Stories about adopting a star, sneaking in, being dangerous, playing music out loud on the train, and a tattoo that moves.

Laurie inhabited his kitchen with an uneasy love. He knew what a cartouche was, but not why he might use it. A few times each week he would take the good scissors and cut a circle out of greaseproof paper. He judged his success by how well his circle fit

When the sky tore, I had three library books overdue. I stopped worrying about those. I saw the purple haze drifting through from the place beyond and thought: I made it to the end. I am one of to be one of the last ones. But now my knees are

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

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

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&

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

Stories about kleptomania, a silent disco, scars, the dead, and throwing a teapot down the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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

Stories about strange dolls, the death of the sun, leaving by train, precious things, a feline heckler, and being unable to sleep because you think you can hear someone crying.

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

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

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,

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

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

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 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

Stories about building a fence, destroying the dunes, futile resistance, running out of salt, and the mouse brining a cat in.

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

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

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.

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

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

"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