I cleared out the coconut shy, of course. Three clean shots, donk donk donk. Pinned the donkey's tail right where it belonged. Got the sweets in the jar dead on, and pulled winning tickets from the tombola until there were no good prizes. I handed out my winnings,

Stories about a great endeavour, a football liaison, an impossible cold, a loud noise stopping, and a sinister local newspaper.

She stepped out into the garden. It had been a week of unrelenting heat, and though the sun had barely risen it was uncomfortably warm on her pale skin. She lifted her foot and poked a toe into the paddling pool. The surface moved in one glass sheet, and her

The pile driving had stopped without me noticing, and it left behind a kind of afterimage, like when I stared too long at the sign over the road and had CAFÉ hovering in my vision when I looked away. Every few seconds there was a silence that bounced my teeth.

They met in the park, while the rest of the country was watching the match. Neither was looking for company – quite the opposite – but having found it, they discovered they needed it. They came back to the park for the quarter-final, and again the next tournament. By then they

I put a little scribble of ink in one corner, like I had needed to get the pen going, and a coffee ring in the corner opposite. Then I thought: doesn't that look too symmetrical? Too deliberate? So I printed another copy, and put the scribble and the

At the end of it all, everywhere was for everything. When I found a car that started I drove it over the golf course and put gouges in the fairways. I played golf all down the high street. I bathed in supermarket chest freezers and skated on the motorway. For

We ate wet grey things from crazing dishes in a long tent, and drank water with more flavour than the food. On Sunday afternoons there was tea, and it was certainly brown. There were prisoners working with us, and they were better fed and better rested: if they were kept

Stories about lying in your childhood bedroom dreaming of space; a drinks cabinet that looks like the world; crows; gardens; a thing that eats rocks.

It cost less than we expected to send his ashes into orbit. Good value, to make sure there was not a speck of him left on the Earth. After the launch, we could get on with our days not thinking about him, and at last the ground beneath us felt

Connie put up a sign by the tree, "Help yourself to bay leaves!". An hour later Ian was waving it in her face. "The fuck is wrong with you?" he spat. "The whole tree'll be gone by the end of the week. You

Mum taught art, and every wall held gifts from her students in paint and pastel and charcoal. Most of them were her, the crows' feet and grey streak growing as the generations passed. All of them pictured her the only way they had known her. My crude drawings sat

Caitlin inherited her uncle's drinks cabinet, along with all its dregs. It was a novelty design, a globe hinged at the equator. Closed, it showed all the places he had wanted to visit. Lift the northern hemisphere and you could see what had kept him away. She burned

My trail of pebbles had not led me far before I found I could no longer follow it. I searched with my fingers in the fallen needles, but the next pebble was not there. In the trees I heard a crunching, and for a moment I was afraid. Whatever had

Mrs Mayfield's garden grew all out of season, with bluebells and crocuses all through July and sweet peas deep into January. In the little orchard there was always something fruiting, a steady crop but never a glut. Mrs Mayfield looked carefully at the sowing dates on seed packets,

After Ajay's parents were gone, the crows adopted him. It was difficult to bring him all that he needed, even with a dozen of them working together. Ajay did well. He acted as though this was a normal way to live. Of course, there was much the crows

Stories about nursery rhymes, strange labyrinths, a fruit machine, and turning into a goose.

Shortly after she hit "Send", Jenny learned by simple coincidence that a brace of something meant, very specifically, two. Everard would certainly know this, but would not acknowledge the mistake. He would proceed as though two was exactly what Jenny had meant. He would keep going even if

I only ever sang him songs with happy endings, where all of the five little ducks came back. He cried and shouted. He wanted to hear about the old man who bumped his head, and Humpty Dumpty all in pieces. I never could say no for long. But it felt

When they pulled the old church down, someone stood on the rubble and said that the church was not the building, but the congregation. I liked that. It made my eyes sting just a little. But I was not part of the congregation, and I did miss how the building

It was Ged's job to map the labyrinths. When a new one sprang up, he would gather his pencils and his yarn and set out. Most were simple, a single winding path, and Ged was needed only to let the people know how much time it would add

We lay under the stars, which after all is the only place you can lie, and we talked about the only thing you can talk about. By the time we felt too cold to stay out, we had discovered that each of us had a different idea about what that

Maria pulled the lever on the fruit machine, and watched the reels spin. There were two clunks, 7, 7, and then the whirring kept on. The last reel whirred, lemon cherry bar 7 bell smearing together down her vision. The next day it was still spinning. The next week, the

The shoes were really hurting my feet now. We had swapped them at the third pub, the whole group but me swept up in Misha's enthusiasm for her crazy fun idea. Misha had the biggest smile and the smallest feet and nothing in life ever seemed difficult for

Stories about the solstice, a friendship with a tree, melting ice, boiling eggs, cyanotypes, whether your dad likes jazz, and a malevolent inflatable.

It was three goes for a token on the Flayer, and the kids were screaming as they flew down the blood-slick inflatable slide. Billy emerged from the end, raw and pink and not smiling at all. His mum had told him he might have more fun on the Buccaneer

He had lain in the thick mud all day. The next day the sun baked it hard, so there was a bowl in the earth in the shape of him. If it rained again and then froze, there would be a doppelganger of him cast in ice. It would rise

I didn't take a camera, or even a pen and paper, so my memories of that summer are all cyanotypes. Leaves and feathers and little dead things, all no more than an absence in the background of blue. I thought they were beautiful, then. Now, I find myself

The tree grew taller every year, but I grew better at climbing, too. I thought we could keep pace with each other all our lives. I was a child with no idea of how things age. I was in its branches when the thought came to me that one of

The boys sat on the doorstep, watching ice cubes melt onto the pavement. "They disappear so quick when you put one on its own," said Brian, "but the ones together in the bag, they keep each other going. That's like how we are." His