The swift had moved again. Just an inch and a half down her arm, this time, but that was enough for its head to disappear beneath the strap of her watch. She couldn't help worrying that it might suffocate under there. By the evening, it was on her other arm, breathing free, and though it always felt strange when it was on the wrong part of her she still felt better. As she chopped onions for bolognese she thought about going to the doctor to ask why her tattoo wouldn't stay in one place. But the telephone rang, and she forgot all about it.

He fancied himself a dangerous man, and he was right, the way a blunt knife is more dangerous. When pressed to something he would skitter off, and he claimed the blood he drew in these moments as evidence of his sharpness. Today he had been called to help a friend collect a sofa, and the seller was being awkward about the price. He ran the thumb of his mind across the edge of his mindlessness, and smiled.

The star lived on the wall of the study. Or rather, the certificate did, displayed proudly in a silver frame, its hologram of authentication twinkling. Hollie said when he unwrapped it that like all dads he was impossible to buy presents for. It was something she was certain he didn't already have out in the shed. Now his accountant was peering at it, at the hologram, at the signature. "You know these things are just a novelty, don't you?" she said. "These companies don't have any right to the stars. They make it all up." He looked at it differently after that: with a smile and a thought of his daughter, instead of the headache that came with being given a whole world to care for.

He had read that a hi-vis jacket and a purposeful walk could get you in anywhere, but somehow he was always clocked as an outsider. Not in a way that got security called. But where he had been promised looks of indifference, he received looks of scorn. Stepping through a roller door on an industrial estate, he overheard the words "some fucking suit in his dad's boots," and picked up his pace. He found a quiet corner, and rubbed his soft hands, and wondered how he might sneak in to wherever it was he belonged.

A few times in my life, I've tried 'morning pages' (writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness _whatever_ first thing every day). Supposedly this clears the rubbish from your mind and creates space for what is meaningful and important. Sadly, it transpires that my mind can generate new rubbish at whatever rate is required to keep it from having to look too hard at what is meaningful and important. For me, writing stories works much better. They have to be dug up from somewhere, and they have to mean something. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I have no idea what this week's story is really about, but one way or another it came out of me. * * * ## This week’s daily stories ### Monday Twenty minutes into the silent disco, her headphones stuttered and fell silent. The shuffling and squeaking and singing and shouting, which earlier she had lifted the earpads to hear, sounded different with them broken. There had been a charm to it, before: she felt she was seeing the grand illusion of human culture, and understanding it better. Now, she felt she had been cast out of it. So she danced and clapped to the rhythm they made, doing her best to fit in, and for a minute or so, nobody at the disco realised that everyone else’s headphones were silent, too. ### Tuesday Halfway across, where it was as hard to go back as to go on, he thought of giving up. There would be no better time. Nowhere else could they say neither “he ought to have turned back” nor “he might have made it, had he fought.” Nowhere else was the water colder or deeper. He had strength left in his arms and his legs, and the cold was not yet in him, but that might not be enough. And if he was to give up, it was best to give up there. ### Wednesday Once she had stolen something from every house, she threw a party for the street. They came bearing gifts, which confused matters a little, but most of the gifts were edible, and most of the things she had taken were not. Mrs Gardner was the first to notice. “This was one of my husband’s favourites,” she said, trailing a finger along the bookshelf. “He had it signed not long before he passed. He was terribly pleased.” But she didn’t take it down to see the signature. Even between them, they couldn’t put it together. They all thought she had such wonderful taste. ### Thursday It skittered across the tiles, feathered but crawling, and she kept saying _it came out of me, kill it, no, you can’t kill it, it came out of me_. All I had was a broom, for shoving or beating or holding at bay. I couldn’t see what it had. There might have been claws or teeth there, under the moon-white feathers. I opened the kitchen door and it heaved itself out onto the step. We see it, now and then, among the bushes, and when she thinks I am not looking she lays a hand upon her heart. ### Friday When they compared scars, he told them his had faded. These days you could barely see the place where the spike went in, and where his head met the mountain, the hair had finally grown back. In the firelight it was easy for them to believe they saw something, another shadow among hundreds. That night he woke, throat seized by the memory of wounds he never suffered. ### Saturday It all came bursting out, then. She hadn’t had a drink for eighteen months and her tolerance was down, but more than that, the wine in her throat and on her gums tasted like blood. She had given up so much more than drink, and the worst of it was that nobody had asked her to. Nobody had to. And they kept on not asking tonight, when she poured herself a glass and turned the bottle at the end so it wouldn’t drip. So it all came out, then: all the choking grime nobody asked about. ### Sunday She threw his precious teapot down the stairs after him, and impossibly, infuriatingly, it neither shattered nor hit him. The lid didn't even roll away under the shoe rack. She would have settled for that: for watching him crawl around on his knees when he was trying to make a dignified exit. But he didn't even grant her a sarcastic 'Thanks' as he gathered it up, undamaged. He walked out with his head held high. * * * ## I have been reading... * One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde. I remembered very little of this, perhaps because it's the first of the series that I read as a proper grown up. Or at least, someone with a job and a flat and a spouse – on reflection, this reread may be the first time I have read any of these books as a proper grown up. * "Offense and Satisfaction" by Courtney Marcelo Norton, the latest One Story. 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 Pause on the Hillside She liked to have her sandwiches before she reached the summit. Often that was before she felt hungry, but her dad had always insisted that lunch was strictly for the descent, however tired the children's legs were. So now, she ate on the way up. Today, the view as she pulled her crusts off was wonderful. It was an unseasonably warm day, cloudless and clear, and there were not too many dead. She did not look closely at those there were. They were shapeless things, mostly, balled up and tucked into hollows or against trees and fenceposts, and that made it easier. It was rare that one of the bodies looked unavoidably human, with limbs splayed out or face on show. Unless worried at by a creature large enough to turn them, or a teenager goaded by friends who had not yet learned to look away and ignore, they stayed where they had lain themselves, curled up against the world and a long way from home. Whether it was to protect themselves or those left behind, only the dead knew. She threw a piece of crust to a blackbird. She had made cheese sandwiches, which she never remembered she disliked, and she chewed them mechanically, keeping the mush off her tongue. When they were done with, she unwrapped her little bar of chocolate and worked her way through it, square by square. Then she stood, turned her back on the view and on the dead, and continued up the path. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

She threw his precious teapot down the stairs after him, and impossibly, infuriatingly, it neither shattered nor hit him. The lid didn't even roll away under the shoe rack. She would have settled for that: for watching him crawl around on his knees when he was trying to make a dignified exit. But he didn't even grant her a sarcastic 'Thanks' as he gathered it up, undamaged. He walked out with his head held high.

It all came bursting out, then. She hadn't had a drink for eighteen months and her tolerance was down, but more than that, the wine in her throat and on her gums tasted like blood. She had given up so much more than drink, and the worst of it was that nobody had asked her to. Nobody had to. And they kept on not asking tonight, when she poured herself a glass and turned the bottle at the end so it wouldn't drip. So it all came out, then: all the choking grime nobody asked about.

When they compared scars, he told them his had faded. These days you could barely see the place where the spike went in, and where his head met the mountain, the hair had finally grown back. In the firelight it was easy for them to believe they saw something, another shadow among hundreds. That night he woke, throat seized by the memory of wounds he never suffered.

It skittered across the tiles, feathered but crawling, and she kept saying _it came out of me, kill it, no, you can't kill it, it came out of me_. All I had was a broom, for shoving or beating or holding at bay. I couldn't see what it had. There might have been claws or teeth there, under the moon-white feathers. I opened the kitchen door and it heaved itself out onto the step. We see it, now and then, among the bushes, and when she thinks I am not looking she lays a hand upon her heart.

