need house left too much quiet stop

I’ve decided I’ll show him. I worry it’s cruel of me. He thinks he’s got his mum back. I’d do worse than he has, if I thought that was on offer. But it’s all a trick. When Joan’s husband died, she had a few recordings of him, and she used to sit and talk to them, pausing him so she could speak. The strangest conversations, as she fit herself around the words on the tape. They say grief makes us mad, but I think it’s just so big we have to invent new ways to let it in or keep it out, each of us, every time.

Some of those ways are good and some are harmless and some are poison, and Tony’s way, that little robot voice, that one is poison. It only works because he wants it so badly he pretends. He doesn’t let himself notice the strange melody of her voice, the way she’s always on her best behaviour, like she’s on the phone to the bank. He twists his mum to fit what’s on the tape. He’s going to forget who she is.

So just for once I’m going to be the wicked aunt, the harpy. I’m going to twist him up first. It cost silly money, but now I have it, my own little brooch with my own little robot Tony inside it.

I thought it would be harder. I thought I would need to fake his signature or say he was in a coma or something. All I had to do was tick a box. You can’t even pick up a parcel that easily. I just ticked a box, to say I had the right to use all the materials I was providing, to give them over to this American company forever “for the purpose of training the neural network”. It’s hard to see how anyone can tick a box like that. How anybody can have a right to that. But tick it I did, and sent off every scrap of Tony’s words that I could find so they could pack it into this little box. The only fair way to do it, and not fair at all.

looking for and never when it is he comes under did I already did she it talks but doesn’t ask maybe dropped did I ever if it asks they don’t listen already looked there if foreign bet he’s need a sandwich wee stretch scratch there sounds like me but it’s the same nonsense as the rest of them

“What’s this for?” he asked me when I showed it to him. “A spare?” Shiny silver, his one. I chose the one I thought he’d like. I don’t know why.

“Not a spare,” I said. “This one’s for you.”

“What? To take home? I had been thinking about—”

“To wear. It’s you. Your voice. I had it made.”

He looked at me like he did when he was little and I told him giraffes sometimes get their necks tangled into knots. Like he didn’t believe me, but he couldn’t work out why someone would lie about something so crazy.

“Look, you know I don’t like that thing. You know I think your mum doesn’t like it. And I understand you feel you’ve got her back. I don’t want to take that away from you. But you deserve to know whether it’s real or not, and there’s no way we’re ever going to agree about that, except this.”

“Except what?”

“You wear that, and go in and talk to her. But not you talking. Not with your voice. Through that. If it’s as real as you say then it should feel just the same. Like it’s coming from you.” I fixed the brooch to his shirt pocket with its little magnetic clasp. I’d practised doing it: the magnets hold so tight my old fingers can barely separate them. “From the heart. And if it doesn’t feel like that for you, well, then it’s not like that for Joan either. But if it does, I’ll stop whinging. I’ll accept it. I’ll even talk to it. God knows I’d love to talk to her again.”

He adjusted how it sat on his shirt, like it had to be turned just right to work. Maybe it did, for all I knew. All those little sensors trying to give it something to say. Then he nodded, slowly, and went in to see his mum, without another word.

“Hello, love,” Joan’s brooch said, like it had a hundred times, like Joan had thousands. “Here for anything special?”

“No, mum,” came the voice that was almost Tony’s. “Just popped in to say I love you.”

And as the conversation continued, he turned to me with tears in his eyes, and said, that’s it, that’s it, that’s exactly what I wanted to say.

"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.

This week's story perhaps has a little of The Third Policeman in it, but I think it mainly expresses the banal truth that you never seem to get a puncture on a day that is otherwise going really well.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• Monumenta by Lara Haworth, an odd little novel, dreamlike while also prominently featuring sequences of dreaming/hallucination, so that its moment of plain, tangible reality are all the more prominent.
• Decolonising the Mind by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Ngũgĩ, who died last year, was a Kenyan novelist. He was imprisoned without trial for his writing, and subsequently chose to stop writing in English and write only in Gikũyũ and Kiswahili. This short, potent book brings together the thinking about language, literature and colonialism that led to that decision.
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny). I tried reading this when I was young and didn't get far; I'm not sure how much that was my age and how much was the translation available in the school library. I'm not entirely sure about this translation, either, but it has the advantage of being the one that I have. Expect to see this one hanging around this section for a few weeks.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: A Bicycle for the Heart

The state of my spirit seemed always to be reflected in the state of my bicycle: a flat tyre on a bad day, clunking gears when I couldn't be other than clumsy, slack brakes when the world was hurtling past me. When the sun shone in my heart the cranks turned smoothly and I could ride with no hands. And so I took to calling my therapist my bike mechanic and my bike mechanic my therapist. It was, at times, confusing, but I think it did me good. I got my bike serviced more often that way, and I took a more practical approach to matters of mental health, knowing that the parts of my mind I cleaned and greased would always need re-cleaning and re-greasing after the winter.

