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.

⁂

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.

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.

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.

This week's daily stories

Monday

By the time her postcard arrived, my house had already burned down. The postie left it on the ash pile where the front door used to be, along with the bills, and a note saying “We tried to deliver your parcel but you were out”. A pint of milk sat nearby on the cracked doorstep. When I stopped by to collect it all, a man came up to me. He said he was sorry to interrupt, but how much did I know about Battersea Dogs & Cats Home? I told him it wasn’t a good time. He said that was fine, and asked if he could use my toilet.

Tuesday

In the dream I am in an exam I haven’t prepared for. The usual thing, old anxieties standing in for new. I’m wise to it now, even asleep. At some point, I remember that my schooldays are over, and I fold the paper into an aeroplane, or pull the fire alarm, or just wake up. This time I take the third option. I wake in a cheap plastic chair at a square little table. I have dribbled on the exam paper a little. There are ten minutes left.

Wednesday

All my life I have been frightened of the stars going out. I suppose I must have seen it on the television when I was small. But now there are a thousand more stars in the sky, and the night is more beautiful than ever. When I stand underneath it I think this ought to frighten me even more. But I can never feel it.

Thursday

Clara and Tom had a wishing-well in their back garden, only there was no hole. It hadn’t been filled in, either. It was never there. They got their handyman to come and build a wall and a roof and a crank, and they hung an old bucket from it with a new rope. Turn the handle, and you can hear the bucket go donk on the clay. How can it be a wishing well, I asked them, when it’s not even a well? But I suppose they know better than me. They get everything they wish for.

Friday

It made him a laughing stock, that book. It would be one thing if nobody had read it, but you see it all over. In charity shops, in remainder bins, next to gurning faces on YouTube. And there I am, trapped in the dedication. Without whom this book couldn’t have never been written. The only gift he ever gave me.

Saturday

On a still night, I can hear them singing from my doorstep. For a week I thought it was my imagination. For a month I thought it was next door's radio. Now I know it's them, just over the lake, singing together for the joy of it. I could take a stroll and hear them up close. I could join them, if I asked. But it is more beautiful this way, drifting over the silent water.

Sunday

They told her she should take up painting, for the stress. She painted the new moon, the bottom of a mineshaft, the inside of an oyster. They said she might at least try to take it seriously. She said: there is the pearl, the gold, a world all bathed in earthshine.

I have been reading...

• The New Tribe by Buchi Emecheta. I'm always struck by Emecheta's very matter-of-fact style. There's a lot in it that dispensers of writing advice would object to: she tells instead of showing, plays loose with points of view, and drops vertiginous quantities of exposition in a sentence or two. But she does it with such elegance, and such a keen understanding of the human heart, that it feels not clumsy but truthful.
• Various books and papers on alienation, technology, and education. I will spare you the full bibliography.

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: Passenger

If he had given me time to think, I might not have taken the deal. One cannot choose soundly under pressure. I see it in everyone, so at least I cannot blame myself. I am sure that half the world would take it too. I gave up my own body, burnt up like flash paper, and in exchange I flit between the bodies and minds of others. When I am settled in a person, I see and feel and know as they do, but I may not influence them. I will live as long as their are minds to live in, but as a passenger. I may look, but never touch.

It is a strange thing, to inhabit a person, to feel all that they feel, to know the thoughts that provoke them to action, and then to watch their body do a thing wholly alien to you, a thing you are sure you would never have chosen. Once I was a boy who caught a mouse in his hands, and I thought: how wonderful, to be so small and feel a smaller heartbeat against our skin. I remembered all the gentleness of my youth, just as the boy threw the mouse into the canal. Yes, it is strange. But as I grow settled in it, I find it is not so different to how I inhabited my own life. Perhaps we are all along for the ride.

This week's daily stories

Monday

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

Tuesday

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

Wednesday

Gracie bought me a hot air balloon ride, three hours in a little basket in the sky. I thought there would be other people there, but it was just me and the pilot, and he jumped out a few metres up. I saw him scamper away, getting smaller and smaller. By morning, I was in a new world, with colours I had never seen before. I sent Gracie a postcard, so she could see them too.

Thursday

Carstone said that they could never try him, for he had not twelve peers in all of England. He was right, of course. They held him on remand while twenty-four boys (doubled up in case of accidents) could be raised up to his degree of privilege and sunk down to his level of wickedness. When they were men, they sent Carstone to the rope with laughter on their lips. The nation laughed too, at how we had outwitted him. But on the scaffold, he smiled to see two dozen fresh Carstones loosed upon the world.

Friday

The first day back at the factory was like any other, stamping out thousands of blank brass scoppets. But now I was wondering where all the brass came from, and where all those scoppets went, and how they were cut and what they were used for. I had never used a scoppet myself, nor seen one used: not one of ours, nor one from any other manufacturer. When the bell went, I followed a cart of scoppets out through the back doors. The men pushed it across a rough yard to other workshed. Coming the other way was a load of fresh brass sheets. I set the worn face of my hammer in the palm of my hand. I had earned enough to buy a salve for my aching shoulder.

Saturday

It was just a snatch, overheard as he passed: “That guy Jamie really butters my crumpets.” That had to be good, didn’t it? It’s the butter that makes the crumpet. But it hadn’t sounded good. It had sounded like “that guy Jamie really grinds my gears”, or “that guy Jamie really gets up my nose”. And didn’t those seem more likely? You couldn’t trust words. People didn’t think about what they were saying. Still, Jamie thought, it’s nice to be noticed.

Sunday

When they chained the sea-thing we all knew it wouldn't hold. A flick of its great winding limbs would break the chains, or else the foulness it exuded would slip it free or eat the links away. It would roar and drive men mad until they loosed it and offered themselves as the first to be devoured. But we were wrong. It sank to the seafloor with the weight of all that iron, and there it lay, whimpering. We watched it there, until it was gone. And that was the end of us.

I have been reading...

• Since it's the new year, I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in J.R.R. Tolkein's translation. I've never read this version in full before, only used it as a study aid, but after slogging through Never Again I thought I didn't think my brain was in any condition for reading Middle English. We often feel pressure to hold ourselves to excessively high standards in the new year: Gawain offers us another way of doing things (immediately fucking up so that we have something to look back on when we get too full of ourselves).
• Birds Knit My Ribs Together by Phil Barnett. This is a beautiful collection that achieves a unity between writer and subject that I think is rare in nature writing. The distinction between humankind and nature is often challenged, but in these poems the distinction simply isn't there. Which lets the birds soar off the page, and makes the poems feel as natural as birdsong.
• 'We Are Sorry For Your Suffering' by Joy Deva Baglio at One Story. I couldn't quite get on with the mechanics of this story. It presents a global AI that is established enough to take control of the world but has seemingly never been applied to care work, and it shies away from the enormity of the genocide the story is built on. But perhaps a story narrated by an AI should be this kind of uncanny. I'm drawn to a reading of this story in which the narrator isn't sentient at all.

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: Hyphae

At the bottom of the bank, the pruned branches piled against the railway fence, and the rain soaked through them, and the mushrooms grew. It was an odd sort of place, seen by many but visited by none. People looked through the windows of passing trains and saw that great bloom, white and grey and a little pink, like clouds at the beginning of sunset. It was mostly children who saw, and adults who hadn't charged their phones, and people sad enough to stare and stare. Not enough people to notice that these were mushrooms never sighted before. They were not in the spotter's guides or the mycology journals. They were only in the rotting branches and the wet earth.

(Or perhaps not they, but it, for it was one connected thing, underneath. What greater being below the surface are we the fruiting bodies of?)

At the top of the bank, Jane thought about the scramble. A lazy zigzag would be best, carving up the gradient, stringing it out long, like that old trick where you cut a hole in a postcard big enough to step through. A long walk through the woods to end up just a few metres from where you started. You could pretend it was magic. Or she could hurl herself straight down, perpendicular to crest and fence and railway line, grabbing at breaking branches to slow her tumble. She could burst through a hole in the fence and out in front of a speeding train, be strung out long by it, opened up like a postcard. She set her back to the sky and walked forward. What use was there now for caution?

She hit the fence at a run, bounced, dropped into a cloud of spores. She lay still. The mushrooms beneath her torso were already flattened, but her limbs rested softly on others. She did not want to shift her weight and crush their delicate bodies. She breathed in deep, air that tasted grey, like it should disgust her. Her shoulders and her hamstrings began to ache and twitch. It was infuriating. The mushrooms could keep still. Why couldn't she?

When she could bear it no more she lifted her knees to her chest and rolled up into a squat. Around her the earth was so covered in mushrooms that it was difficult to see them: like the brushstrokes of a painting, like the illusion that covers the real. She reached out a plucked a little piece of the world. It was so light. Were living things supposed to be so light? She thought of all the life of the world pressing down on it, the way she was, and these pale little caps floating up to somewhere better. The smooth flesh she could tear with her fingertips. Then she thought of the mass below the surface, wet and heavy like tar.

She ran a finger around the gills below the cap, feeling them flutter against her skin, wondering what it felt like for the mushroom. She could not see the fine dust on her finger: just a dulling of her skin, a softening of the ridges. She rubbed her finger on her gums, her eyes, her nose. She sniffed the promise of it deep into the back of her throat. She picked another mushroom and another, and kept doing it until she was filled. Then she let herself lie back on the delicate carpet, knowing she would float right on its delicate tips.

A train heaved past, so fast the mushrooms shook. She had forgotten. She rubbed a little of their potency in her ears, too, but not too much. She needed her balance to see her safely up the bank again.

At home the dehydrator sat on the counter, unboxed but still wrapped in its loose plastic bag, the power cable tied up in loops. Jane felt it looming behind her, unnaturally black, unnaturally shiny. She hadn't known what she needed, such a short time ago. She had driven it home in the passenger seat like a friend. But it was a killing thing, a thing for consuming and extracting. It made her think of nuclear experiments, flashes of radiation that killed every bit of you. She would have thrown it away, but she couldn't bear to touch it. A time would come when she could face it, when it would be nothing to her. For now, she set to the business of life.