Once she had stolen something from every house, she threw a party for the street. They came bearing gifts, which confused matters a little, but most of the gifts were edible, and most of the things she had taken were not. Mrs Gardner was the first to notice. "This was one of my husband's favourites," she said, trailing a finger along the bookshelf. "He had it signed not long before he passed. He was terribly pleased." But she didn't take it down to see the signature. Even between them, they couldn't put it together. They all thought she had such wonderful taste.

Halfway across, where it was as hard to go back as to go on, he thought of giving up. There would be no better time. Nowhere else could they say neither "he ought to have turned back" nor "he might have made it, had he fought." Nowhere else was the water colder or deeper. He had strength left in his arms and his legs, and the cold was not yet in him, but that might not be enough. And if he was to give up, it was best to give up there.

Twenty minutes into the silent disco her headphones stuttered and fell silent. The shuffling and squeaking and singing and shouting, which earlier she had lifted the earpads to hear, sounded different with them broken. There had been a charm to it, before: she felt she was seeing the grand illusion of human culture, and understanding it better. Now she felt she had been cast out of it. So she danced and clapped to the rhythm they made, doing her best to fit in, and for a minute or so, nobody at the disco realised that everyone else's headphones were silent, too.

Welcome to the first issue of Scattering's second year. As with the first issue of every month, this week's longer story is free for everyone. It's about being unable to sleep because you think you can hear someone crying. * * * ## This week’s daily stories ### Monday The night after I was supposed to leave I found a feather on my pillow, long and black with hints of green where it met the light. A magical thing, I supposed, but when I touched it to my face I could smell the bird on it, as earthly as a flying thing can be. I tucked it between the pages of my book, but when I woke it had vanished, and I had lost my page. I left that day, to show I’d got the message, though I hadn’t. ### Tuesday There was a different kind of light in those days. It was a bright, brilliant white; it’s how you knew what white was. It made crisp shadows that didn’t change their size as they moved. In the morning and the evening it turned deep gold, and the shadows stretched out forever, and the skies… I can’t begin to describe the skies. The plants remember. They stretch out like that, looking for a light that isn’t there. You must too, somewhere in your bones. I’m sorry for it. ### Wednesday Old Gorton said he stitched something special at the heart of the dolls he gave us. A magic spell, said I. Kimi, who was older, said it would be a lock of hair from somebody he loved, and joked it was our mother. We both agreed it was best not knowing, but of course, one afternoon when I was in her care we cut them open and delved into the guts. In mine was a little gold ring with a jewel in it. In hers, a shard of glass that cut her thumb and left the doll with a deep red stain across it. ### Thursday It was strange to see the train leave with her on it. I had watched those trains so many times, sitting on the footbridge and throwing sweets and chips and cigarette ends at them as they passed beneath. They were never more than a part of the landscape, like leaves floating down the river. But when she left I believed I could have said which carriage she was sat in. I believed she could see me looking just as if I had gone to the platform to wave her off. I watched and watched, wanting to feel the instant when the red lights disappeared. The horizon was so much further than I thought. ### Friday There was only room for two of the cases. She would have to leave one on the platform. It shouldn’t have mattered which she chose: they were all essential, and she couldn’t afford to replace even half the contents of any of them. But in one, stuffed firm into the toe of a shoe that no longer fit, there was a bundle of letters and a broken watch. She would have left the rest to take those, if she could only remember which case they were in. ### Saturday Halfway through Jon’s set, during the awful quiet of a joke not landing, a cat came down the aisle. It miaowed in the silence, and suddenly no one was looking at him, thank God, They were all looking at the cat. And so was he: he held up a hand to screen out the stage lights, and said, “Toby?” The cat miaowed again. Like that he was saved. It would be the most memorable five of the night. Jon and Toby had the crowd’s full attention, and two minutes left. He climbed down from the stage, scooped his cat up in his arms, and carried him home. ### Sunday It was a tight space I hid in. My arms were snaked where they could fit, one above me, one to the side. I had one foot on the floor, but little of my weight on it: it was the walls pressed front and back that held me up. The foot kept me from slipping down each time I breathed out, but I could not breathe out or in much, and besides, not breathing was good, quiet, safe. In a place so narrow, I was sure I could not be found. I hoped they would not find the others, either. Not all of them, at least. I needed one of them to pull me free. * * * ## I have been reading... * The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín. I have to say I liked this because it was a present from my wife. Luckily, it is easy to like. This is the first Colm Tóibín I've read, but I expect I'll be reading more. If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops. * * * ## The Crying House I was woken by the house crying. Or so I thought it must be, after listening with eyes closed and breath held: a murmur in the pipes or a bird under the eaves that had the rhythm of sobbing, now rising, now falling, now stifled for a moment or two. I had been dreaming about people I did not know. Terrible people, generous with the excess they had so they could demand what you couldn't spare. In the dream I was a guest in their big house, a country getaway, and they had just begun to turn the screws on me. They had begun to show their teeth and their claws, certain that showing would be enough for one as weak as me. I was a guest in the crying house, too, which made the sound of weeping more confusing. If it was not the pipes or the house martins, I could not say who I thought it was. I had never heard Kate or Michael cry: they had a seawall solidity to them, parent-like, which is what brought be to their door the day before. I could not imagine their daughter crying like the house did, low and long, waking people by trying not to wake them. And if I could work it out – if I went looking and found Kate alone in the dark kitchen – I could not say it was my place to help them. But nor could I go back to sleep, knowing that they needed somebody. And yet I did. The bed dissolved and the lights rose and I was sat at a piano, being watched over an expensive drink by a handsome young man. By his face I could see he was curious about me, the way you might be curious about a dead thing on the sand. "What should I play?" I asked. He shrugged. "Anything you like," he said. "Play what you think will cover the bill." I played something. In the dream I thought it was something new and beautiful. I suppose in waking life I had heard it somewhere before. My fingers moved across the keys instinctively, like the music was playing me, just how I always thought it would feel to play an instrument. I found it very moving. The music had the rhythm of weeping. As I played, Catriona was cleaning the kitchen. She glanced at me once or twice through the doorway, like a mother keeping an eye on her child. She was one of them: rich, young, attractive. But they were cruel to her, too. When the last node died away, I looked up at Simon. I wanted so much for him to approve. "I think," he said, swirling the whisky in his glass, "we may have to charge you extra." I woke again, and I knew nobody was crying, but there is knowing and knowing. The room was not quite dark, lit softly by a streetlight through the kind of thin curtains you put in a bedroom rarely slept in. I was grateful. It helped me to know where I was. I got out of bed and opened the door as slowly as I could. I did not want whoever was crying to know that anybody else was awake. I stopped, and could hear nothing. I pictured Michael, sat on the floor of the bathroom, his face pressed into a towel. But everything was still, doors closed, lights out. Since I was up, I thought I might as well use the toilet, but I could no longer remember which door was which. I tried to remember the tour Kate had given me yesterday, but she, trying so hard to put me at ease, had hardly seemed to know the house herself. I remembered steadying myself on the banister, and looking through a doorway at butterflies drawn on tile in bath crayon. It must have been the door at the top of the stairs. I crept in, and pissed by the light of my phone screen. I was adept at moving around a home unnoticed. When I returned to bed the crying was still there, but the cold water from the sink had made things seem more solid, and I fell asleep quickly. I could not tell whether it was Catriona or me crying. It seemed like one and then the other; it seemed sometimes like I was her and she was me. At times it was both, but even then I could not say who each of us was crying for. We were in a bedroom, and the door was locked, and because I knew it was locked neither of us tried the handle. The dream was coming apart by then. Sometimes Simon pounded at the door to be let in, and sometimes we pounded to be let out. Sometimes he was in the corner, saying nothing, but sneering; and sometimes he was setting the house alight. Sometimes I looked at Catriona, and her face was bloody, and I thought that it was me who had hit her. I tried to remember what I had played at the piano, but I couldn't. I woke up, and the sun was rising, and the house was quiet. I came down to breakfast wearing the top Kate had left out for me. Not a spare one, I could tell, but a Sunday morning favourite, thick and soft. The socks were hers too, and, though I tried to forget it, the pants. She asked me how I slept, and I smiled and said something that wasn't an answer. I couldn't talk about the crying. They might think I was mad, if they didn't already. Worse, they might have known that it wasn't the house crying at all. She asked me if the clothes were all right, and I said yes, thank you. Their daughter said the top suited me, and I thanked her too. And Michael, who had not said good morning, swirled the coffee in his cup and said: "We'll add them to the bill."