This week marks 500 days of my daily stories, if I have done my working out correctly. Have I run out of ideas? Yes, approximately 500 times. See you tomorrow!

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.”

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• The Discarded by Colin Hamilton, a gift from Christmas 2024 (life imitates art). Each chapter is a précis of an imaginary book removed from circulation in a fictional library. I found it a disorientating read at times: imaginary non-fiction had me unsure what was real. That unstable feeling was a little like walking around the parts of a library covering topics you aren't familiar with. I especially enjoyed a few playful self-referential touches, such as when Hamilton implies that his unusual, experimental novel was written just because it's the only way he could get a poem published.
• The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk. I'm not familiar with Pamuk's novels (yet), but I enjoyed this outline of his ideas of the novel a great deal. Pamuk offers them with a confidence and humility that I found very engaging: I get the sense that he would be a very rewarding person to argue with.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: A Body in Motion

Running away could be easy, after all. It was all a matter of inertia. Use up all your resolve to set going one way, and you would have none left to turn around. A train ticket, a barrier, the rumble of the rails. A press of people moving from terminus to dockside. Now, a queue, moving forward like a heartbeat, and soon a ferry and the cold grey sea between him and home.

And yet his palms were itching. The train had been painted all in company colours, like a cereal box: a promise to take you anywhere. The railway stretched down the landscape like a tether, like a thread in the labyrinth. But the ferry was all thick, sturdy paint on rough metal, paint like the heavy jackets the crew wore, there to keep the salt out, not for fashion. And the sea changed the moment you stepped over it, and would never show a way back.

But here he went, shuffling forward another place in the queue, filling the empty space in front of him, like water rushing in. All the pressure at his back, and the space in front opening up. Like he was being drawn into a syringe. He thought of a school science lesson, the teacher pulling up on the capped syringe, the lukewarm water boiling.

Do take a moment to look at some pictures of puffins. They are a very reliable day-enhancer.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• The Rose Field by Philip Pullman. I'm going to keep my counsel rather than risk spoiling anyone's thirty-year reading journey, but if you have read it and have thoughts, my inbox is open.
• “Colors From Elsewhere” by Rachel Khong, the latest from One Story. I really enjoyed this story, in which familiar ideas collide into something quite new and beautifully rendered.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: The Puffin Guide to Drawing

Marsha was trying to draw puffins. She had come to the island specially with her bag of inexpensive drawing things; arranged to stay all day while the people from the boat tours came and went. The puffins were wonderful things to capture in pencils, she thought: the monochrome of their bodies and the sunshine splash of beaks and feet.

But they wouldn’t come out right. They came out like the puffins she imagined as a girl, like little penguins, a foot and a half tall. Indelicate. They came out as the mascot on the spine of an adventure story, somehow flat and featureless, however much she shaded their little round bellies or softened the wispiness of a stray feather. When she added the things around them to the scene, the rocks and grass and flowers, they still looked the same size. It made the plants look strange, enormous.

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.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

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.

Tuesday

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.

Wednesday

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.

Thursday

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.

Friday

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.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• Seldom Seen by Sarah Ridgard, a novel about family and community and secrets, what it means to keep them and what it means to let them slip. I liked this book a lot, and I hope Ridgard will pop back up with another sometime.
• Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, essential reading for anyone interested in the state of the online world, or indeed the wider economy. Doctorow’s bloggy style is sometimes a little slapdash or digressive, but he makes his case well.
• Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, my book club's Imbolc pick. A painful, powerful collection about resistance, in which hope and despair seem not opposite but interdependent.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Double Texting

They shared a smile and a wave as he passed her desk on the way out of work. She was on a call and her gestures were small, considerate of the person on the other side of the screen. He mirrored her smallness, considerate of her constraint, or making fun of her, or both. As he waited for the lift he texted: “Hope whoever you’re stuck talking to lets you go soon!” She reacted with a middle finger that changed to crossed fingers a few seconds later, and he smiled again, picturing her fumbling with her phone held just out of frame.