It had felt wrong to break the stems in the gully, and it felt wrong again to break them off now, but the work of living breaks things sometimes. Now and then as she went along she bent back her little fingers, alternating left and right, though she hadn't the will to push them all the way, not yet. She lay the stems in a little bowl. She had thought she would make tea from them. That was what the hated dehydrator was meant for. But that was the wrong way round.

She set the bare heads down gently on paper, and covered them over with bowls and cups and glasses to keep the life-dust in. This was all they needed. They did not rut like animals or play tricks with sweet fruit or nectar or barbs. They multiplied just by being. A part of Jane wished she didn't know about spores, and could only see the magic of a new thing fruiting like the pattern of it was sounding through the very stuff of the universe. That would have been a truer way to see it. But true is not always useful, and Jane was called to labour.

She turned off the lights, and bathed her swelling hands in cold water, and scattered the mushroom stems on her bed, and slept.

By morning the spore prints looked good, but she had slept more than usual, with long, tendriled dreams, so she didn't have time to attend to them. She took one and folded the paper over carefully, then slipped it into a freezer bag. She placed a few stems in the bottom of her shoes, and left for the office with the paper in her handbag.

The shoes were the same as she had worn yesterday, and on the train she stared at the mud on them. It would flake off on the stairs and the carpets. It would upset the cleaners. But it was good mud, with the stuff of life in it. She picked a little off, and pressed it beneath her fingernails.

At her desk, she itched with emptiness. Everything around her was smooth white and bare metal and electric light. She poked and clicked, lifeless movement through wires, a mockery of the true networks that flesh makes. She pushed out the threads of her fingers and meshed with it, the way they made her, through dead plastic keys. When she pushed them she saw life in the cracks, bits of skin and crumbs of food and a dark little place to grow. She reached below the desk and slid open the little plastic zipper on the freezer bag. It felt evil, now, to have this barrier there, this cruel, impermeable skin over the vitality of things. She slid a finger inside and rubbed it over the paper, then brought it to her face. Nose, eyes, ears, gums. Then, after a moment's thought, the crease of her neck, and under her top to armpit and navel. All the warm, dark places she was supposed to be ashamed of: she knew now that they were what the world needed of her. She felt herself loosen, clean at last. The rest of the day, it was easy to pretend.

That night, she scraped the dust from the papers into boiled, cooled water, then drew it off into syringes. She capped most of them off, but emptied two into a little smoked-glass spritzer bottle. The little water that was left she drank down, letting it dribble over her chin into her lap. It was a waste, she knew. Inside a person is too cruel a place for life. But some day, those vicious human parts of her would have to soften. What if they already had? There might be a new world within her.

She misted herself over before bed, and sprayed the sheets too for good measure. She slept damp and dark and smiling, dreaming of what would grow.

But nothing grew, not then and not for days. She phoned in sick to the office, and they believed it, though she sounded stronger than ever. She ate rough, woody vegetables and tried not to move too much. One afternoon as she returned to bed she saw a shadow of herself, an outline: something growing everywhere she wasn't, and all her body still just her.

She turned the shower up as hot as it would go and scrubbed until her skin was tender. She sucked water up her nostrils and spat it out of her mouth. She soaped her eyes and tongue and she screamed until her lungs emptied. She dried herself all over with the hair dryer until she thought she must have shrunk like a raisin.

Then she dressed in crisp new clothes, hot-washed and tumble-dried, and went back to the railway line. Her booted feet stepped steady down the bank, in a lazy zigzag to string the slope out long. At the bottom, the pruned branches had been cleared, and the mushrooms with them. A shiny new fence pierced the bare ground. The life is still there, below the soil, something whispered to her, but it didn't sound like a promise any more. She sat on the dry earth and pulled the letter from her pocket.

She held it to her heart for a while, and went to chew a fingernail, but she had clipped them down to nothing. After two trains had passed, unheard, she stood. She tore the letter into two curving halves. The first, she folded up tight, and threw through the bars of the fence and onto the railway line. Then she kicked a hole in the earth with the heel of her boot, and pressed the second half into it, and covered it over. As she reached to wipe away a tear, she felt something at the corner of her eye: the thin, delicate stalk of a new life.

This week's daily stories

Monday

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

Tuesday

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

Christmas Eve

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

Christmas Day

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

Boxing Day

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

?????

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

?????

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

I have been reading...

• I finished Never Again, Doug Nufer's novel in which no word is repeated.* I enjoyed many of the ways Nufer tackles his constraint, but found myself disappointed by the setting and plot, which for such a strange book seemed to hew oddly close to the stereotypical fixations of the American male writer (gun violence, crime, sex, motor vehicles etc). On reflection I think that works: this is a story about trying to escape the habitual ("Do anything once; then, best of all, never again") and being sucked back into it. The content suits the form. All in all, though, I don't think I'm cut out for constrained writing. The world imposes enough constraints on us already.
  * Sadly, the word "landlocked" appears on pages 84 and 93, so with regret I will have to throw the book in the bin.
• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. I don't read the backs of books very carefully (or rather, I carefully don't read them very thoroughly), so I was expecting a sort of gently satirical rural mystery. It's more like if Alice in Wonderland started out with a one-legged farmer murdering a man with a spade. Surprises like this are why I take care not to pay too much attention to the backs of books.

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 End of Year Rush

”I started reading it,” Liam protested. “But you know what it’s like this time of year. Everything’s all over the place. And then you go back to work and that’s it, poof, gone out of your head.”

Sally smiled and ruffled his hair, the way she had been doing since he was half her height. “I’m not telling you off, stupid,” she said. “I just think you’ll like it. Read it before you read this one, yeah?”

And this year’s present looked really good. Liam was itching to get into it, in all these unclaimed hours between Christmas and the new year. But his big sister had never grown out of knowing best, so he stared at his bookshelves looking for last Christmas’s book, and when that didn’t work he walked his fingers along the spines so that he couldn’t miss it. It would have helped if he had known what it was called, or who wrote it, or what colour the cover was, or how thick it was. But he would know it when he saw it, he thought.

And so he did, when he saw it in its spot under the bed, carelessly kicked once and gone for a twelvemonth, a little crown of dust and hair making him ashamed two ways. He brushed it down and glanced over the few pages before the bookmark. They had the shadow of familiarity, like being told what you did when you were drunk. No good. Start again. It was the season for it. He pulled out the pagekeeper, wiping things clean with a flourish, the novel’s hero snapping back to that rainy Kyiv street with a dull premonition of how his evening was about to go wrong. Before Liam tucked the press-ganged bookmark into the back cover, he looked it over. A list, written on a torn-off flap from a box of Christmas crackers. Number one: read more.

I was sorry to hear this week that Inner Worlds, a very fine speculative fiction magazine, will be closing after its next issue. All of their previous issues are available to read for free online, so do give them your eyeballs as a farewell gift, and look out for the final issue next year.

See you in the strange mushy period between Christmas and the new year. I will try to remember what day of the week it is, so I know when to post.

This week's daily stories

Monday

A nail half in. A board primed and unpainted. A window open, just to let the air in, with the snow blowing through. Pencil marks on walls and a dust sheet on the floor. A glass, empty but for the fine white residue that clings to it. A radio still playing. A phone long dead. A pair of boots. The earth still moving beneath.

Tuesday

The ghost-hunter had a battered buzzing gadget, a metal thing from the seventies with a chunky handle to support the weight of its huge batteries, and a wand on a coiled wire. He said the tricky thing was calibrating it. The dead are everywhere, you see, so it takes just the right level of sensitivity to find the spirit you’re looking for against the background haunting. He traced the shape of a frail young body in the air, the piezo howling. What do we do now we’ve found it? we asked him. He shrugged, and tucked the wand back in its holder. Just sit, and know she’s there, he said.

Wednesday

The alarm had been ringing for twenty minutes, but nobody knew what it was for. “It has the rhythm of catastrophe,” opined Jeremy, “but not the timbre.” Jenny closed her eyes and raised a finger for quiet. “I heard something like this once before,” she said after half a minute. “I think it was for ‘man overboard’.” We were not at sea, but we thought this got us closer. We decided to take five minutes to write down our ideas. Then we would reconvene and discuss. But it was very hard to think with all that noise going on, and by the time we came back together, it had stopped.

Thursday

A week into the job, I still hadn’t met a person. I was working my way through the induction training: uncanny voiceovers about health and safety and data protection, backed up by questions a block of wood could answer. Automated emails delivered accounts, reassurances, and promises of tasks to come. Then payday came, with payslip but no pay. With no manager to my name, I found the head of HR on the company website and fired off an email. No reply. Looking longer, her photo was uncanny: an emptiness behind the eyes, and not in the way of my last job’s HR manager. I searched her up, and a few other staff, and found nothing. Fake people, fake company, fake job. Lying in the next day, I still felt guilty.

Friday

The pumpkin wouldn’t rot. We had promised Benjamin that it could stay on the step until it started to smell, but it looked better than ever. The scuffs I made trying to get the top off had healed up. It must have been the cold weather.

One day, I left the house to find it glowing in the dark December morning. I looked at it, and it turned towards me, and its horrid little mouth said “Merry Christmas”. My boot went out to kick it away, but I stopped myself. We promised Benjamin.

Saturday

A year later, I made my way to the appointed place. The Green Knight was waiting in the dawn mist, axe in hand. I knelt, and bared my neck, and he struck my head clean off. He posted it that afternoon, Epic Beheading Prank GONE WRONG! Knight Gets Karma After One Year, two million views for my grimacing face, top comment “0:21 this dudes wearing a green gurdel, bet he thought it was magic”. When I returned to Camelot, head in hands, they were all watching it and laughing.

Sunday

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

I have been reading...

I'm still working my way through Never Again. It's not a long book, but it's not easy to read, and I find if I read too much of it at once then Oulipesque eccentricities infect M.T.'s quotidian missives.

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 Solstice

That solstice we beat back the darkness for good. We built up bigger bonfires and gave up all the year's spoils. We tormented our flesh even as we indulged it. The old ways had always been the right ones. We had just been holding too much back.