It was a tight space I hid in. My arms were snaked where they could fit, one above me, one to the side. I had one foot on the floor, but little of my weight on it: it was the walls pressed front and back that held me up. The foot kept me from slipping down each time I breathed out, but I could not breathe out or in much, and besides, not breathing was good, quiet, safe. In a place so narrow, I was sure I could not be found. I hoped they would not find the others, either. Not all of them, at least. I needed one of them to pull me free.

Halfway through Jon's set, during the awful quiet of a joke not landing, a cat came down the aisle. It miaowed in the silence, and suddenly no one was looking at him, thank God, They were all looking at the cat. And so was he: he held up a hand to screen out the stage lights, and said, "Toby?" The cat miaowed again. Like that he was saved. It would be the most memorable five of the night. Jon and Toby had the crowd's full attention, and two minutes left. He climbed down from the stage, scooped his cat up in his arms, and carried him home.

There was only room for two of the cases. She would have to leave one on the platform. It shouldn't have mattered which she chose: they were all essential, and she couldn't afford to replace even half the contents of any of them. But in one, stuffed firm into the toe of a shoe that no longer fit, there was a bundle of letters and a broken watch. She would have left the rest to take those, if she could only remember which case they were in.

It was strange to see the train leave with her on it. I had watched those trains so many times, sitting on the footbridge and throwing sweets and chips and cigarette ends at them as they passed beneath. They were never more than a part of the landscape, like leaves floating down the river. But when she left I believed I could have said which carriage she was sat in. I believed she could see me looking just as if I had gone to the platform to wave her off. I watched and watched, wanting to feel the instant when the red lights disappeared. The horizon was so much further than I thought.

Old Gorton said he stitched something special at the heart of the dolls he gave us. A magic spell, said I. Kimi, who was older, said it would be a lock of hair from somebody he loved, and joked it was our mother. We both agreed it was best not knowing, but of course, one afternoon when I was in her care we cut them open and delved into the guts. In mine was a little gold ring with a jewel in it. In hers, a shard of glass that cut her thumb and left the doll with a deep red stain across it.

There was a different kind of light in those days. It was a bright, brilliant white; it's how you knew what white was. It made crisp shadows that didn't change their size as they moved. In the morning and the evening it turned deep gold, and the shadows stretched out forever, and the skies... I can't begin to describe the skies. The plants remember. They stretch out like that, looking for a light that isn't there. You must too, somewhere in your bones. I'm sorry for it.

The night after I was supposed to leave I found a feather on my pillow, long and black with hints of green where it met the light. A magical thing, I supposed, but when I touched it to my face I could smell the bird on it, as earthly as a flying thing can be. I tucked it between the pages of my book, but when I woke it had vanished, and I had lost my page. I left that day, to show I'd got the message, though I hadn't.

Welcome to the last issue of _Scattering_ 's first year. When I started this project, I had written a year of daily stories and was curious as to whether I could manage something longer every week. I figured that if I gave it a go and it proved too much, I could stop after a year and still feel I had made something worth making. One year on, I'm still curious. I have made it through the year with a little help from my old drafts when life got in the way. I have, by no small measure, written more and finished more and shared more than ever before in my life. Some weeks I feel I could build up a comfortable buffer of stories and cruise along comfortably. Other weeks I feel it's inevitable that I will soon have to post the seven daily stories followed by an apology note. This time last year, I thought I would mix something more like blog posts in among the fiction – perhaps on alternate weeks, or when there was a fifth Sunday in the month. I soon found out that almost everything I wanted to say was better said through stories. And _Scattering_ has helped me to say those things more than anything else I've tried. So, can I keep it going for another year? Let's find out. * * * ## This week’s daily stories ### Monday The wind blew from the ocean across the hills, and it made you want to blow with it. I pulled up a big fistful of coarse grass, and watched the sand disappear from the roots, stripped by hungry air until the skeleton was showing. Then I opened my fist, and let the grass be carried away too. I hadn’t noticed, until then, that the hill was a dune, and its thin coat of green was all that held it together. I pulled up more and more and more, wanting to feel the earth slip. ### Tuesday “I sometimes think about how you could study a single grain of sand all your life, and you’d never know all there was to know about it.” He was rolling something between finger and thumb as he said it. It might have been sand, but it might just as well have been earwax. “Even if you could scan the whole structure, reproduce it exactly, you’d never know all the places it had been.” He flicked whatever it was into the sea. He never asked me what I thought. He said he didn’t need to. He knew me so completely. ### Wednesday I was woken at three in the morning by a squeaking at my bedroom door. The mouse had brought a cat in. She wanted to show it off, and I couldn’t fault her for that. The cat looked back and forth between us and gave a pitiful little meow, while little Heidi pranced about triumphantly. With a sigh, I hoisted myself upright, carried the cat downstairs, and put it out into the street. When I got back upstairs, Heidi was snoozing away on my pillow. ### Thursday In the end, it was the salt that ran out first. It was a victory, of sorts: nobody imagined we would outlast the supply. Perhaps if we had, we might have stretched it out longer. Before too long, we were sore, and tired, and confused, and somebody said: this is how it might have felt, at the end. This is how it might have felt to live the full span of our lives. ### Friday After half-full mugs of gritty soup, she was handed a scrap of wood shaped like a rifle. “Don’t let anyone get a proper look,” the man in the cap told her, “and if they get too close, whack ’em with the fat end.” She tried to imagine how a real gun would feel: what it would weigh; how it would balance; how it would jump when she fired it. It felt smooth, like the arm of an old chair. It had passed through many hands before hers. ### Saturday As the motor whirred and my passport began to disappear into the shredder, I wondered when it would start to feel real. Not halfway, and not when the blades started struggling. Not when there was so little left that to grab it would have cost me my fingers. Not when it was gone, and the motor fell silent. I was a thousand miles away from home, and smiling: for the first time in my life, I had no idea what I would do next. ### Sunday Tired of all the waste she piled upon the world, she learned to make rope from old clothes. It came out sturdy, but beautiful too, all the colours swirling down the length of it like a stick of rock. She hung it from stout iron hooks in the garage, and now and then she would take some down and run her hands along it, the way her mother used to do with her plaited hair. She had no use for this much rope, and never would. * * * ## I have been reading... * Something Rotten__ and __ First Among Sequels__ by Jasper Fforde. Rereading these so close together, I notice how delightfully incoherent they are. Fforde happily rips up bits of his world to tell a different story, but his characters are always firmly consistent. * "The Typing Lady" by Ruth Ozeki, an issue of One Story that I misplaced for a while. I felt a little odd about this story when I finished it: it ends with a tidy summation of what it's about that seemed a little too pat for the story it followed. It felt that there must be more going on that I hadn't put my finger on. From Ozeki's interview on the _One Story_ website, I learned that the story is disguised as an author's note in her new collection, which makes perfect sense of it, and makes me want to read it again in context. I almost made it through this week without reading anything that mentioned Napoleon Bonaparte, but when I stole my son's Phoenix on Saturday night, there he was on page 30. Foiled again. If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops. * * * ## Boundary Line When drier weather came, I built a fence. There was too much space without it. The house sat in acres of land, suitable for grazing and with planning approved for use as a campsite. I didn't want those things. I wanted emptiness. But I didn't want to have to look at it. I built the fence high, and planted trees and climbing plants around the inside. I had felt out the plot with my feet and my throat, as large as I could bear it, and ordered twice as much timber as I needed. I put the corner posts in first, with string stretched between them, marking out the line of the rest. I do not know if this is how you build a fence. But it is a way to mark a space. At the end furthest from the house, I put in a gate, which I opened once to feel how smoothly it swung, then fitted with a sturdy padlock. When the fence was finished, I lay on the grass with nails still in my pockets and splinters still in my fingers and looked up at the sky, which I never saw from the house. I thought how anyone I had ever known might be looking at this sky, but you couldn't get there from here. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Tired of all the waste she piled upon the world, she learned to make rope from old clothes. It came out sturdy, but beautiful too, all the colours swirling down the length of it like a stick of rock. She hung it from stout iron hooks in the garage, and now and then she would take some down and run her hands along it, the way her mother used to do with her plaited hair. She had no use for this much rope, and never would.