They didn’t message again that evening, and he liked that. It felt easy and secure, to let a fingers-crossed emoji stand for “good night” and “see you tomorrow”. There was a time he looked for reasons to text her, and resented other friends when his phone buzzed from them instead of her. Now there was nothing to fear or test or prove. When her status showed as “online”, it was like sitting in companionable silence. He slept without trying and dreamed unremarkable dreams.

The next day he traded a few words with her in the kitchen, normal stuff about his cat and her son and their similar behavioural issues. In the afternoon meeting she took his side when it seemed nobody would, and he sent a surreptitious “thanks x” under the table. Later, she replied “of course :)”, and he loved that she said it even though she didn’t need to.

That night he sent her a photo of the book he was reading, with the caption “Should I recommend this to you or did you already recommend it to me?”, and she replied “pleeeease don’t recommend any more books I’ve got way too many to read already”, so he said “Tough, I’m officially and formally recommending it”. She sent back an eye-roll emoji accompanying a photo of a pile of books. He laugh-reacted and wrote “Sorry, I don’t make the rules” and closed the chat without looking at the titles on the spines.

The next day she wasn’t at her desk and he messaged to say he hoped she was OK. She wrote back a little too quickly and put three hearts at the end to show she appreciated his concern, and that annoyed him. So he opened up his archived chats and found the conversation with the other woman and told her what she had done wrong, and the other woman quickly replied to apologise and promise that it wouldn’t happen again. After that he felt a little ashamed of how he had reacted, but he wasn’t sure it was appropriate to say sorry to the other woman to make himself feel better, so he just deleted the message with the hearts. She didn’t come in for the rest of the day, and they didn’t text each other either.

The silence kept up for a few days longer, although she returned to work and they exchanged a few words there. It wasn’t that he was angry, and if he was angry, it was with the other woman. But the easy trust between him and her was missing, just for now. When he thought about texting her, he thought about what she might be doing at that moment, whether it was an appropriate time, if she would think it was weird, the nervous way he did with everyone else. On the fourth day, she sent a photo: her and her son posing with an alpaca, and he responded, face with hearts for eyes, but as he did so he noticed the picture’s Instagram squareness and wondered why she would send this to him, who had never met her son. For a time, small smiles in the office marked the boundary of their relationship, the way they always had before.

These were painful days for him. He remembered dreaming as a child that he was setting off on holiday, before waking and trudging to school. He hoped that somebody would notice he was down and ask him about it, though he had nothing to say if they did. He ate an entire box of chocolate breakfast cereal and tried several times to read a book. Once, he had broken a tooth, and for a while it hurt so much if he chewed on that side that he would almost faint. But it wasn’t the pain he couldn’t bear: it was the need to avoid it so carefully every time he ate. The thinking so much about something that ought to need no thought at all. This felt like that.

The thaw came, as it always did, from a moment’s forgetting. Just long enough to send her a photo of the cat without thinking: the one thoughtless step it took to fall back into another reality. From there, they could pick back up as though nothing had ever happened. And when they did, he found he could write to the other woman too, in the oblique style he had always favoured, like the other woman was a friendly ear helping him figure things out. “It’s weird how she doesn’t talk about her husband. It’s like she thinks I’m into her and she doesn’t want to upset me. It’s almost like she feels scared of me sometimes. I wish she felt more comfortable talking about him. What do you think?” A few days later, she mentioned a cake her husband had made, just in passing.

There were times, during those painful periods where the dream slipped, that he wondered whether he and the other woman could be true friends instead, one day. But then things went back to normal, and he remembered how much better normal was.

On her birthday he sent her two happy birthdays, one in the work group chat, one just to her. Then he copied the one that was just to her and scrolled down the list of chats until he found her name again. It was a different contact photo, her with a false moustache and an exaggerated frown, and it hurt him to see it but he made himself look a moment longer than he thought he could stand. When he opened the chat there were nearly as many datestamps as messages, all months apart: functional exchanges about moved meetings and forgotten laptop chargers, and that one brief conversation about a film she recommended. That had been two years ago. He pasted his birthday greeting into the message box, looked at the photo again, and closed the app without pressing send.