We didn't know at first. We licked our wounds and ate our meagre rations and the days grew longer the way they always do. I picked snowdrops for Robert and daffodils for Kathyrn and looked forward to long summer days by the lake. I know that the only darkness you can sing out of the world is the darkness in your own heart. I know that. Or I knew it.

Those long days by the lake never came. It was hard to get warm and slow to get dry after dipping, and the sun always set before the best talk started. It was a strange year: it seemed to pass all at once. You forgot whether you were living yesterday or tomorrow or today, and after a while you stopped worrying about it. It made no difference anyhow. The winter came, and we gathered close by our fires, but we burned them low, and in the mild air we soon drifted away from each other.

This week's daily stories

Monday

Danny said a mouldywarp was different to a mole: they were clever like people, and if you left them food they would dig up treasure for you. He was always saying things like that, and always leaving food for vermin, too. And now he’s rich, and he says it’s all because of the mouldywarp king, and I tell him to stop being stupid but he doesn’t care. He just laughs and pays for dinner.

Tuesday

On the way to work your bike skids on the flattened corpse of a pigeon. You saw it in plenty of time, but that didn’t save you: your eyes snagged on the hollow bones, and your wheels followed. As the world flips on its side and you slide along the tarmac, you see the bird kicked up into the air, and then the shattered wings flapping. It pulls left into the sky, and you try to lift your head from the road to follow it, but you are stuck there.

Wednesday

After that Christmas our snowmen stopped coming to life. Coincidence, I said. You can’t fall out so hard it kills the snowmen. It was probably pollution, like every other thing: the changing climate, or the dust from the new road, or the way the LED streetlights flatten the whole world. But there was something else hanging in the air, too, heaviness to hold down something as light as snow. I looked at their gravel eyes and thought: what if they still come to life, and they just can’t move? I thought I knew how that would feel.

Thursday

I went out in the storm in all the old clothes I’d shrunk out of, and my big hat tied tight to my head, and I let it blow me away. Once the wind takes you, everything feels calm: the air and the wind and your little body are all flying around just the same as each other. You look down at the ground and think: thank God I’m not down there, spinning around. It set me down a few miles away, not gentle, but fair. I built a little hut, and waited for the next storm.

Friday

Jenny gave Dave his birthday present in an intricate puzzle box, knowing he would never get around to solving it. But Dave knew how she was: he knew there would be nothing inside. So he solved it the day he got it, ready to fill with treasure and give back to her. Inside were two tickets to the gig that weekend, the one that had sold out before he even saw it. He didn’t mention it, and neither did she. They just met at the venue, and he bought her a drink.

Saturday

I didn’t think school fairs gave goldfish as prizes any more, but apparently this one did. All the parents were holding a fish in a bag, most of them pulling a face to say I don’t really agree with this, but the kids were so excited. The first bag split forty minutes in, and its resident spent the rest of the day in the hook-a-duck tub. More joined, until the golden shimmer was so enchanting that kids started tipping them in on purpose. We made a quiet exit, before we could be asked to help.

Sunday

The continental buffet breakfast was truly unlimited. You turned, or blinked, or just shifted your attention, and all the bread and cheese and meat and pastry was back in place like you had got up early for once. We did what we could, filling bags and touring the city to feed the hungry. We planned how we could do more. But we didn't understand the magic. We didn't even try. We didn't know what unpayable debts we were billing to our rooms.

I have been reading...

• Pity by Andrew McMillan, a novel about three generations of men in Barnsley. This is a very finely-crafted book, intricately patterned beneath its unshowy prose, and revealing beyond its themes of industry and queerness and place without them ever losing focus.
• Never Again by Doug Nufer, a novel where no word is used twice. I've had this on my shelf for more than a decade but it is not what you would call a welcoming book: the cover looks like having a migraine and the text feels like having a stroke. But I had the urge to pick it up at last this week, and it's been interesting feeling my way into Nufer's prose, which is necessarily strange and filled with compounds and puns and other trickery. It's fun the way the mind adapts. In the first sentence Nufer burns through "the", "I", "to" and "a" to open with a pretty normal sentence, and because it's so normal you don't think much of it. After a few chapters, you come across "an" or "she" or "I've" and there's a little spike of excitement. There it goes. Never again. I'm looking forward to finding out what the last word is.

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: Christmas Shopping at the Non-Euclidean Argos

From behind her phone, Em let out a noise like the closing of a rusty portcullis. I kept at the washing up. Best to let it run its course.

"It's in stock," she said.

"Oh, that's good," I said, brightly, like I hadn't noticed anything amiss.

"It's in stock at the Argos in the non-Euclidean shopping centre."

I knew this, because I had looked earlier, but I hadn't said anything because I was trying very hard not to know it any more.

"You know," I said, with a philosophical air, "there was a time before online shopping when we wouldn't have known it was in stock, and there's no way we'd have gone Christmas shopping in the non-Euclidean shopping centre, and we'd have just got him something else and it would have been fine."

"I know," she said, rubbing her face. "But we do have online shopping, and we do know it's in stock, and he'll look me in the eye and ask about it and what will I say?"

I wiped my hands on my trousers, and regretted it instantly. "It's OK," I said. "I'll go." The time for cowardice had passed. Now that there was no choice, it was the time for bravery.

"Are you sure?" she said.

"Of course," I said. "It's no big deal."

"OK. Great. That's all fine then. Great." She pushed out a long, slow breath, her eyes closed, then went and got her phone to place the order, brushing off the paint mark from where it hit the wall.

The non-Euclidean shopping centre was the first and last of its kind, the future of urban planning for a brief year or two, an unscoopable dog turd curled around the town centre in incomprehensible spirals. It was officially the Turner Street Retail Gardens, but that name was all wrong: Turner Street had folded in on itself during construction, and no plants could live there. Everyone called it the non-Euclidean shopping centre, although most of us couldn't explain what that meant, many of us couldn't pronounce it, and the ones who could do both told the rest of us it wasn't strictly correct. It was fun seeing all the different ways the kids spelled it. You couldn't laugh at them for it, though. Not when they were the only ones who could draw a map of the place.

This week's daily stories

Monday

We got one last crop from the garden, those soft white berries that don’t grow anywhere else. I put them in boiling water to take off their thin, bitter skins, then cooked them down to a thick jam. Winter air curled in through the open windows, and I turned my face away from the steam. Afterwards, I scrubbed the pan and the spoon and put them back in their place in the garden shed. I peeled off my gloves and dropped them in the bin. I put the jar at the back of the larder with the others, in case I ever needed it.

Tuesday

The leopard in the library scared people away. There was no pretending otherwise. She stalked the shelves while you were browsing and made it very hard to concentrate. But she had never hurt anyone, and she always had her library card hanging from her collar, and she read and read and read without so much as creasing the pages. So the head librarian said she could stay, and that made me feel safe.

Wednesday

Eventide was a sort of paste, with little crystalline grains suspended in it. You spread it across your eyelids when you went to bed and it kept the dreams off you. Monstrously expensive, but everybody bought it. It was all the more frightening to dream when you were the only one doing it. My mother worked in the Eventide factory, and they would be searched going in and out. The black market got going all the same. Half the time you got the fake stuff, though, and in the end I thought that was even better: you dreamed, but nobody else knew about it.

Thursday

She was a cat by night, and used to wake with the taste of blood in her mouth, but as her fur greyed all that was too much. In those colder, darker nights, when the cat-dreams came she leapt from her own bed and padded over to the box room. In the daytime, her son never mentioned the strange cat that slept on his bed. Perhaps he thought he dreamed it. When they were older, and the cat-dreams no longer came, he said he had held his tongue in case she didn’t let the cat come in any more. She said no, no, no. That could never have happened.

Friday

On the lawn of Safflower House, a unicorn lay sleeping. You could see how it rested on the tips of the grass, barely bending them. It must have weighed little more than a sigh. I wanted nothing more than to go out to it, rest a hand on its nose, feed it from my hand, whisper rhymes into its ear. But nobody else seemed to be paying it much mind. They were busy with talk of places I hadn’t been and people I didn’t know. I watched it through the window, always looking past it like I hadn’t noticed it was there. That’s how I remember it: a blur, an uncertainty. When we came back from dinner, it was gone.

Saturday

When I want to forget a thing I did, I make myself a trophy, and it goes up on my shelf. It sits next to the plaque I got for falling asleep at work, the cup I won for throwing up on my sister’s bridesmaid, the foot-in-mouth shield that gets my name engraved in a new place every few months. On Sundays I take them down and polish them until they sparkle, and I look into the gold and see my face reflected back, smiling.

Sunday

She was on the cover of all the magazines: those obscure trade ones that lie untouched on a coffee table while you wait for a job interview; the fifty-six issue limited runs where you build a model of the Titanic; the smudged-toner zines that are the only things still worth reading. She looked different on all of them, but it was always her. I drew a moustache and glasses on her face with the free pen on the front of Puzzler. Nobody knew who she was.

I have been reading...

• "Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune" by Seena Ahmad, the latest issue of One Story. One Story's gimmick is that they publish one story at a time in a cute little chapbook; I only wish this wasn't unusual enough to be called a gimmick. Thanks for the recommendation to Katherine Montalto, whose poetry capsule machine concept should be less unusual too. Put one on every street corner.
• I enjoyed "Six Stitches and a Scar" by Jane O'Sullivan at Fictive Dream, and it also prompted me to get Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities down from of the shelf where it has been sitting since I bought it. I enjoyed that too, though it wasn't my favourite Calvino; I suspect I am more of a Mr Palomar than a Marco Polo.

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 Pit and the Sky

There’s a hole in the meadow that nobody ever talks about. It’s always been there, and it never fills up with rainwater or dead leaves or rubbish. I’ve never seen anyone chuck anything in it. Nobody even goes near it. God knows I never have. It’s narrow, but not so narrow that a person couldn’t squeeze down it. Bigger than the ones I’ve seen in potholing videos on YouTube. Those make me want to go and stand in a wide open space under a wide open sky for a while. The meadow is the widest, most open space near here, but I don’t go there when I get that feeling, because of the hole.