As the motor whirred and my passport began to disappear into the shredder, I wondered when it would start to feel real. Not halfway, and not when the blades started struggling. Not when there was so little left that to grab it would have cost me my fingers. Not when it was gone, and the motor fell silent. I was a thousand miles away from home, and smiling: for the first time in my life, I had no idea what I would do next.

After half-full mugs of gritty soup, she was handed a scrap of wood shaped like a rifle. "Don't let anyone get a proper look," the man in the cap told her, "and if they get too close, whack 'em with the fat end." She tried to imagine how a real gun would feel: what it would weigh; how it would balance; how it would jump when she fired it. It felt smooth, like the arm of an old chair. It had passed through many hands before hers.

In the end, it was the salt that ran out first. It was a victory, of sorts: nobody imagined we would outlast the supply. Perhaps if we had, we might have stretched it out longer. Before too long, we were sore, and tired, and confused, and somebody said: this is how it might have felt, at the end. This is how it might have felt to live the full span of our lives.

I was woken at three in the morning by a squeaking at my bedroom door. The mouse had brought a cat in. She wanted to show it off, and I couldn't fault her for that. The cat looked back and forth between us and gave a pitiful little meow, while little Heidi pranced about triumphantly. With a sigh, I hoisted myself upright, carried the cat downstairs, and put it out into the street. When I got back upstairs, Heidi was snoozing away on my pillow.

"I sometimes think about how you could study a single grain of sand all your life, and you'd never know all there was to know about it." He was rolling something between finger and thumb as he said it. It might have been sand, but it might just as well have been earwax. "Even if you could scan the whole structure, reproduce it exactly, you'd never know all the places it had been." He flicked whatever it was into the sea. He never asked me what I thought. He said he didn't need to. He knew me so completely.

The wind blew from the ocean across the hills, and it made you want to blow with it. I pulled up a big fistful of coarse grass, and watched the sand disappear from the roots, stripped by hungry air until the skeleton was showing. Then I opened my fist, and let the grass be carried away too. I hadn't noticed, until then, that the hill was a dune, and its thin coat of green was all that held it together. I pulled up more and more and more, wanting to feel the earth slip.

If I have timed things right, this is just the right moment for you to be infuriated by an early mention of Christmas. If you are reading this on the website, the picture of Christmas presents should have you frothing and spitting. If you got this by email, you should have briefly mistaken it for an early marketing message and started mentally composing an angry reply. If you are reading this some time after publication and by chance it is almost Christmas – come back in September. This week's longer story is about getting ready for Christmas too early. Please rest assured that I have not bought a single Christmas present yet. * * * ## This week’s daily stories ### Monday They call it “aphantasia”, and it’s nice to have a word, but it’s not quite right for me. I can picture nothing in my mind’s eye except an old breaker’s yard. That I can see vividly. It is out of use, so all the vehicles are rusty, and much of the space has been cleared for some other purpose. There are footprints in the dust, and the morning sun shines golden on the painted sign. I cannot picture an apple, or a forest, or a bird. Sometimes I imagine a piece of shattered glass or a wire fence and I think something has changed, but then I see it is just a part of that one scene. Sometimes I imagine a sunrise, but it is always the sunrise over the yard. Sometimes I imagine a face, but it is always the face of the man there, on his knees in the dirt. ### Tuesday I saw the last of the summer sun light up an aeroplane, and I imagined that aeroplane exploding, right there in the sky while I watched. The fireball would hang in the sky, and debris and people would rain down on us. We would think of nothing else for weeks. And then it happened, just the way I was imagining it. I wondered how many people had been on it, and why nobody had ever told me I could do this. I never looked at the sky again. ### Wednesday Inside Grandma’s bag was Grandma’s purse, and inside Grandma’s purse were two ten franc pieces covered in indelible scarlet ink. Her real purse was kept elsewhere, away from thieving hands: when she gave us money, which she often did, it was a long and secretive process. My sister and I would dare each other to steal a coin or two, each of us thinking the other didn’t know the trick, and at six o’ clock our dad would come in to pick us up, his eyes low and his fingertips red. ### Thursday One end of the yarn was tied to Lena’s gatepost, and had been since the house was her parents’. It ran snug across the wall and into a hedge, emerging at the other end and soaring off to tangle with the telephone wires. Here and there, in the tight crevices of knots, you could still see the bright yellow it had once been. She had never followed it. Perhaps, once, she had wondered what was at the other end: when she was small, and knew how to ask questions. Now each day she told herself that she would cut it down tomorrow. When finally she went out with the scissors, there was someone waiting. He had followed it all the way to her. ### Friday We inherited a frame with no painting. It was a beautiful thing, hand carved, with all the little faults that a human hand creates. We never could agree what should go in it. Every painting we both liked was the wrong size. We hung it on the wall just as it was, saying it would make us look at the ordinary in a different way. It didn’t. We just looked at the frame. ### Saturday Some days it was hard to think what to write in his gratitude journal. Grateful for my arms, grateful for my legs, grateful for my head. The first time it worked: he fell asleep tingling with how golden it was just to be. The next time he had to go further. Grateful for his fingers, his toes, his lips. His nose and his ears. His breath and his bowels. One day he wrote: I am grateful that I have an eye left. By then, he couldn't tell if it was true. ### Sunday Two yards from the bus stop and twenty from the school, a man crouches, one hand bracing on the railing. Behind him is a girl almost as tall as he is, with a fluffy blue hairband and delight in her eyes. She climbs onto his back, and he stands, face red, breath held to keep him stable, a little quiver at the knees. As he half falls the rest of the way to the gate, he wheezes: "One of these days, you'll get too big for this." * * * ## I have been reading... * Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde. I am not normally a big re-reader, but I'm returning to these now because the series is concluding soon. And what a treat, in a week when I've been tired and coldy, to read something familiar, comforting, and very silly. * Wunderkind, a little volume of four stories by Carson McCullers, taken from The Ballad of the Sad Café. This has been on our bookshelf for a long time, but I haven't picked it up because my idiot brain repeatedly mistook it as being by Cormac McCarthy. I'm sure I'll read some Cormac McCarthy one day but I haven't felt the urge so far. This, on the other hand, was very much up my street. If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops. * * * ## Ready for Christmas I have never been this ready, not for anything. It is mid-September, and at the back of my wardrobe, hidden away from prying eyes beneath an old blanket, there is a wall of parcels. They are wrapped. They are tagged. And I am afraid. Never before have I completed my Christmas shopping before Christmas Eve. Now, this preparation that I was so proud of is a portent. My wall cannot possibly hold. There will be consequences. It is obvious what will happen first. My wife will leave. That will take out her gifts, and her family's. Of course, I could strive to be the bigger person. I could give them all their presents, expecting nothing in return, and show them that I value them even though the marriage is over. Or I could let Amy give them, so she doesn't have to worry about Christmas shopping while going through the pain of a divorce. So I can make it work, if she simply leaves, which means it will have to be worse that that. She will leave after an affair with my boss, and they will conspire to spread malicious lies about me. That way, I will be too humiliated to give the presents, and nobody will be willing to take them. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Two yards from the bus stop and twenty from the school, a man crouches, one hand bracing on the railing. Behind him is a girl almost as tall as he is, with a fluffy blue hairband and delight in her eyes. She climbs onto his back, and he stands, face red, breath held to keep him stable, a little quiver at the knees. As he half falls the rest of the way to the gate, he wheezes: "One of these days, you'll get too big for this."