On a busy day in November, he returned to his desk with a cup of coffee and saw he hadn’t locked his computer. On one screen, his email, doubtless in breach of the data security procedures nobody followed. On the other, WhatsApp Web, open to an innocuous group chat but with her name next in the chats list. Her name, with the wrong photo and the first words of a message she had never sent him. He closed it with such adrenaline speed that afterwards he wasn’t sure he had really seen it. But the churning in his guts, the itching in his throat, told him he had. He slipped into his chair and started clicking around his emails, giving his shaking hands a reason to move, reading each subject line in turn to steady his breathing.

He was split in two: one of him convinced that she had seen it, or that someone had; the other assured that nobody looks that closely at their colleagues’ screens, that he hadn’t been gone long, that nobody was interested enough in him to snoop on his messages. And there she was, across the office, looking perfectly relaxed, not even glancing his way, not pulling aside her manager for a private meeting or on the phone to HR.

He calmed, slowly. His confident self was winning out. To be discovered was impossible, because the discovery was unimaginable. This thing he had done was so absurd as to be beyond suspicion. His breath settled and the world began to open around him again. He changed her surname in his contacts, sent the other woman a photo of a stranger scavenged from Google Images, and ten minutes later he left his desk again, WhatsApp Web on full display so that prying eyes could realise their mistake.

That night he wanted to text her. He felt scared and shamed and alone and he just wanted his friend. But when he opened up his phone and saw that new name and that stranger’s face, he felt more scared and more shamed and more alone. And this time, he knew there might be no thaw. They might stay like this forever, as she drifted down his list of recent chats until she sank out of sight. And he would keep paying the other woman, every month, no longer buying an illusion but only the hope of one.

He began to wish that she had seen it. To be discovered, to be humiliated and fired and shunned, that would at least have some solidity. Perhaps he should confess. But no, confession would be cowardly. Dragging her into the mess he had made of himself. She would be upset, afraid, revolted. Keeping his secret was the one good thing he had ever done. He would stay hidden, to spare her from seeing him.

The winter passed slowly at first. He supposed he had always known the way a thing’s absence could take up so much more space than the thing itself, but he had never felt it like this. Though he knew how it would look, he had never thought her a big part of his life. It was a silly thing, really, just to make the days a little easier. The other woman had told him it didn’t seem strange to her, that everyone needed this kind of connection to survive and if you weren’t getting it the usual way it was only natural to seek it out. He had never tried to make her a lover, or a best friend. Just a friend. Some days he hadn’t even thought of her. Now he thought of her every moment, like she had barbs to tear him open on the way out.

Jammed in with his obnoxious family, he just wanted to wish her a merry Christmas. He even took out his phone to do it. But she wasn’t there any more, just the imaginary person he had created to hide her. He could have her back, he knew. He could message the other woman, and the other woman would change the picture straight away and reassure him that it was all OK and he wasn’t hurting anyone. She would wish him a merry Christmas back, and a happy new year, and put just the right emoji after “see you next year!” to make him feel like she was really looking forward to it. But it was Christmas Day. He couldn’t ask all that of the other woman on Christmas Day.

On the 29th of December he tried to write her a letter. He hadn’t written a letter for fifteen years, but there was some old writing paper in a drawer at his mother’s house and one of the pens on the kitchen counter worked. He wrote “I’m sorry” and stopped. He didn’t know what came next, and it felt like there were eyes over his shoulder. He looked at the writing and found he couldn’t read it: it was tight and small, written the way a child says sorry, too quietly to hear. He wrote it again, in bigger letters, then bigger again and bigger again, then he folded the paper over before anyone could see it and took it down the road to a public bin.

When the year turned, he texted her “Happy new year x” and blocked her number. He sent the other woman a thousand pounds, cancelled his standing order, and blocked her too.

By April he felt much better. They still exchanged their little smiles and pleasantries, but it didn’t seem to matter so much now. Before there had always been an idea of more, something he grasped for and never reached. Now he knew what less felt like. Whether they were friends of acquaintances or colleagues, it was a little shred of warmth snatched back from the emptiness. And yet he felt it would be the same even without what little relationship they had, even if they never saw each other again: there was a warmth that came just from knowing that the world had people like her in it. He was trying to bring that feeling to everyone, now, without asking for anything else.

Early in June, they were talking in the office kitchen about something inconsequential when she picked up her mug, and smiled, and spoke a little strangely, like it was rehearsed.