It’s not that the hole makes me uncomfortable. It’s that if I went near it I think I would climb down into it. That’s the peculiar thing about a claustrophobia like mine: it’s as much a calling as a revulsion. Like people who are scared of pubs because they’ll drink themselves to death if they go through the door. I don’t want to be in a small space because I won’t be able to stop myself crawling further and further in, until the walls have closed in so tight that I can’t crawl out again. I suppose that’s why I started noticing the hole, after years of very carefully not noticing it. You can’t ignore something you want to climb inside.

So, I noticed it, and the next thing I noticed was how everybody else didn’t. And then, how I knew that I mustn’t go near it, mustn’t disturb it, but I didn’t know why. I thought: I can ask Jenny about this. See what she thinks about the hole, or if she thinks about it at all. I can talk to Jenny about anything. But I couldn’t. I physically could not push the words out. My throat closed in like a cave narrowing around me. It was like trying to tell my grandma to fuck off.

Which left only one option. But I couldn’t do it when anybody was around, and there are always people around the meadow. You would have to go at three in the morning to be alone. But who wants to squeeze into a little hole like that in the middle of the night? To not even have sunlight to show you the way out? If your palms don’t sweat thinking about it then there is something very strange going on inside you.

So in the end I took my cheap little head torch and I lowered myself in there in broad daylight on a Tuesday afternoon. The dog walkers ignored me like my grandma pretending she hadn’t heard me tell her to fuck off. Of course they did. I took one last breath of fresh air and slid my head below the ground.

There’s a hole in the meadow that nobody ever talks about, and it’s been on my mind my whole life. I must have tried to get down there a hundred times as a kid. Of course my parents always stopped me, but then we never talked about it afterwards. They never said “that’s dangerous” or “we don’t do that”, they just pulled me away and eventually I got the message. Of course, it didn’t kill my curiosity. But there are so many other things to be curious about, so many bigger worries, and they only get bigger the older you get. So it wasn’t at the front of my thoughts. But it was lingering there, and it was only a matter of time until I acted on it.

It felt a little bit shameful, going over there. I guess the shame that’s put on you as a kid doesn’t go away easily, however silly it might seem as an adult. But I’ve learned in my life that shame is just a signal: it’s up to your thinking brain to choose. So I strode over there, dangled my legs in, and slithered down like it was a water slide. The damp smell of earth.

There’s a hole in the meadow and it’s my favourite place to go. It’s like the world is breaking the rules: a hole like that shouldn’t be there, down into that loamy ground. It certainly shouldn’t have stayed all these years, unfilled and unfenced. Sometimes I feel like that too, an aberration that persists just for the sheer petty fun of it. So we are at home there, me and my hole, and sometimes I whisper a secret to it or drop down some beautiful thing I have found that I think it would like. And I don’t wonder what’s down there because I already know. Everyone does, I think; it’s just that most people feel scared more than they feel excited, which makes a sort of sense, I suppose. I’ve always figured that I’ll go down there when the time feels right. You don’t have to rush when you know something will always be there.

In the end it felt like falling in love with your best friend. That total comfort and calm and trust that seems like it must be all you need, until one day you realise you need more. And if you’re as lucky as I am, there’s no fear or pain or doubt. You just know that everything is going to be OK. And you fall, gracefully, gratefully, below the surface.

There is a hole in the meadow and I am teasing myself with it, feeling the good hurt that comes from not allowing yourself something you really really want and knowing that you will have it, but not yet, not quite yet. The hurt that’s only bearable because you tell yourself it will be over soon, though you have no intention of it really being soon; you intend to stay a little cruel to yourself as long as you can manage. When I’m bored or I can’t sleep or someone just will not stop talking, I think: there is a hole in the meadow, and I am going to climb down there, maybe even tomorrow.

And when the moment finally comes it is more perfect than I ever imagined, that feeling of coming home as my head drops into the dark of the world.

There is a hole in the meadow and I don’t understand why Jenny won’t come down there with me. It’s like she’s afraid. And I know we’ve all heard those stories of caving accidents, of people stuck dangling upside down until their lungs fill with fluid and they drown in the guts of the earth; of breaking legs because it’s the only way to get them around the bend and then never getting them around it anyway; of sudden rain washing a dozen young adventurers out of all known existence. But it’s not some big terrifying cave where a rockfall might seal you in, and it’s not a grasping crevice where you empty your lungs to squeeze in and you never fill them up again. It’s just the hole in the meadow, as ordinary as home, where we belong.

Because it’s Jenny and I can say anything to Jenny I know she doesn’t mind that I keep talking about it. She thinks it’s weird, but she thinks a lot about me is weird. It’s why she likes me. Everyone says. But I don’t like how she acts like I’m joking, like I know it’s a silly idea and my insistence that it’s serious is just part of the act. I know maybe I’d do the same to her, but surely she can see that it hurts me. I don’t mind her making fun of me as long as she takes me seriously while she does it.

All in good fun but a little bit serious too: that’s what we’re doing tonight. Sitting by the hole in the meadow, her sometimes pretending she’s going to flick a cigarette end in, me pretending I think it’s funny, her goading me playfully, saying “Why don’t you just jump in like you always say you’re going to?”, me reminding her I always say she’ll be coming with me, and then my legs are dangling, and I slowly shuffle forwards until there’s nothing below my feet and nothing below my arse, and I grab the hand she’s holding out so she can pull me up but I’m not grabbing it to be pulled up, and as my head goes under I can hear her scream start to echo but I know it will all be OK as soon as she’s down there with me.

There is a hole in the middle of the meadow and Jenny is getting impatient with me about it. She says she doesn’t understand why we would wait. I tell her I get how she feels, really I do, that it’s hard to do or to think about anything else while it’s waiting for us, but that the important things in life cannot be rushed and that we should go when we know it’s right, not just when we want to. And she says she does know, she feels it in the soles of her feet where they meet the earth, and it scares her to think that I don’t. And one day she calls, when she never makes a phone call, when I’m pissed off and headachey trying to fix the gears on my bike, and as I try not to get grease on my phone she says she’s going right now and I can’t say anything to stop her, and I ride with the cable disconnected, struggling stuck in the highest gear, sweating and swearing. But I get there just in time to see her wave and smile as she slips away, and I throw myself after her, grabbing her hand and letting her pull me under, face first.

There’s a tree in the meadow, a lone tree that grows outwards as much as it grows up. Its branches reach out wide and flat, like when you pour molten aluminium down an ants’ nest and dig it up. It’s a good tree to sit in, and I sit there a lot, enjoying the meadow, the quiet belied by birdsong and crickets and rustles in the grass. It makes you feel held, right down to the roots. All it’s missing is someone to sit up there with me.

This week's story is about a magic lamp that, as far as we can tell, does not have a genie in it. It's also, in my view, your best opportunity so far if you have been hoping to get a band name out of my titles.

This week's daily stories

Monday

I took the little box you made me out to the garage, where the wasps build their nests. Such light, papery things they make. It will take them decades to get through it. At the end of each winter I cut down the empty nest and hang it gently from my ceiling. All your beautiful inlaid details, spread out above me. You take up so much space.

Tuesday

The dull dread had drained from his limbs while he slept. It must be in the sheets somewhere: he sprang up to go about washing them. Crisp, fresh linen for a crisp, fresh day. They dried double-quick in the sun, and as he watched the low wind fill them he thought of great sailing ships on a calm blue sea. He wondered where all that fear and misery had come from, but it didn’t do to dwell on it, with a whole wonderful life to be getting on with.

Beneath his feet, unnoticed, the earth began to crack in two.

Wednesday

We had been waiting for the train a very long time. A few of the songs we sang had become favourites: one about the train that would come one day, most about the things we had done while we were waiting. On Saturdays we played a game, throwing coffee cups at the departures boards in three teams. Wednesday was market day, and Sundays were spent in quiet contemplation of the timetable. I fell in love, but it was not to be. At last, the train came, and I found I had bought the wrong ticket.

Thursday

Jenny always joined in with pass-the-parcel, so I wrapped the ring box up in golden paper and made that the big prize in the middle. Haribo friendship rings in some of the layers, just to drop a hint. Of course I checked with her sister and her niece first. I don’t know what happened. The Wi-Fi must have gone down or something. But Jenny wouldn’t let us take it off the kid. I suppose that’s why I love her.

Friday

Lightning struck the spire, then stayed, stretched across the sky like a nerve. On cold days it stretched out taut and thrummed in the wind; on warm days it curled lazily around the sky. Before long we found we were navigating by it, without thinking: it framed our space the way the bells framed our time. And the easiest place to navigate to was the church, so blinding bright inside that you could not step through the doors.

Saturday

I spent forty minutes tucked in the little booth, drawing on my ballot paper with the stubby pencil. Nobody can look at you there. It’s not allowed. They have to leave you alone to make whatever mark you choose. I drew a different thing in every square, six of them ugly and one of them beautiful. Then I folded up my paper and pushed it through the slot into the darkness. Tonight they will unfold it, and they will have to look at it, and make me count.

Sunday

I was worried about the yellowing around my fingernails, a dirty sort of yellow, like I had been smoking all my life. I was worried about the skin cracking at the corner of my mouth, and the taste when I woke, and the way my tongue felt too big by the evening. I was worried about head neck shoulders back stomach hips legs knees ankles feet toes, worried just about being a thing in the world. I was worried that I worried too much. What got me in the end was something quite different.

I have been reading...

How Saints Die by Carmen Marcus. I loved this book. I don't really want to say anything else about it because it's still doing its work on me, so I'll just reiterate: I loved this book, my favourite novel for quite some time.

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: Edith Buchanan's Wonderful Machine

It was a wonderful machine. Light the candle and turn the crank and figures danced on the walls. It had enchanted Edi as a child. It made her want to build things of her own, to learn how to bend metal and light into shapes nobody else had imagined. And so she had: she became very good at it, and made many machines, none quite as wonderful. Which was how she knew that first one must be magic.