Some days it was hard to think what to write in his gratitude journal. _Grateful for my arms, grateful for my legs, grateful for my head._ The first time it worked: he fell asleep tingling with how golden it was just to be. The next time he had to go further. Grateful for his fingers, his toes, his lips. His nose and his ears. His breath and his bowels. One day he wrote: _I am grateful that I have an eye left._ By then, he couldn't tell if it was true.

We inherited a frame with no painting. It was a beautiful thing, hand carved, with all the little faults that a human hand creates. We never could agree what should go in it. Every painting we both liked was the wrong size. We hung it on the wall just as it was, saying it would make us look at the ordinary in a different way. It didn't. We just looked at the frame.

One end of the yarn was tied to Lena's gatepost, and had been since the house was her parents'. It ran snug across the wall and into a hedge, emerging at the other end and soaring off to tangle with the telephone wires. Here and there, in the tight crevices of knots, you could still see the bright yellow it had once been. She had never followed it. Perhaps, once, she had wondered what was at the other end: when she was small, and knew how to ask questions. Now each day she told herself that she would cut it down tomorrow. When finally she went out with the scissors, there was someone waiting. He had followed it all the way to her.

Inside Grandma's bag was Grandma's purse, and inside Grandma's purse were two ten franc pieces covered in indelible scarlet ink. Her real purse was kept elsewhere, away from thieving hands: when she gave us money, which she often did, it was a long and secretive process. My sister and I would dare each other to steal a coin or two, each of us thinking the other didn't know the trick, and at six o' clock our dad would come in to pick us up, his eyes low and his fingertips red.

I saw the last of the summer sun light up an aeroplane, and I imagined that aeroplane exploding, right there in the sky while I watched. The fireball would hang in the sky, and debris and people would rain down on us. We would think of nothing else for weeks. And then it happened, just the way I was imagining it. I wondered how many people had been on it, and why nobody had ever told me I could do this. I never looked at the sky again.

They call it "aphantasia", and it's nice to have a word, but it's not quite right or me. I can picture nothing in my mind's eye except an old breaker's yard. That I can see vividly. It is out of use, so all the vehicles are rusty, and much of the space has been cleared for some other purpose. There are footprints in the dust, and the morning sun shines golden on the painted sign. I cannot picture an apple, or a forest, or a bird. Sometimes I imagine a piece of shattered glass or a wire fence and I think something has changed, but then I see it is just a part of that one scene. Sometimes I imagine a sunrise, but it is always the sunrise over the yard. Sometimes I imagine a face, but it is always the face of the man there, on his knees in the dirt.

You might expect the hardest part of writing _Scattering_ to be the stories, but the things that really test my mettle are a) thinking of something to put in the introduction, and b) saying something about what I've been reading that doesn't make me worry about looking stupid. This week I am drawing a blank on a), hence this descent into meta-commentary. I recommend scrolling past and getting on with the stories. Maybe not the one from Sunday. I apologise for the one from Sunday. * * * ## This week’s daily stories ### Monday Liam’s dad is stupider than my dad, just like Liam is stupider than me. He never gets my riddles. You have to tell him everything twice, and then he just pretends to understand to shut you up. So how is it that he can tell you any kind of tree just from looking at a leaf? How come he drives everywhere without a sat nav and never gets lost? I want to do those things, too. But I don’t want to be stupid. ### Tuesday I shed my skin on a Thursday evening. I had been itching for it all week, feeling the squeeze of it when I sat down or bent my arms. I should have waited for the weekend, but I felt like I would burst. I rang in sick on Friday, with the phone on speaker. My hand was too tender to hold it. On Sunday I got my first cut: a little nick that hardly bled, but still, my perfect new skin was spoiled. ### Wednesday Coral has moon dust in her lungs, and one day it will kill her. She doesn’t seem to mind. But it has made her fearful: she obsesses over healthy food and handwashing; she will not swim with us in the ocean or ride her motorcycle. Coral, who always wanted to go everywhere, will not travel. She loves that moon dust in her lungs. She is proud to have it there. She does not want to die of anything else. ### Thursday I drew the cow all right angles, the way I imagined them. I hadn’t seen many animals that weren’t people or rats, and to me a cow seemed to have more to do with machines than anything living. I showed it to the children, and they laughed. They asked me to teach them to draw a cow that way. But I didn’t know to teach them. I drew it just the way it looked. ### Friday I followed the trail of pebbles, though I had found it in the middle and I didn’t know which way it led. To a home or a frontier; to a safe place or a dangerous one. It didn’t much matter: the home would not be mine anyway. I liked how it turned me in ways I would never have gone, how I saw the forest from strange angles. By the time it looped around to where I started, the world seemed so changed I didn’t know where I was. ### Saturday Everyone at my wedding wore grey. Grey suits, grey dresses. Even the babies were in little grey babygros. As they gathered in the church, clouds gathered in the sky. They all said it was a coincidence. They all said they were mortified. I thought that was worse than if it had been a joke: that our love didn’t inspire one of them to colour. But we threw a party for our anniversary, and the room looked like wildflower meadow. ### Sunday Everyone tried not to look at the thing that fell out of Wilson's ear. They looked at their laptops, or the presentation on the big screen, or the nervous young associate speaking in front of it. But then the thing that fell out of Wilson's ear started moving – twitching – crawling – and nobody could pretend any longer. They watched it wriggle across the table, drawn to the bright light of the projector. They watched it struggle up onto the casing, and they watched its half-shadow appear across the slides as its translucent body eclipsed the lens. They heard it sizzle in the heat of the bulb, and they heard the tiny noise its dessicated body made as it landed on the table again. Then everyone went back to ignoring it, and ignoring each other's faces, and ignoring the tongue that lolled from Wilson's slack mouth. * * * ## I have been reading... * Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, an account of six years working on public policy at Facebook/Meta. I'm not sure there's much new to learn about Facebook's bad behaviour by reading this, but it does offer compelling portraits of the personalities that created and enabled it. * The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I'm re-reading Fforde's series of literature-hopping alternate history comic thrillers ready for the final novel's publication in October. Infuriatingly, there is a mention of Napoleon Bonaparte early on, and so my pledge not to read any more novels involving Napoleon this year has been unexpectedly broken. I'm reading the new 25th anniversary edition, but I'm not sure I can recommend it: the annotations are fun, but the text has a surprising number of new errors and upgrades will surely be a nightmare. Then again, it's always hard to say what's an error when reading a Thursday Next book. If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops. * * * ## Quick Return For some reason, there is still a video shop on Pooley Street. We passed it on the way to the curry house, and the others said it must be laundering money: the perfect thing for it, no stock turnover to account for, just tapes checked out and tapes checked in. But I thought that was stupid. Because after all, we noticed it. We thought it remarkable, and wondered how it could still be there. A little too conspicuous. The others are on their way to the pub now, and for some reason I am in the video shop, a little drunk, carrying my bag of leftovers. There are no DVDs here, certainly no Blu-rays: just tapes. Like a retro thing. I came in out of curiosity, a cap to the evening that would take the sting out of leaving early. Something to send to the group chat while they are laughing together. But the moment I take one of those chunky cases down from the wall I know I will be renting a film tonight. I will take it home and watch in in a tiny, fuzzy letterbox or – better yet – crudely cropped in from glorious anamorphic widescreen. I browse for a while. It feels good to pick up cases and flip them over, after years of infinite scrolling and autoplaying trailers. It feels good even though the empty cases weigh less than my phone, and I know it will feel better when I have the satisfying heft of a cassette in my hand. I look at a few classics I have never seen, at straight-to-video crap with outlandish plots and stills on the back that avoid showing off the special effects. I look at films I have heard of, but do not recognise. I am sure that _Rocky Balboa_ came out too late for VHS. It makes me feel like a kid, being in here. I thought it would when I walked past, before the curry, but when I stepped through the door I decided I was wrong. I've been back to all sorts of places I went when I was little. My childhood home, and the park down the road from it. The National Railway Museum. Alton Towers. They all make me feel old. Everything is so small, and so simple. But here, everything is enormous. The racks run higher than I can reach. The cardboard cutouts are bigger than life-size: Schwarzenegger is vast and unending, and DeVito taller than me. The popcorn smells like my head is in the warmer, like my lungs are going to turn inside out. I feel my eyes skipping over any box with an 18 certificate in the corner. ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Everyone tried not to look at the thing that fell out of Wilson's ear. They looked at their laptops, or the presentation on the big screen, or the nervous young associate speaking in front of it. But then the thing that fell out of Wilson's ear started moving – twitching – crawling – and nobody could pretend any longer. They watched it wriggle across the table, drawn to the bright light of the projector. They watched it struggle up onto the casing, and they watched its half-shadow appear across the slides as its translucent body eclipsed the lens. They heard it sizzle in the heat of the bulb, and they heard the tiny noise its dessicated body made as it landed on the table again. Then everyone went back to ignoring it, and ignoring each other's faces, and ignoring the tongue that lolled from Wilson's slack mouth.

