Daily Story

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

"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&

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

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,

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.

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

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

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

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.

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