How could it cast figures that were brighter than the candle flame? How could they dance so smoothly through those thin slits? Why didn't it work with a lightbulb or a motor? She made another, a perfect replica, matching all the materials and using antique tools. It smeared dim, muddled light on the walls, and rattled as it span. Never quite right. She swapped the parts over one by one, the new becoming old, the old becoming new, but only when the original was completely reassembled did the figures dance again.

Also, Uncertain Stories have a little Q&A with me about my story 'All Seasons Sweet'. I'm grateful to them for not using "Chaucer and Shakespeare are full of it" as a pull quote, and for tolerating my Omelas joke.

This week's daily stories

Monday

The world ended with an eight-week consultation period, which didn’t seem to make much difference. Representatives of the living were selected to sit in meetings with ancient gods and fundamental forces and (just showing its face for five minutes due to a packed schedule) the endless, yawning void. Their contributions were diligently minuted. Most of us were redeployed to other realities. Some of us came out of it quite well, on paper. And you can see why it happened, the way things were going. But still, the morale is gone.

Tuesday

The apprentice came back with tartan paint. Campbell, the tin said. It rolled on beautiful, sharp edges and dead straight. The next day we sent him for sky hooks, and I don't know how we ever worked without them. The day after, he handed Al a left-handed screwdriver, and when Al used it he said it just felt right. He almost had tears in his eyes. We should have left it there, while it was all harmless fun.

Wednesday

He told me he collected butterflies. I imagined a plastic tunnel in his garden with thick, hot air that made you sleepy. I imagined a little glass-fronted box where cocoons hung in rows, and us holding hands as something new emerged and unfurled its wings. I imagined delicate things that he protected, and he showed me drawers and drawers of death.

Thursday

They did free skull-measuring at work, booked out a meeting room for the day, got someone in with all the proper gear. They even sent out little graphics of your results for LinkedIn, really professional. I wasn’t too sure about it, to be honest, but it was really interesting. They said I’ve got an trustworthy brow, and trust has always been so important to me, so you can tell they know what they’re doing. And they said I’ve got a head for leadership. So I’d definitely recommend it.

Friday

but only when— and even if— before we saw— the day after— when she told me— only later did I— by then it was too— they should have known— it felt not sad but—

I shut my mouth, my book, my door, my eyes, and began at the beginning instead.

Saturday

She must have thrown the bouquet so far. It sailed over the guests’ heads, over the hedge, over the horizon. She laughed and flexed her bicep, and there was cheering and laughter. Later, it flew over the opposite wall, looking a little the worse for wear, and slammed into the side of the groom’s head as he was talking to her cousin. Everyone agreed that a thing like that had to mean good luck for the marriage.

Sunday

We sat and watched the paragliders circling above us, and I told her what my brother had told me, about how the geological fault that built the cliffs they sailed from was still moving the landscape today, and the paragliders were the only way to monitor the shifting ground. Halfway through I realised it was a lie, one of those soap bubble lies that survives until you touch it. But she believed it, just as I had, and I let her. So does that make me a liar?

I have been reading...

• Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor, a beautiful little novel of bone-sharp vignettes that hurt the way life does.
• Necrosmologies by Anthony Cartwright, which explores alternative Midlands where industry is powered by dragons and leviathans and moon-rock. A strange book that's most affecting for its throughline of normality: whether fuelled by coal or creature, the machinery of capitalism devours workers much the same.

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: Right Through You

The cold had come to Austport. The people felt it in their feet and their fingers: a pale numbing, and a shying from touch. A chill in the summer sunshine, and seawater warm around their toes. Nobody prayed. The men who walked bare-chested along the waterfront could not imagine the cold creeping up their limbs toward their hearts; the women cursing broken fans in the offices pressed their fingers to their throats to cool them. It was impossible for anyone to believe the cold would take them, though everyone knew it would take some of them.

It took Jakob first. Jakob, who strode into the waves at dawn all year round, who waged snowball war with the kids in his t-shirt, who drank neat gin kept in the freezer. He sat by the pub fireplace as though the memory of a fire could warm him, in a jumper nobody had ever seen before. He had not been to the sea in four days. Even the pleasant breeze on the beach bit him too sharply. But he kept up with the gin, for now. His grandmother had told him it was warming.

It was just Jakob in the armchair, and Violet behind the bar: a quiet night, and those who were in enjoyed the summer air in the beer garden or on the street. "You should go out yourself," Violet told him. "Bask in the sun. It's warmer out than in at the moment."

"You think I'm cold blooded, like a lizard," Jakob said. "I'm not cold blooded. I'm just cold. The sun only warms your skin. The wind goes right through you."

Violet shrugged. She couldn't judge him for his strangeness, when she had a cup of tea clasped in her hands and an ice pack tucked down her top. "You're not shivering, at least," she said.

"You don't shiver with it," Jakob said. It had been two days, and already he was tired of them. Didn't they read? Didn't they listen to the radio? They hadn't a whisper of curiosity between them, not even the ones who kept asking him questions. Them least of all: they asked to show off what they thought they knew already. He pulled his coat tighter around him, and didn't think of himself last week, saying the mistake all these people make is trying to warm themselves, you have to let the body adjust.

The door clattered, and a man Jakob half-recognised came in from the beer garden, pink to the top of his bald head and glistening with sweat. The sheen of his skin and the wobble in his legs from the day's drink made him look half-melted, and Jakob's stiff limbs envied him. He went up to the bar and waved a banknote in greeting. "Two Doom Bar, love," he said.

While Violet busied herself with the glasses, he turned to Jakob. "All right, mate?" he said. "Cold dips finally caught up with you, have they?"

Jakob looked at him, and wished he could shiver. A person shivering looks ill, or in danger. Even this man, with the wide, gloating smile spilling onto his red face, would take pity on him if he was shivering. It would be awful to be pitiable, but better than being blamed. Jakob looked at him, and then back at his gin, and the frost growing across the glass like a fracture.

Violet had poured the beer and taken the money. She was fumbling in the till, trying to make change with ice-dulled fingers. The man frowned at her silently, and rubbed his own hands together. On his way out, he set one of the glasses on a table to put a hand on Jakob's shoulder. "Don't worry, pal," he said. "It won't kill you. It's just forever."

This week's daily stories

Monday

The Incredible Clockwork Boy wouldn’t come out. One too many punters had made a joke about winding him up, and he had stomped off stage as hard as his delicate legs could manage. “Oh, he’s ticked off now,” a voice shouted as he went. He sat in his dressing room, door closed but not locked, and laid a hand over the keyhole in his chest. They key hung on the wall like a brass skull. Such a difficult thing, always to say: “I want to live tomorrow. Please help me.”

Tuesday

The mouse stares at Mike. Mike stares at the mouse. He has seen this play out in movies: a man sat awake in the quiet of the night, connecting for a moment with a little creature that cannot comprehend him but somehow seems to. Usually the man speaks some pithy quip or weary solemnity, but Mike’s mind is blank. He is no better at talking to mice than anyone else. The mouse gives a little squeak, and turns away. Yet again, Mike feels that he is not the hero of the scene.

Wednesday

We used to buy liquorice from the shop up the road, all of us except Mae. We would hang around on the road or in someone’s bedroom pretending we liked it, all of us screwing up our faces as our tongues turned black and Mae shook her head slowly. Later on we bought cigarettes, and then vodka. Mae just kept on buying ten white chocolate mice and a can of Vimto. We all wanted to copy her, but we were scared to do it. We copied each other instead.

Thursday

I won a year’s supply of dog food, which should logically be no dog food, since I don’t have a dog. I expected vouchers, but no: they delivered it in one go. It sat in the hallway, taking up more and less space than I expected, the way every year is longer and shorter than you expect, both at once. I wondered what it would look like if you stacked up all the food I needed for a year, or for a lifetime. I was going to drive it to the rescue centre that afternoon, but instead I made space in the cupboard. I gave it away a meal at a time for twelve months, to shelters and food banks and men on the street you could tell always fed their dogs first. It’s electrifying, to be rich in anything.

Friday

I spent a happy afternoon in the park, following squirrels and digging up their nuts. They are fast, but they are small and stupid, so they cannot stop you. A snick and a flick of the trowel and the treasure is yours. I piled my prizes under a glass bowl, so the squirrels could see what they had lost. Their little paws skittered on the glass. If one dug under I would break its back. We all deserve a chance to be on top.

Saturday

His magic coat grew new embroidery overnight, marking out his accomplishments in threads of green and gold and scarlet. It grew in beauty as he grew in power. Soon his coat was too beautiful to show to his old friends. He took it where it would be appreciated. Where he would be appreciated. The embroidery stopped growing: now she wasn’t there to sit and stitch all night.

Sunday

There were men in the woods with 3D-printed chainmail and LED-tipped wizards’ staves. Eliza watched them from the campsite office: flashes in the trees, and every now and then, a knight or a warlock emerging for a piss or a phonecall or a can of Irn Bru. God, they looked stupid. It was hard not to laugh when they came to pay. But there hadn’t been a monster in the woods since they started coming.

I have been reading...

• It's Not a Cult by Joey Batey. I love Joey Batey's band, The Amazing Devil. His novel has the same mix of melodrama and mundanity as his lyrics, but with more right between the two, as fame and fandom become an unknowable horror and ordinary human connection the only source of hope.
• Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, an interesting, accessible introduction to the science of reading. I'm perplexed by how little thought I had given to how reading actually works in the brain; this book is a great remedy.
• "Love (a journey)" by Laura Besley at Fictive Dream and "The Ex Files" by Jon Negroni at Cetera, two very different stories involving going to a wedding after a breakup. I enjoyed both.

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 Woman, the Bomb and the Wardrobe

At the back of Simone's wardrobe is a passage to another world, where it is always nuclear winter and never nuclear Christmas. Once in a while she pulls aside the coathangers and suitcases and looks to see if it is still there. It always is. She hopes one day to find the splintered roughness of cheap pine – or, better, a world of blue skies and peace and plenty. In the meantime, perhaps the radiation will keep moths away, though in the end everything will be shredded anyhow.