Everyone at my wedding wore grey. Grey suits, grey dresses. Even the babies were in little grey babygros. As they gathered in the church, clouds gathered in the sky. They all said it was a coincidence. They all said they were mortified. I thought that was worse than if it had been a joke: that our love didn't inspire one of them to colour. But we threw a party for our anniversary, and the room looked like wildflower meadow.

I followed the trail of pebbles, though I had found it in the middle and I didn't know which way it led. To a home or a frontier; to a safe place or a dangerous one. It didn't much matter: the home would not be mine anyway. I liked how it turned me in ways I would never have gone, how I saw the forest from strange angles. By the time it looped around to where I started, the world seemed so changed I didn't know where I was.

I drew the cow all right angles, the way I imagined them. I hadn't seen many animals that weren't people or rats, and to me a cow seemed to have more to do with machines than anything living. I showed it to the children, and they laughed. They asked me to teach them to draw a cow that way. But I didn't know to teach them. I drew it just the way it looked.

Coral has moon dust in her lungs, and one day it will kill her. She doesn't seem to mind. But it has made her fearful: she obsesses over healthy food and handwashing; she will not swim with us in the ocean or ride her motorcycle. Coral, who always wanted to go everywhere, will not travel. She loves that moon dust in her lungs. She is proud to have it there. She does not want to die of anything else.

I shed my skin on a Thursday evening. I had been itching for it all week, feeling the squeeze of it when I sat down or bent my arms. I should have waited for the weekend, but I felt like I would burst. I rang in sick on Friday, with the phone on speaker. My hand was too tender to hold it. On Sunday I got my first cut: a little nick that hardly bled, but still, my perfect new skin was spoiled.

Liam's dad is stupider than my dad, just like Liam is stupider than me. He never gets my riddles. You have to tell him everything twice, and then he just pretends to understand to shut you up. So how is it that he can tell you any kind of tree just from looking at a leaf? How come he drives everywhere without a sat nav and never gets lost? I want to do those things, too. But I don't want to be stupid.

