Dawn sent me a photograph of an earthworm. A little pink earthworm, I thought, but as I looked I saw that it was not pink at all. It was grey and purple and a little iridescent. I wondered if that was why she sent it. She loved to discover that

He forgot everyone's names, all at once, a strange aphasia that settled unseen, like a judgement. His sister, his boss, himself. It had happened before, in dreams: the most excruciating thing his anxious brain could find to warn him with. But awake, it wasn't embarrassing. To

She learned young that chewing gum was a dirty habit, and did it whenever she could. She kept the habit up her whole life, an offering to bad behaviour that kept her kind and sane. On bad days she would press what she had chewed into the carpet at the

The teacher lifted the marbled paper from the tray, and everyone leaned and stretched to see the patterns, but Esme was still looking at the water. There had been so much colour there, shivering on the surface, catching the light. Now there was nothing but a smudge of ink at

I dug out the clay myself, and made myself filthy sifting wood ash for the glaze. I left a thumbprint on the handle where his thumb would rest. It was not enough. I had not made the spade I dug with. The tree that burned to make the ash had

Stories about decrepitude, bad apologies, weird tinned fish, biting a marble, and appealing against an infatuation.

On Monday I decided just to be decrepit. To accept it: to creak and click and stop pretending I could do the things I used to, or do anything at all. The doctor told me my joints would seize and my muscles would waste if I stopped moving. I thought

James had learned to apologise, and that was something. He would say I'm sorry, and then he would say I got scared. There seemed to be no end to the misdeeds fear provoked in him: scared, he missed birthdays, and drank his flatmates' beer, and slept with

Every Guy Fawkes Night she checked the bonfire for hedgehogs, but she never found one. She had begun to suspect hey were made up, like unicorns, or the thing her dad insisted lived out in the shed. Even so, she always checked, and all the grownups smiled and said "

Because he liked that weird tinned fish, I pretended I did too. Pretended I liked how it made my eyes water, how I found slivers of jellied bone beneath my gums hours later. Nobody believed me except me. I thought that if we ever kissed our mouths would both taste

Her daughter had made cookies, and right in the middle of his there was a marble, sat there like a macadamia nut. He might have seen it, but he was looking at them: two smiling faces that seemed, against all reason, ready to love him. He swallowed down the pain

There were seven crumbs left on the plate. One of them was big enough that she could split it apart with a fingernail and make eight. She ate them one at a time, picking them up with the tip of a finger and placing them on her tongue. She tried

Stuart packed the orders in shredded paper, his secrets keeping the battery packs and supplement powders safe. It was exciting to think of someone piecing them together to ruin him – making repeat purchases in hope of recovering the missing piece of the puzzle. When he ran out of documents he

Stories about the falling moon, being an owl, ghosts, and falling off a roof.

Ronni had been very understanding. "It hurts, but it happens," she told him. "At least we know where we are." She didn't kick him out. She didn't even raise her voice. She just started packing. He had always admired that about her:

Their house was always full of little miracles. A broken toy restored, a wished-for treat appearing out of nowhere on the counter. In this way the children learned what caring meant: smoothing over, casting out discomfort. The youngest, Maisie, was nineteen when the illness came. When she became the

Joe fell off a roof, and everybody laughed, because he laughed. With Joe it was always laughter until somebody laughed at the wrong time. Then he would turn sullen or angry, or quietly disappear. His friends all knew he was that way. That's how they knew it was

I was an owl, once. For a night at a time, and only for a year or so. When the sun rose I would close my keen eyes and wake fumbling for my glasses. It stopped the summer of the London Olympics; I remember flying for the last time, not

The full moon fell, fluttering down like paper, and came to rest on the surface of the lake. It was the size of a dinner plate, and still glowing. As the wind moved the water, it began to spread: it grew a little dimmer and became elliptical, but every eye

Always, things had seemed ready to decay. A chain without oil turned to rust; a wall left to weather would crumble. I cared for all these things, kept them whole, and as I did so I was sure that I must be decaying, since nobody cared for me. Here, now,

Four minutes, bit of chicken between my teeth, untied shoelace, hair in my eyes, thing on my shirt. Three minutes, shoelace tied, hair pushed out, chicken still there, what is on my shirt? Two minutes, thing off my shirt, still not sure what, rearranged the jacket and tie to hide

Stories about Rubik's cubes, fake medicine, missing teaspoons, and going with the crowd.

She held the paper to her lips. That was the only place she still had much sensation, and so she kissed every letter she received. She liked to feel the stiffness and the grain of the paper, the sharpness or softness of the crease: they told her something that the

Once again, there were no teaspoons. Since Gracie made wind chimes, we had all been plucking teabags with our fingers. Everyone in the house was heatproof now at index finger and thumb, except for Adam, who bought a single teaspoon from the loose box at the hospice charity shop and

I had a little matchbox of Grandad's whiskers. I had to hide it in the corner where the carpet came up and the floorboards had a gap: otherwise, Mum would have thrown it away. It disgusted her. She had to cover her eyes when he stuck his chin

It burned on the way down. Powerful stuff, we told him: your guts will cramp like you're giving birth to a crocodile teeth-first, but it'll fix you up. We'd steeped whatever we could find in there, ginger and black pepper and horseradish and

Cubes came down the conveyor all mixed up, and by the time the bell rang we all saw spinning squares behind our eyelids. One colour out of place and our pay was docked – and there was little enough of it to take from us. On the day I retired, I

"I promise I didn't see anything," he said. "I promise, I promise." Which of course meant he had seen it all. The first "I promise" said he had seen something; the second said he had seen everything; the third said he knew

It was the wrong screw. Too short and too fat, but the only one around. I turned it slowly, whispering gentle affirmations to the board to keep it from splitting. I let the head press deep into the surface so the tip could gain a little more purchase on the

The photo they used was a few years old and made me look handsome and mysterious. I curated things carefully to make sure that was the one everybody had, and when I saw it on TV through a pub window I was glad I had. But now things have changed.