This week's daily stories

Monday

The stories have all got mixed up. You pull a sword from the stone and all the evils of the world fly out. You kiss a frog and it turns into a wolf. There you go, trying to put them all back in order and only getting yourself more muddled. There are fairies in the mountains and dragons in the woods. It’s no good trying to mend things now. There are new stories to learn.

Tuesday

I found myself on that narrow borderline, where I seemed comfortable enough until my clothes started to wear out, where I could survive until any little thing went wrong. It felt like I had tripped but hadn’t started falling yet. I was at all times reaching out, grabbing at the air, calling for the wind to hold me up. On borrowed time, they say. I was defaulting.

Wednesday

In quiet moments I heard music, but there was never enough quiet to hear it properly. What brief phrases I made out seemed to dissolve when the noise returned and pushed them out. Notes scattered into engine pings and cat cries and distant drilling. Finally I sealed myself in the house, cotton wool in my ears, manuscript paper on my lap. I wrote down that strange music, then collapsed into a sleep that left me dry-mouthed and weak-limbed. The next day I played it for Andrea. ‘That’s the theme from the Muppet Show,’ she said.

Thursday

She brought him cake soaked in syrup, too sticky to eat. It made him angry, although he knew it shouldn’t. He watched the sugar crystallise on the paper bag, then threw it away, untasted. The next day she brought him gingerbread, warm and fragrant. But that made him angry too.

Friday

“Wood splits. Concrete cracks. Metal rusts. Why not build in wonderful plastic?” The poster must have been there for decades. We knew we would never get it off in one piece, so we set up lights and took good photographs. We knew that someone, somewhere, would want it preserved. Then we lifted the corner, and the whole thing peeled away, pristine as the day it was pasted up. A moment later the wall collapsed. The photos didn’t come out. We drifted apart.

Saturday

There are new things in the sky, smooth white disks stacked atop each other, that seem to hover in place. I never see them move, except to rise higher until they are too far away to see. They either don't have lights, or they don't come out at night. And they hum, a more sonorous sound than a jet engine. I suppose you already know about them. I suppose everybody does. By now I'm sure people can't remember what life was like without them. You can forget how fast things change, if you don't look up.

Sunday

The fireworks stood in the air, burning like a migraine, more bursting every moment. Soon it would be so bright it would look like daytime. The sound was constant too, every bang turning to a drone. We screamed out at the night to stop letting them off, to give the sparks a chance to fall to earth, but nobody could hear. Behind a cloud, the moon began to burst.

I have been reading...

• Your Sons And Your Daughters Are Beyond by Rosie Garland. Very short, strange stories with bite. Like a box of good dark chocolates, best enjoyed one or two each night, but tempting to devour in one go.
• We Are Not Numbers, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey. This anthology of writing by young Gazans is beautiful and varied and alive, and achieves exactly the goal its title sets out. You can read more from the We Are Not Numbers project at wearenotnumber.org

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 Shadow Economy

Pete once read a story about a man who sold his shadow for a bottomless purse, but that was a fairytale. It was meant to frighten you into virtue. In the story, the man sold his shadow thinking he didn't really need it, but then he found out that nobody liked him without it. Pete thought that was stupid. Most people wouldn't notice a missing shadow, obviously. He thought the person who wrote that story had been such an idiot that he couldn't think of any real problem with selling your shadow, so he just made it that everyone except the man knew it was bad not to have one. Otherwise the moral wouldn't work.

Well, Pete was cleverer than that, so before he went off to sell his shadow he worked out all of the real problems there would be. Like: sometimes on a sunny day, he put his back to the sun so he could read his phone screen in the shade of his own body. That would be out. And he had to assume, as a worst-case scenario, that shading his eyes with his hand wouldn't work either. He might come out of the deal looking lit up all over, a bit unnatural, like somebody Photoshopped into a picture where the lighting doesn't match. Maybe that was what happened to the man in the story, and that was why they didn't like him: it was too uncanny, particularly when you hadn't seen Photoshop before. It wouldn't be a problem these days. Looking weird was a flex, so long as the weird looked expensive. And nobody ever asked for more shadows on their face, did they?

This week's daily stories

Monday

There was the tiniest piece of grit in the salad, and she bit down on it every time: a boulder between her teeth, the way things feel big in the mouth. When she was done chewing she rolled it to the tip of her tongue, and then to a finger. A beautiful little thing, crystalline and perfectly itself. She wasn’t used to washing salad. At the supermarket it came clean, bagged and anonymous, like a packet of crisps. She placed the grit back on her tongue, the first stone in a wall.

Tuesday

Dad was sitting in a folding chair by the open kitchen door, looking out into the dark. He was worried he had upset the cat and she wouldn’t come home. “Of course she’ll come home,” I said, “Don’t worry.” He smiled as best he could and said, “I know she will. I’m just daft, you know that.” All through the night I heard him shaking the bag of treats. I thought about the time I got lost in the shopping centre and he didn’t even notice. Curled at my feet, the cat was the only one asleep.

Wednesday

After two hours in the lift, someone answered the emergency call button. You need to think more positively, they said. This idea of being trapped is keeping you in the lift. When you feel stuck, take ten deep breaths. Ask yourself: why do I believe this thought? And try to get out of the lift just a little bit each time. She tore the panel off the wall with a strength she didn’t know she had, and used the edge of it to lever the doors open. At the reception desk, a smiling man in a suit greeted her. There we go, he said. I’ll mark you down as a success.

Thursday

Auntie Mona had the biggest tub of biscuit cutters you’ve ever seen, and somehow she knew exactly what was in there. One of us would name a shape, she would reach in, and there it was. A mushroom, a Pikachu, a battery, Australia. We thought: there’s no way they all fit in there. She must be magic. So when Mum and Dad went away for the weekend and we stayed over, I crept down in the night and had a look. I tipped them out onto the floor, and I was right: there was no way to fit them back in.

Friday

Between the channels on the radio, if you listen long enough and gentle enough, there are voices whispering. Sometimes there is strange music, a melody you never quite hear properly but find yourself humming days later. It’s an enchanting place, between the channels, in the static and the noise. You feel you are discovering something deeper and truer. You aren’t. Turn the dial again. Tune back to one of those stations you have been ignoring. There are real voices there, and real music. Listen long and gentle. This is what you were searching for.

Saturday

It didn’t take long to untie a few knots, loosen a screw here and there, and put a dab of glue where glue ought not be. A little rearranging of the world to make it safer, like cutting a firebreak. The machine would start again tomorrow, even so. But every knot retied and screw tightened was a choice, one that could be made differently. The machine would start again every day, until one day it didn’t.

Sunday

There had been snow on the ground for two weeks, fresh falls covering what had melted and refrozen, so that there was a hard layer under the soft and it was impossible to imagine the world being colourful again. Impossible for everyone but Mr Garland, whose eyes turned to the soft curves outside his door and thought of what was hidden underneath. While the snow lasted, he could not move it, and the world could not see it. Fate kept its hands tucked in its pockets for warmth. But in time the snow would melt, and they would all see it, and him.

I have been reading...

• The Double by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (translated by Jessie Coulson). I hadn't heard of The Double until I found it at a second-hand book stall the summer after my short story 'The Double' was published, which is quite embarrassing but also satisfyingly appropriate. I think I've got away with it, and could convincingly pretend my story is "in dialogue with Dostoyevsky", rather than merely unoriginal.
• The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro (translated by Jennifer Shyue). A fine partner to The Double in this week's 'man buffeted around a city as he goes mad' double-bill. Where Mr Golyadkin's identity is displaced by his externalised double, Katzuo's is smeared out by all the multiplicity within him. I really enjoyed this, and I'm feeling very tempted by Archipelago Books' digital membership.

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: Cold Call

The man on the step had a big wide smile that made me wish our door had a chain. He wore a navy blue fleece with black embroidery on the breast, and at the end of his lanyard was a badge in a plastic holder that had fogged up in the autumn air.

"Good morning, I won't keep you too long," he said, stepping past me. I had stood filling the doorway, I was sure of it, but now I was all turned around, and he was almost to the end of the hall. "Do close the door," he said, "we don't all the heat getting out."

He went through to the kitchen. By the time I got there he was sat at the table, a spiral-bound A4 notebook in front of him. He frowned as if a tricky problem had just crossed his mind, and began drawing long spirals across the ruled lines.

I re-tied the cord of my dressing gown.

After three lines of spirals he clicked the nib of his pen away and stood, the chair making a long, neuralgic scrape on the tiles. I had retreated, putting the breakfast bar between us. He took a step towards me and placed a cup of hot tea on the the faux granite. "You're very kind," he said, "but if I had a cup of tea on every visit I'd be in the loo all day." The tea steamed. My coffee was cold. "Let's go out to the garden," he said.

He stood on the lawn and poked at fallen leaves with a booted toe. The fresh air seemed to bring me round a little, and I said, "I'm sorry, why are you here?"

"I'm with my dog," he said. The dog was off sniffing at the bushes. Dew sparkled on its fur.

"That's what animal you've got," I said. "Why are you here?"

He took a smaller notebook from his fleece pocket, and made a note. The dog trotted over and nosed my ankles. Then the back door opened, and another man came out, with a different face but the same smile. I wasn't sure which of them had been the man at the door.

"Sorry about that," said the man who had just come out. "We don't want to keep you waiting. How are we getting on out here?"

The sun had just slipped over next door's roof, and was shining in my eyes. I heard myself say, "Getting there, I think."

The man with the dog slipped a lead around its neck. "Yes, I think so," he said. "Let's go back in."

Inside, one of them sat at the dining table while the other stayed standing. The man at the dining table filled in forms and slid them into a white envelope. The other man had plugged something into one of the power sockets. Every now and then it beeped, and he pressed a button and called out a number to the man with the forms.

"Will this take long?" I asked. "I have to take my mother to the hospital."

"Don't worry," said the man at the table, "we can see ourselves out. But I'm sure it won't be necessary. I hope it's nothing serious."