Having made it through both the school summer holidays and _War and Peace_ , I am feeling a new sense of lightness and possibility. Soon autumn will begin its great renewal, and as such I have bought myself new socks. This week's story – which, being the first of the month, is free for everyone – is about things stuck to lampposts. I used to regularly walk past a sticker that said "Remember to do that thing!" and it saved my bacon on numerous occasions. I recommend paying attention to the stickers on the lampposts near you: they can be very enriching. But remember to carry a metal implement of some kind, to scrape off the fascist ones. * * * ## This week’s daily stories ### Monday That morning they were out in hi-vis jackets moving around all the street signs. Having lived on Chapel Road all my life I now lived on Oakley Street. “Must be worried about spies,” said Peter next door. “Trying to throw them off.” The post stopped coming, and all my visitors were late. When I filled in a form, I wasn’t sure which address to put. I wondered why they had changed the signs in the daytime, why they had worn hi-vis. I wondered if I was a spy, and they had found me out. ### Tuesday Mrs Geiger had a globe on her desk that we weren’t allowed to touch. Since she didn’t teach geography, she never touched it, either. But when she changed our seats around and I moved closer to the front, I saw that all the countries on it were wrong – not just the names, but the shapes. There were seas where there should have been land, and continents I felt uneasy to look at. When she left the room, I went to turn it, to see the other side of this uncanny world, but my reaching fingertips burned. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure where I was standing. ### Wednesday The turns of the staircase grew tighter as I descended, the steps steeper, until it was only the closeness of the walls that kept me from falling. There was a cold smell in the air, and an unearthly quiet. I turned to climb back up, but there was no longer anywhere to set my feet. Below me, the hole narrowed. ### Thursday I nestled the things in among the rocks and plants, trying to make it look natural, trying not to show any preference – though I admit, I tucked the yoghurt pot a little further into the leaves than I might have. Then I stepped away to let him choose. A few days later, he was all dressed up in the little glass bottle. I lifted his old shell from the tank, the only real shell I had seen in a year. It was so light, so beautiful. My fingers twitched to crush it into powder. ### Friday Ro’s tattoo was one big maze. It started at the left side of his heart and walked his whole body to arrive back at the right. I always thought one day I would find the way through, but there were so many wrong turns, so many false passages and dead ends. I could never remember my past mistakes well enough. After the surgery, the scars took all the walls down: unnaturally pale skin where there had been dark blue lines. You could hop straight across, left to right, right to left. But the true path was lost to me forever. ### Saturday Hot buttered toast. They all had hot buttered toast, and they got it from somewhere. They got it from somewhere, and none of them thought to tell me. They all just licked their greasy fingers, and I sat there, not even hungry, but feeling stupid that I hadn’t found the hot buttered toast. ### Sunday Since there's nobody else to do it, I tend his grave. Pull the weeds, clean the bird mess. Sometimes I bring flowers, since there's nobody else to do it. I bring a soft brush to clean inside the lettering, and I bring a flask of tea. I sit there and I let him hear all the things I want to say, since there's nobody else to do it, and since he can no longer tell me 'no'. * * * ## I have been reading... * The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder), on the surface an inventive but straightforward dystopia, but really something much more metaphysical. It reminded me of The City & The City. * "It Happens" by Anthony Walker, the latest from One Story. I find it hard to feel much enthusiasm for stories about the US military, however thoughtful they may be, just because of how saturated our culture is by the topic. This story seems to be aware of, and struggling with, that problem. When the narrator says of his PTSD psychosis, "You won't see that in a movie", there is a sense that the author knows he isn't quite right; his later brief reflection on modern war literature recasts the whole story. * "Cybernetics and Ghosts" by Italo Calvino (translated by Patrick Creagh), in the collection The Literature Machine. This 1967 essay about the prospect of literature produced by machines is more interesting than anything I've read on the topic during the current LLM frenzy. I'm still chewing it over. If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops. * * * ## Lamp Posts It was Tuesday, and the last late schoolchildren were gone from the streets, so Clem went out to look at the lampposts. She had a route, and she kept to it. Otherwise it was hard to know what had changed. She wondered if the dogs she saw sniffing and weeing did the same, but they were mostly on leads, so it wasn't up to them. A bit sad, she thought, to communicate only by wee and have even that taken from you. There was nothing new on the first one, the one that glared in at her bedroom window like sunshine all through the night. There was rarely much of anything on that one. It was in the middle of a long run with no corners or shops: a poor place to find an audience. But at the mouth of the little passage down to the park there was a big black sticker with a shiny gold leaf filling it, and a mobile number. Clem half knew what that meant, and she knew it was nothing that interested her. Below it, the sign for the lost cat had run in the rain. People sealed them up in plastic, then put holes through to tie them up, and the holes let the water in. Then the cats looked melted and you couldn't read the phone number. Clem always looked out for the cats (and the dogs, and even the tortoise, one time). She had even seen one of them once, a little fluffy ginger thing. The sign had said it answered to the name Talisker, and it didn't answer for Clem but it did look at her, and when she imagined it in black and white it looked just like the photo. But that was a few minutes from Art's shop, so by the time she had borrowed his phone, Talisker was gone. Clem tried to remember how the cat on this sign had looked last Tuesday, but now she could only picture it melted. They sometimes did turn up like that, if they ran out on the big road. But then there wasn't much use in the posters. Clem thought that a spoiled poster probably meant the cat had been found. Otherwise you would go out and fix it. But when you got your cat back, maybe you didn't worry much about going to take down your posters. Nobody ever took anything down from the lampposts. Nothing of their own, anyway. At the corner with the big road, stickers kept getting scratched up and stuck over and written on. On other lampposts, things sometimes got written on in a friendly way, a joke or a little chat, but what was happening at the corner didn't look friendly. Clem couldn't see what it was about. The stickers all said things about _protect_ and _defend_ and things like that, but people kept scratching out one lot and putting up their own. It didn't seem like much to argue about. Clem thought if you wanted to keep one lot of people safe then keeping another lot of people safe could only help. Maybe it was a football thing. A lot of the stickers were about football, and those ones didn't have to make sense. There were some good new things on the main road. A poster with tear-off tabs, offering Spanish lessons. Clem took a tab, as she always did, although she was pretty sure she didn't want to learn Spanish. She was already learning French, and thought it might be confusing. There was another one a little further along, but they had forgotten to cut the tabs on that one, so Clem did her best to tear along the lines ready for the next person. There were some bright new stickers she didn't understand, with strange pictures and words she didn't recognise. She used to copy them into a little notebook and look them up on the computers at the library on a Tuesday afternoon, but she had stopped doing that now. It was never anything as interesting as it looked from the sticker. Usually it was a band, and the computers at the library didn't have headphones anyway. Once she sent off for the CD they were selling, but it never showed up. Up by the traffic lights, near the temple, there was a big one she hadn't seen before, a sheet of paper like a missing pet poster but without a pet on it, slipped into one of those plastic bags with zips that never kept the rain out for long. It said: > be part of your commUNITY That was exciting. She looked at it for a while. It looked properly new, like if she ran down the road she might catch the person who put it up. She wondered if they had a pile of them to put up all over, or if it was just this one. She hadn't seen any others, not even by the two pubs, where the posts were always busy. Normally she would have carried on past the traffic lights and gone home down the other side of the park. Instead she turned around and walked as fast as she could to Art's shop. Art was sat behind the counter doing a crossword, filling up the boxes as smoothly as if it were a dot-to-dot, but he looked up as she came in. "Hello, Clem," he said. "We don't usually see you at this time. What a treat." "Hi Art," she said. "Just need a few things." Art had a little wall at the back with all the things he sold that you couldn't eat. He had big marker pens and sticky tape and even those zippy plastic bags that didn't really keep the rain off, but the only paper was tiny little notebooks or big rolls of wrapping paper. The notebooks were too small but the wrapping paper would probably be white on the inside. She brought a roll to the counter, with two big markers, some sticky tape, and a packet of the bags. "Someone's birthday?" Art asked. "Not much of a present," he said, waving the bags in the air. "Do you have any of those black tie-up things?" said Clem. "The clicky ones people use on lampposts." Art looked thoughtful. "Black tie up things..." he said. "No, I don't know what you mean, sorry." "You put one end through the other," Clem said, "and they go pzzzzzzz." "Ah, zip ties!" Art looked triumphant. "Zip ties, zip ties. Cable ties, they call them, too. Very, very useful." He smiled his big smile, then said, "No, I don't sell them. We have string?" Art did not in fact have string, but he found some old blue packaging twine under the counter and let her have that. Clem didn't have the patience to take it all home. She sat on the pavement by the traffic lights and wrote out her message on the back of the wrapping paper. It said: > Yes please with a little smiley face. And because this seemed like a very slow way to carry on a conversation, she added: > I'm Clem Then she folded a bit of extra paper behind to make it stiffer, slid it into a bag, and taped over the edges to keep the rain out. She made little loops of tape at the top and bottom to put the string through, and tied it up just below the other sign, good and tight so it wouldn't slip. It didn't look quite like the other signs. Clem hardly ever saw a handwritten one. They were all printed. If you saw handwriting, either it was because someone had put the wrong phone number or it was someone drawing over what someone else had put up. She supposed she could have done that. There was plenty of room at the bottom of the other sign, and it would have been easier. But this way felt more polite, and besides, she wanted to join in. Normally she only looked at the posts on a Tuesday. She tried not to look at them even in passing the rest of the week, because that would make Tuesday less special. But she didn't want to miss anything, so on Wednesday morning she went out and looked at her sign, and on Thursday and Friday too. There was nothing new there, which felt a little disappointing even though it was what she expected. But it was still nice to look at it. Clem had lovely handwriting, and she was proud of it. It had come through all right even on the shiny paper, even writing crouched down on the pavement. When she was little she had awful writing and all the teachers made fun of her, pretending she had written silly things. So one summer she practised and practised, and got books about calligraphy out of the library, and when she came back she won a prize for it. They even asked her to write the big message in the card when the headteacher was retiring, and she told them to fuck off, and when they rang her mum, her mum told them that was fair enough. Clem tried to be kind to everyone, but she only made beautiful things for people who were kind back. On Saturday there was a new sign, underneath hers. It was a little one, and it only had tape over it to keep it dry. It said: > hi Clem And that was it. It wasn't printed, which made sense since it was just for her. It was written in blue pen on a little white card, and they had stapled it right on to her sign, which meant the rain would get in. But that was OK. They weren't meant to last forever. Clem wasn't sure what she was supposed to say next. The commUNITY sign had made it sound like whoever put it up had a plan. She got her things out of her bag and chewed on the pen for a while, until she got worried about it leaking ink into her mouth. Then she made a little loop out of twine and twiddled that around on her fingers instead. She thought that she should probably ask a question. That was supposed to help people like you, and it would mean they had to write a bit more, too. She thought since they had started out writing about the community she should say something about that. So she wrote: > What do you like about living here? I like it when the park is busy. (Sometimes, in the summer, there were so many people in the park that you couldn't tell the groups apart, it looked like everyone was having one big picnic, and sometimes it turned into that, with everybody sharing and the kids all playing together. She didn't want to write all that, but she thought the commUNITY person would understand it anyway.) She didn't bother with the extra tape on the edges of the bag this time, or even with the twine. She had calmed down a bit, and she wanted to look relaxed. So she just taped it to the post, underneath the other note. The bottom of the whole thing was getting quite low. She had to squat down a bit to do it. On Sunday there was already a reply. She only had time to read it, because she was going to work, but that meant she had time to think of what to write next. The reply was in green pen on a torn-off piece of glossy cardboard, and you could see that the gloss had messed up the writing a bit. It was stuck to her note with little smiley-face stickers, and it said: > I like how everyone always helps each other And Clem thought that was true, like with Art letting her use his phone to try and help with Talisker, even if it hadn't actually worked. Clem never really needed help but she felt like it would be there if she did. So it made Clem happy to read that, but it would have been nice if they had asked a question, too. It felt like she was having to think of everything, even though they had started it all with the commUNITY sign. Still, not everyone knew about how asking questions helped people like you, and remembering that helped Clem to like them anyway. So while she was at work she thought about what she could write back to them. On Monday, she still wasn't sure, but she took her things to the traffic lights anyway. The torn-off piece of cardboard wasn't stuck to her bag anymore: someone had opened the zip and put it inside, and there were three more bits of paper in there, a receipt and a notebook page and a corner of newspaper. The receipt said: > I like sitting outside Sid's cafe with a bacon roll and saying hello to everyone The notebook page said: > I like the craft market at the Scout hut The newspaper corner said: > I like the fine women!!! And they were all in different handwriting. It all looked a bit precarious, so Clem put them in a new bag, and she put tape-tabs on the back to loop the twine through, and she tied it up carefully underneath her sign. Then she cut a little arrow out of the wrapping paper, and taped that on to the sign, too, pointing to the bag and with the colourful side showing. She fixed up the other signs so it wouldn't all blow away, and went home. On Tuesday she did her usual route around the lampposts, but she didn't really look at them properly. It felt a bit like when she played hide and seek with her little cousin, and she kept pretending to look in different hiding places even though she knew he always hid in the cupboard under the stairs. When she got to the post by the traffic lights, there were two new notes in it. One said: > I like the big trees in the park The other said: > I like this lamp post with a little picture of a heart. That one made Clem a little bit teary, but just a little bit. She got out the notebook she had bought from Art's shop. She tore out all the pages, very carefully, and put them in the bag, along with one of the marker pens. Finally, she got out the string of hearts she had cut from the wrapping paper. She wrapped it around the lamppost a couple of times and taped it into place. It wouldn't survive the rain, but it looked nice right now. Then she went home, smiling. By the next Tuesday, the bag was full of answers. _I like the banter at the Sheaf of Wheat. I like singing in the Community Choir. Friendly smiles at Art's shop. Meeting everybody's dog! I don't live here but my love does <3_ She took them out, and then she pulled out her old sign and slid in a new one. It said: > What's your biggest dream? I want to visit New Zealand. (Clem thought New Zealand looked like the most beautiful place in the world, and although she didn't want to visit New Zealand quite as much as she wanted to visit Paris, she thought it was probably a bigger dream, because it was so far away.) She put some more paper in the other bag, and made sure everything was sealed up. Then she replaced the string of hearts, which was looking a bit tatty and flapping in the wind. On the way home, she noticed that some of the stickers about keeping people safe were black and bubbly, like someone had held a cigarette lighter to them. There were new notes in the bag all week, but she decided not to read them until Tuesday. She would take them home and stick them onto a big poster, and then she would put it up with a new question. A couple of times when she went to look she saw people writing their dreams on the little bits of paper. She thought about saying hello but she didn't want them to feel embarrassed. When she went out on Tuesday the lampposts were all bare and clean, except the one at the corner, which still had a scorch mark and some deep scratches. And they all had one little sticker, which wasn't very colourful and wouldn't get you excited to hear music. It said: > FLY-POSTING IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE > AND YOU MAY BE PROSECUTED. > Anything fixed to this lighting equipment will be removed. Up at the traffic lights, everything was gone except a little string of three hearts, trodden firm onto the pavement. Clem wondered if whoever had taken it all would bother to read about everyone's big dreams. She didn't go to check the lampposts the next Tuesday, or the Tuesday after. She tried not to look at them when she went out, especially the one by the traffic lights. She went a different way when she could. After a while she noticed a few things appearing: little stickers that disappeared quickly. Even the lost cat posters had stopped, though Clem hoped that maybe no cats had been lost. One Thursday afternoon, on the way to Art's shop, she saw a little black thing stuck right on top of one of the "FLY-POSTING IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE" stickers. It was a picture of a fly, a photo, life-size and printed on clear plastic so that it looked like it had landed there. She reached out and touched it. She couldn't feel the edge; it had been covered over with clear nail polish. That would keep the rain off, and make it hard to peel up, too. She smiled. There was one on the next post too, and the one after. There was one on all of them. She walked right past Art's shop, right past the corner, right up to the traffic lights. On the lamppost there, a whole swarm of flies had covered up the official-looking sticker. Through a few small gaps, Clem read: > 🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰 > 🪰🪰 YOU MAY 🪰🪰🪰 P🪰OS🪰🪰🪰T🪰🪰🪰 > Anything 🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰🪰 Underneath there was a string of hearts cut out of wrapping paper, and an arrow, pointing across the road to the temple. Clem followed. She could smell the wet paint, and sure enough, there was a little sign warning about it. The frame was painted with red and gold hearts like the wrapping paper from Art's shop, and at the top it said "commUNITY notices". There were plastic doors to keep the rain off, and a box of pins for people to use, but there were only two notices. The first looked handwritten, but it was printed from a photograph. It said: > What's your biggest dream? I want to visit New Zealand. Just underneath, someone had pinned a note. It said: > You're looking at it!!! Clem heard the door of the temple open, but nobody came out: they just stood in the doorway, smiling. It was dark through the door, and she couldn't see them well: couldn't say how old they were, or if they were a man or a woman. Even their clothes blended into the shadow. But she could see that they were kind, and had made something beautiful for her. They waved, and Clem waved back. She had already said about New Zealand, but that was just to make conversation, and she had thought of something else now. So she took a card and a marker from the little box, and she wrote down her biggest dream, and pinned it to the noticeboard.