“Hey, so,” Annie said, “we’re having a barbecue at the weekend. You should come. It’s nothing fancy, no special occasion or anything, just, you know, burgers and beers in the back garden. But it would be really nice to have you there.”

And he smiled back, and he thanked her, and he made his excuses. As he walked back to his desk, he thought he felt his phone buzz.

With my new gadget, I have prepared for you another story about a sad boy near a tree. I didn't do this on purpose and I will try to write about something different next week, although I can make no promises.

This week's daily stories

Monday

The city was unchanged, although it had been twenty years since he walked there. The same signs on the same buildings; the same fashions in the same shops. On the steps of the station he saw the coffee he had spilled running for the train. He looked at his hands, and at his face reflected in a window pane, and all the change fell upon them at once.

Tuesday

By the time they discovered what I had stolen, I had the redundancy money out in cash and I was well beyond their reach. It was a good payout, ex gratia, as they say, which means “don’t ask any awkward questions”. Nothing like what the other lot would pay for what I stole, of course. But I didn’t sell it. I kept it under my bed, and imagined them all squirming to help me off to sleep.

Wednesday

After my fall, a little crowd gathered. Someone helped me stand and someone laughed. Someone brought me a cup of tea and someone picked my pocket. There were streaks in my eyes and blood in my mouth and I couldn’t tell who was holding me up and who had knocked me down. Sometimes I think of falling again: falling carefully, so I can see is who. Instead, I try to help people up.

Thursday

I began to look thinner in the mirror. I told myself I shouldn’t worry, but that just gave me two things to hate myself for. The next week I saw my reflection’s fingernails: smooth, unbitten. Manicured? He began dressing better than me, and his wrist grew a big silver watch that needed winding. I couldn’t look him in the eye any more: he was so much taller, just from standing straight, I wound up looking up his nose. So I stopped looking altogether. A few weeks later I came face to face with him in a lift. He was thinner than ever, and slumped, and ragged, and his eyes stared blankly ahead. I reached out to touch him, and felt cold, smooth glass.

Friday

She came back as a beetle, tough and iridescent, and something in her remembered what it had been like before. She set out for revenge. He marvelled at all her colours, and when he reached to her she bit him. But that was not revenge. Revenge she found under his boot. He stamped and stamped, like a child with no pudding. When he was done she sauntered away, as hard and as beautiful as ever, and left him to suck his swelling finger.

Saturday

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.

Sunday

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.

I have been reading...

• The Secret Commonwealth by Phillip Pullman. What with one thing (the birth of my son) and another (a global pandemic) it took me a long time to get round to this, but I was reminded of it at the weekend by friends rereading it before The Rose Field. I'm glad I waited: there is much in this novel that speaks to me more now than it would have in 2019.
• The Ones Who Flew The Nest, a short anthology from Fly on the Wall Press. This caught my eye for its first story, Katie Hale's “You Can Let Yourself Be Swept Away or Else Become the Flood”, in which “a young woman falls in love with a Goose and grows wings”: I recently wrote a story (which you haven't seen yet) about transforming into a goose for love. I'm grateful the coincidence took me here: all four stories are very fine.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: A Felling

The boy was sitting still now, and Steven was worried he would get cold. That was how kids were. Running around refusing their coats, and then, bam, it all came over them at once and they started whinging as though it was anybody’s fault but their own. The boy gave a sniff, unnaturally long and deep to Steven’s mind. Like he was gearing up to scream.

He didn’t scream. He just looked up at Steven, and said, “This is taking ages.”

Steven drained his can and crushed it in his hand, just enough to show it was empty. He put it with the others. Should be bagging them up as I go, he thought. If we have to run there won’t be time, and then we’d be littering. And there’d be fingerprints. Should be bagging them up as I go. Shouldn’t be drinking at all. Shouldn’t be here.

“Come back on your own if you want,” Steven said. He regretted it straight away, the way he usually did when he spoke to children. For one thing, he really thought the boy might do it. “Look, I’ve got to think about the best way to do this. You don’t want to end up underneath, do you?”

“I could go and stand over there,” the boy said, pointing off into the dark.

“Well, I don’t want to end up underneath it either. So just let me think.”