The box beeped, but the man attending to it waited with his finger by the button.

"Oh no," I said, "we don't think so."

"That's wonderful to hear," the man said. And when I didn't reply for a few seconds, his colleague said, "Eighteen," and pressed the button.

I went back to the kitchen and microwaved my coffee a little too long. I added a splash of cold water. It hardly tasted of anything.

Back in the dining room, the man was packing the box into a little fabric case. "All done," he said. "I'll get out of your hair."

I walked him to the door, and opened it for him. "These are for you," he said, handing me the white envelope. "If there's anything you need, just give us a call." He handed me a business card, and stepped out. I closed the door without watching to see where he went. The card was good heavy stock, matte finished, and blank white on both sides. I took it through to the kitchen, and pinned it to the noticeboard.

This week's daily stories

Monday

We got the thick duvet and the big coats down from the loft. We bled all the radiators and had the boiler serviced. We cleared leaves from the gutters, piled up firewood, harvested potatoes. We started writing Christmas cards. Anything to pretend we would still be there when the winter came.

Tuesday

The boy had to make an autumn collage, so we went out gathering leaves. Together on the ground they look so perfect; it’s only when you look up close that you see all the flaws. Tears and spots and nibbled holes, and edges already rotting. I thought we’d never find enough that we could use. The boy put a brave face on it: he found smiles and stars and hidden creatures in all those blemishes, and he stuck them on the page without complaining. But I looked at his collage, and all I could see was mess.

Wednesday

“Bury me at sea!” He was drunk when he said it, and none of us knew he was dying, least of all the man himself. But he said it a lot, and he didn’t say much else before he went. It fell to us to decide whether he meant it. We all felt the romance in the idea as he half-sang it down Brewer Street, but after, we thought of the cold and the wet and his trussed-up body flopping over the side like a sack of coal. Bleak. Nobody wanted it, and nobody really thought he wanted it. But the idea of those words in our heads at the crematorium was bleaker still.

Thursday

I made the wish, clear and true, and my fingers tingled. When I flexed them, they moved with freedom and precision: I felt I could have plucked a fly from the air. My hearing had changed, too. I heard tones and rhythms and melodies from the fountain where I had thrown my coin. I dashed around looking for a piano, and found one in a grand old bookshop, old and (I could now tell) out of tune. The music poured out of me. I haven’t played much since. I suppose if I had been all that interested, I would have learned without wishing.

Friday

At night the postboxes came alive, great red columns stomping down the street, little red cuboids squirming out of walls like lambs from their mothers. We hadn't fed them enough. They swallowed up all the paper they could find, and when that didn't satisfy they swallowed phones and laptops and routers so that we would need them again. We all had to go and buy postcards and stamps, and write thankyous to aunties and greetings to old friends. It felt good, in a way, but we posted them carefully, frightened for our fingers.

Saturday

We put two cans on a piece of string and stretched it tight. You said I had to pull good and hard, or you wouldn't hear me. With that distance between us, with the smell of baked beans in my nose instead of the smell of your mum's cigarettes, with the feel of you pulling away from me, I thought maybe I could say something true for once. But when I opened my mouth, you let go of your can and you laughed at the gash mine left on my chin. I have to admit, it was pretty funny.

Sunday

At school I learned that if you share your chocolate with someone every day, it doesn't make them like you. It just makes them expect chocolate. Of course there's learning and learning. I still seem to end up with no chocolate and someone spreading rumours that I wet myself in Geography and had to go home. But at least now, when someone gives me chocolate, I don't feel I have to be nice to them.

A new tiny story goes up every day at www.scattering.ink/daily

I have been reading...

• Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino (translated by William Weaver). A charming, fractal, cosmic, comic little novel in which the titular Mr Palomar grapples with the infinite profundity, banality and silliness of the universe around him. I feel as though I have lots to say about this book, but as Mr Palomar puts it, "It is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible."
• The Weather in Kansas by Crista Ermiya. This short story collection seems to be out of print now, which is a shame. Ermiya's voice is distinctive but never predictable, and I really hope we'll hear from her again soon. (An aside: in 'Marginalia', a character once again handles an old book with gloves, but don't worry: the book is a facsimile and the gloves are of great importance to the story. Come back next week for another edition of the Handling Books With Gloves newsletter.)

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: Shots Hereat

They were meeting at Shots Hereat. Supposed to be, anyway. Ade had got Jack a pint in, but was beginning to think he'd have to start on it himself. Jack was always late. Worse than that, he always had a good reason.

The bar wasn't officially called Shots Hereat. It had held a few names over the years. Multiple names, multiple owners, and multiple just-off-trend food menus. But the A-board out the front had held steady through it all: no manager had stayed long enough to get round to changing it. The A-board said "SHOTS HEREAT", and Ade thought that was better than any of the names that had gone up on the sign. So they called the bar Shots Hereat, or sometimes just Shots or just Hereat, and often, because it really tickled them, Thereat. Ade would text, "Meet you at 7 Thereat?", and Jack would turn up at eight or nine or not at all, and they would never have shots even though they joked they really ought to, because it wasn't a shots kind of friendship.

This week's daily stories

Monday

She married in her great grandmother’s wedding dress, sewn up from the parachute that saved her great grandfather’s life. Something old, and borrowed from the war museum that kept it pristine. They would add a photo of the day to the exhibit, and she would tell them how marriage was like a parachute jump, a great adventure but with something holding you safe. But as she walked to the altar she heard the silk whisper: in case you need to jump.

Tuesday

I'm stepping on all the cracks, because I know he doesn't want me to and I'm not in the mood for his stupid games. I can feel his little hand pulling and pushing at mine as he dances around them. It's easy for him to keep those little feet to the middle of each paving stone. Doesn't he realise how much harder it is for me? He's played at wearing my shoes enough times.

Normally when I am in a bad mood I reassure him: don't worry, Daddy isn't upset because of you. It's not your fault. But today it is his because of him, so I stay quiet and step on cracks, until I hear a little sob, and the next crack I step on opens up and swallows me.

Wednesday

“I feel like my head’s turning inside out,” I said, but saying it made me think of pictures I had seen and scrolled past quickly, pictures of heads turned inside out that didn’t feel like anything any more. It’s not my place to say a thing like that, I thought. But my head still hurt. It hurt more.

Thursday

My guitar string broke. My shoelace snapped. My belt fell to pieces, and there was a little shred of torn floss stuck between my back teeth. Everything that had been stretched out too tight and narrow had given up at once. For a while I lived in slippers and elastic-waisted pyjamas and played a little flat. I loosened.

Friday

It grew dark, and they began to wonder what they had done with the day. Not nothing, surely: most of them were sore all over, and those that weren't were sore in the head at least. But when they looked, they couldn't see where all that soreness had gone. The darker it got, the harder they looked, and the less they saw; until they collapsed into sleep, and the sun rose. It shone on everything they had built, but none of them were looking.

Saturday

My father collected the murderous kind of spy gadget. No clever codes or microdots, just hidden knives and poison rings and beautiful things that were guns. All the most thrilling toys a boy could be forbidden. By the time he left them to me, I had outgrown my fascination. All I wanted was to read his old diaries, and get to know the man inside. When I opened the first volume, it gave a click. There was an empty space where the explosive charge should be.

Sunday

Fresh brewed like the day, and like the day, they had no time to drink it in. They left it on the counter, steaming, and the day drank it instead. When they came home it was half-gone, stale and strong like them. They warmed it in the microwave and swallowed it down. It kept them awake when they should have been sleeping. They read poems and drew flowers and talked with friends across the ocean. They drank in the night.

I have been reading...

• Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders. There's a moment in this novel where protagonist Jamie, working on a PhD in eigtheenth-century English literature, handles a rare book "with gloves on, she's not a monster". This seemed like an authorial goof: Jamie ought to know that gloves impair sensation and dexterity, and so do more harm than good. But it's the perfect mistake for a novel driven by characters who are a little numbed and clumsy, who think they know better than they do, and who do harm as a result. Jamie has to learn to take the gloves off, even though it's scary. I think Anders knows that you don't wear gloves to handle rare books. And that is my review of a seven-word parenthetical from the middle of this novel.
• Carmen et Error issue 13.5. I especially enjoyed 'worm song' by Marten Baxter, though this may be because of the elaborate worm-friend lore that my son and I have concocted. Worms are underappreciated, and I salute Captain Worm.
• 'Briar Rose' by Alex Clark and 'Chalklands' by Richard Smyth, two short stories being distributed free to bookshops and cafés by Uncertain Stories. They are fine stories in delightful little books, and you can get them packed in with your order of Broken Ground.

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: This Is Disco Turtle

This is Disco Turtle. He has little pieces of broken mirror glued all over his shell, and despite his name, he is a tortoise. The name is stuck as fast as the mirrors, and I can hardly complain, my own name being Grace.

Disco Turtle sparkles on a sunny day when he walks down the street. He roams the neighbourhood like a cat, when the sun is out. When it is grey he stays home at number 7, where his mad owner keeps a whole room at just the right temperature. If he is out on the street and the sky clouds over, he is almost invisible, the dull flat world reflecting off his shell, his little head poking out as though from another dimension.

This week's daily stories

Monday

It was the fanciest place I had ever stayed, a proper country pile. When I went down to breakfast I announced myself to the lads: "Colonel Mustard, in the library, with the candlestick." There was another guest sat across the dining room, an older woman, dressed all in yellow. She looked daggers at me. She looked ropes, lead piping, revolvers. I took my breakfast up to the room. It didn't feel safe downstairs.

Tuesday

The tattoo artist refused, at first. Said the words were too cruel, that she had a duty of care. But she understood they were better on my skin that in my mind. We put them on my left flank, where it's tender. I never look. You don't need to look, when something's safe.

Wednesday

"Why do we go round so many churches?" Edie was whining, but she was doing it quietly. She respected the place; it was her dad she wasn't sure about. He gave the question some thought. It was one he had asked his mother many times, in grand cathedrals and little village chapels. She had talked about beauty and history and architecture and tradition, and said he would understand when he was older. And now here he was, older than he ever thought he would be, dragging his daughter past candles and stained glass and looking for the same thing his mother always had been: an answer to the question, "Why do we go round so many churches?"