Since there's nobody else to do it, I tend his grave. Pull the weeds, clean the bird mess. Sometimes I bring flowers, since there's nobody else to do it. I bring a soft brush to clean inside the lettering, and I bring a flask of tea. I sit there and I let him hear all the things I want to say, since there's nobody else to do it, and since he can no longer tell me 'no'.

Hot buttered toast. They all had hot buttered toast, and they got it from somewhere. They got it from somewhere, and none of them thought to tell me. They all just licked there greasy fingers, and I sat there, not even hungry, but feeling stupid that I hadn't found the hot buttered toast.

Ro's tattoo was one big maze. It started at the left side of his heart and walked his whole body to arrive back at the right. I always thought one day I would find the way through, but there were so many wrong turns, so many false passages and dead ends. I could never remember my past mistakes well enough. After the surgery, the scars took all the walls down: unnaturally pale skin where there had been dark blue lines. You could hop straight across, left to right, right to left. But the true path was lost to me forever.

I nestled the things in among the rocks and plants, trying to make it look natural, trying not to show any preference – though I admit, I tucked the yoghurt pot a little further into the leaves than I might have. Then I stepped away to let him choose. A few days later, he was all dressed up in the little glass bottle. I lifted his old shell from the tank, the only real shell I had seen in a year. It was so light, so beautiful. My fingers twitched to crush it into powder.

The turns of the staircase grew tighter as I descended, the steps steeper, until it was only the closeness of the walls that kept me from falling. There was a cold smell in the air, and an unearthly quiet. I turned to climb back up, but there was no longer anywhere to set my feet. Below me, the hole narrowed.