This week's daily stories

Monday

Under the ice, he had two moments of certainty. The first came when the panic was about to overwhelm him, and he knew that if he let it go then he would live. The second came when he tasted the cold in his throat, and he knew that he would die. When a hand grasped his collar and pulled, he didn’t know anything at all. He thought some creature had a tentacle around his throat. He thrashed and bit with the little strength he had left, until he was on his knees on the frozen lake, unsure if he was gasping air or water.

Tuesday

Orla watered his plants while he was on holiday, because he had asked and she was nosy. She looked in everything: the books on his shelves, the post on his doormat, the way he rolled his socks. It was a kind of power, like knowing his true name. She didn’t notice that the plants were plastic.

Wednesday

Mr Grey’s summer club cost a pebble to get in. Sometimes the kids painted their pebbles gold or silver, or drew little pictures on them, or wrote messages. But you didn’t have to. It just cost a pebble, found in the park or in the gutter or on someone’s gravel driveway, and if you forgot yours then Mr Grey would give you one to pay with. At the end of the summer we looked back through the window and saw him tipping them out from a great blue bucket, and feeling the weight of them all, and smiling.

Thursday

Something roared and ripped in the return chute, but it was deep enough in the dark that I could pretend ignorance. They were good books, most of them. One I hadn’t read before it came due, and that was a shame. But the system is what it is, and it takes all of us to keep its wheels turning. Soon there will be new books on the library shelves, bright white and filled with pretty words for us.

Friday

Someone set a great flywheel spinning where my heart should be, ready to shake me to pieces if I tried to stop still, ready to tear the fingers from anyone who touched me. You could hear it whirring in quiet moments, a long low groan echoing up my throat. Every task I turned it to just turned it faster, thermodynamics shattering against the force of it. It needed something stronger to slow it: a pair of arms, and a wash of gentleness.

Saturday

Zia trained crows and I trained squirrels, and that's how we kept in touch: his messages dropped on the table where I left pumpkin seeds, mine carried off in little grey paws. Most of our friendship was badmouthing the other's choice of familiar, all in good fun. But after a time, things soured. Our notes grew cold, then angry, then cruel. One morning I caught a squirrel, paper unfurled, scratching away with a stubby bit of pencil. On the fence, a crow laughed, ha ha ha.

Sunday

They will put adverts in, Nell told me. They will put adverts in your electronic eyes that you can’t look away from, and adverts in your brain-chip that you don’t even know are adverts. You will suddenly crave an ice-cold Coca Cola, and it will feel like it comes from you. I knew all this. I knew it would be much worse than she thought. But it was that or dying.

I have been reading...

• The Book of Manchester, edited by David Sue, an anthology of short stories by Manchester writers from Comma Press. There's a real variety of stories in this anthology, all distinctly Mancunian, and while the cover bears the tagline "A city in short fiction" it rightly doesn't try to be definitive or comprehensive. I especially enjoyed “Getting Home” by Peter Kalu and “Occupy Manctopia” by Mish Green.
• Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Glück, a wonderful collection of poems, lucid in their language but with great complexity beneath, like cut glass.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

This week’s story: Catching Helicopters

Joey has been fizzing all week about going to the park. It made us feel we are bad parents. It is the first weekend after a cold, wet half term when he didn’t see anyone younger than his cousin Mick, who works behind the counter at Screwfix and is experimenting with a moustache. No wonder the park with his friends looked like Glastonbury. We should have given him a better holiday. But now Saturday has come, and we meet by the big sycamores, and half a minute later he is crying in that funny way of his, where he pretends not to.

I click the lid shut on my travel mug and go over to squat down next to him. I always do this, to come down level with him, but then I realise that my ankles can't take it. I have to drop on my arse and hope there's something nearby that I can pull myself up with. Today the ground isn't as dry as it seemed, and I can feel dark water leaching into my trousers. I try to put it from my mind, and ask Joey what the matter is.

It was in the classroom that it happened, when they were copying out sentences to practise their handwriting. All that imagination, capped off and pressurized, ready to whistle out of any hole that came. The frog put his best hat on. “Joey, you want to come to the park and catch helicopters?” It was a good word, helicopters, lots of those ascenders and descenders they were practising. The sentence could have been Joey and his friends catch helicopters in the park, and instead of a picture of frog wearing a top hat, there would have been a picture of them all grabbing at falling sycamore seeds, and Joey would have understood. But the lesson wasn't made for things like that. Just for straight, careful handwriting in straight, careful rows.