Thursday

All around me are things you mended. A soldered patch on the hot water pipes. Embroidery on the worn knee of my jeans. An apostrophe added in neat black ink to each unsent invitation. There are so many things that you can do. There are so many things I can't. It makes me want to break something.

Friday

There was something in the stone. We all knew it: there was something wonderful inside, if we could only crack it open. But it’s not an easy thing to break a stone in two, and it’s harder still to keep hold of it long enough to try. I was the lucky one, in the end. I scored it with a chisel, then let all the strength I had left fall on it in one great blow. It shattered into fragments. I was half blind from it. Inside, there was nothing.

Saturday

She opened up the little box of left-behinds. There she kept eggshells and plum stones and the punched-out frames of board game tokens. A milk tooth nestled inside the lost-wax mould that cast her ring. All the little in-betweens, the punctuation of life. She tucked the letter inside, and closed the lid.

Sunday

It was a hot day, but it was cool in my hole, with water round my ankles and shade from the walls. I had brought a few things down, book and snacks and water bottle; it was getting awkward to climb out. Hard work, but fun. I rested my head on the sand. The children playing up above were muffled, like a dream.

The walls were weeping, and I thought how alive seawater seems, and yet how cold. I saw the slip just in time to know I couldn't stop it. The children went silent. The sun went out. The sand was too heavy to struggle with; I couldn't even open my mouth to drown. But there was a strong hand pushing through the sand, reaching to me. Grasping tight and cold around my ankle. Pulling me down.

I have been reading...

• Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (translated by Lucy Jones), a small but dense novel from and about the German Democratic Republic. Siblings movngly captures the way disparate feelings – about family, romance, art, politics – get mixed up in a person; it was well worth having its namesake silly internet song in my head for the week.
• No One Talks About This Stuff, an anthology of writing about 'almost parenthood' edited by Kat Brown. A fitting book for Baby Loss Awareness Week, but it brings together a much wider set of experiences, from indecision to infertility to the impossible choices that pregnancy sometimes involves. A book that shows how cold and painful the world can be, and how we can warm it for each other.
• 'Door in the Woods' by Chris Scott, a short story I really enjoyed over at Okay Donkey.
• Broken Ground (see shameless plug above). I've loved reading the other stories in this anthology, and the artwork by Lucy Scott is gorgeous. Uncertain Stories are also distributing free little one-story books to bookshops and cafés; a very cool thing to do.

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: Melting Point

She must have known. That was the worst part: that she must have known, and just been unable to admit it. If she didn't see the problem, then she would have said so. She would have explained, justified, invented. But she didn't. I would say: 'Lydia, there's no point putting ice cream in the food bank collection, it'll melt before anyone ever comes to collect it,' and she would say, 'Yeah, I get it, poor people don't deserve ice cream. They should just get a kilo bag of oats and be happy with it.' I would say 'Everyone deserves nice things but a tub of melted sticky goo isn't really a treat,' and she would say 'For God's sake, Allie, we're in the middle of a heatwave,' and I would say 'Yes, exactly,' and she would post on the local Facebook group about how people just don't want to think about people who use food banks like they're real people. And then she'd do it again.

This week's daily stories

Monday

I spent all morning at the beach looking for two perfect shells that my mum could make into earrings. I got one straight away, so I thought I'd find another quickly too, but then they were all broken or the wrong colour or had holes in. She said we could just make a necklace, but she never wears necklaces. Then I found another and it was blue and shiny and perfect all over, but when I brought it back we saw the first one had got broken to bits in my dad's pocket, and it was nearly time to go home and I hadn't even had a chance to dig my hole. But maybe it's good that it happened, because when I was sad they got me an ice cream, and it meant I got to keep the second shell.

Tuesday

Grey-tongued, he braved sunlight and strangers until he reached the bookshop. Shelves and shelves of nothing. He had a pile of library books, five times renewed, and reservations just come in, but he wanted to buy. He wanted perfect corners and the smell of ink. He wanted papercuts, not words. After too much browsing he made his selections: a book on the history of the London Underground, which he had never ridden; and a hardback novel so thin it looked like a greetings card, with a big number on the back to compensate. They would tickle at the edge of his overdraft nicely. He took them to the counter to be judged.

Wednesday

When the leaves fell, things would feel better. The world would have shaken off its heaviness and he would see the sky through his window again. He knew what he needed. He had everything ready. He was just waiting for one good windy day to strip the branches bare. But the weather was calm and the air was still, all through September, all through October. Every tree he looked at had a leaf or two, just clinging on. He sat like a ship becalmed, until the new leaves came.

Thursday

In the dream there was wet cloth over her face, and when she peeled it away she found another layer, and another. When she woke, she could still feel it there, suffocating her, blinding her. She lived that way for years, afraid to dream, but hopeful, too, that the next layer of dream-cloth might be the last. Bolts and bolts of it, and gallons of water, until one night she dreamed a different dream, and breathed again.

Friday

He left late, because the cake had taken so long. But the cake was a disaster, too, an eggy, unrisen mess in the tin. It didn't even taste good with his eyes closed. So he was late and cakeless, except for the smear of it unnoticed on his trousers. By the time he arrived he was sweaty and stressed and falling over his tongue trying to apologise, and nobody understood why, because nobody had needed a cake from him, or punctuality. He went into the toilets to mop his brow with paper towels, and saw the stain on his leg, and left early.

Saturday

It's not your fault, he said to the tears on her face. You know the blobfish? They call it the world's ugliest animal. But it only looks like that when you fish it up. It's the pressure change that does it. You see what I mean? He smiled, eyes artfully crinkling, and put his hands on hers. She wondered how he would look if she dragged him back to the deep sea with her.

Sunday

It had been a sixty-year campaign, and just him for most of that. Him and his chart of constellations – new ones, ones that made sense. He knew when he began that he might get nowhere, and he thought he had accepted it, but now he felt his heart wearing out it all seemed harder. It was the world he felt for, stuck with its old way of looking at the sky. It would be all the same to him when he was gone. He would see the stars close up, and they would look completely different.

I have been reading...

• Second-Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta. A semi-autobiographical 1974 novel about a woman who moves from Nigeria to the UK at the beginning of adulthood. A fine novel which blends naïve and evocative modes to great effect, and another win for the librarians at Hulme High Street library.
• The Bee is a magazine and website publishing and promoting working-class writers. I've been leafing through the website archive and looking forward to the first issue of the magazine. I particularly enjoyed Lynsey Hanley's piece on buses.
• Tony Harrison died last week, so I have been revisiting his poetry. I first encountered Harrison's work while at university (not as part of the course – browsing a bookshop). While I didn't feel much more out of place at university than anywhere else, poems like Them and [Uz] were good to have by my side in a place where my Leeds vowels were sometimes met with total incomprehension. 'v.' is, sadly, more relevant by the day, forty years on.

This week's story: Three Portraits

When she came in with her new hair, the girls all wanted to draw her. Or rather, Jenny wanted to draw her; Maisie wanted to do what her big sister was doing, as always; and Imogen looked up from her bin lorry when the paper came out, and decided it was all her idea.

Imogen drew with crayons, great wild curls flying all around the page so her mother looked like a burst pocket watch. Purple, for some reason. The stylist hadn't coloured it, but Immy said it looked purpler than it had before, so she did it all the way purple to show that. She was soon done with the portrait, and started adding butterflies. She said those were really there, too.

Maisie drew with pencils. She had found an old tin of sketching pencils a week before and, because the picture on the tin was of a cat, become obsessed. Her father had tried to explain what the different pencils were for, but he didn't really understand it, and she didn't listen. So instead she sucked at her lip and looked thoughtfully at the numbers and letters. Her mother longed to know what she was thinking when she chose, but she could never explain it. Maisie had drawn the shadows of the curls so dark that it swallowed up her mother's face. She looked like a tornado, but even so, you could tell who it was supposed to be.

Jenny drew with oil pastels. She was sure she had got the hang of them. She used all the techniques her art teacher had showed her: she built her mother up in layers, blended colours for the shades in her new curls, scratched at her eyes to make highlights. She did something she called scumbling, which made them all laugh. Maisie said she had made it up to sound clever. Immy said that nobody would make up scumbling to sound clever because it sounded stupid. Their mother thought she ought to say that wasn't nice, but she was too busy trying not to laugh, because she could see Jenny didn't like them laughing.

Jenny's picture hadn't worked, and everything she did made it worse. It was smeary, indefinite: all the things her mother hoped the curls would stop her feeling. Jenny stippled delight onto her face; close up you could see the marks. What's good is that when it goes wrong you can always make something right on top, she said. She blended it more with a piece of kitchen paper. She bit a pastel to a flat point before her mother could stop her, spitting the unwanted chunk into the blending paper. She used the point of the pastel and the point of her fingernail to add more definition, and when she had finished, she said See, that's so much better. But it wasn't, and there were tears in her eyes.

Imogen had wandered back to her bin lorry and was making noises that made it all harder. Maisie was getting bored of drawing but didn't want to make a fuss. She had started a comic book in 5B pencil, the words unreadable. Their mother tucked a loose curl out of her eye and looked at Jenny's picture. It's the paper, she said. This is just cheap printer paper. You need proper thick paper, with a bit of texture.

And Jenny screamed, It's not the paper, it's NOT the PAPER, a big voice that made her seem small. She rubbed her eyes, and the mess her hands left on her face made her look like the picture of her mother. And her mother sat still as a model, still as a painting, while the other girls pretended not to notice and the bin lorry went bshhh bshhh bshhh.

Then Jenny said, in a small voice that made her seem big, There's another thing my art teacher told me, but you won't like it. She led them all out into the garden and took the lid off the barbecue. She lit a match and held it to the corner of the picture. The oily paper burned with a wet roar. Don't breathe the smoke, said Jenny. You don't want this stuff inside you. Her mother sent the other girls back into the house.

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