After the photo op there was a scent on her hands that lingered for hours, earthy and metallic. She thought about the hands she had shaken that day, how they must always smell that way. She covered her face and breathed deep and long, and wondered when her first wrong

Enid carried the seeds home in a snug fist, only softening the pressure because she feared crushing them. She wouldn't hold hands to cross the road. Once through the door she wouldn't take her shoes off, trod dust and dry grass up the stairs to her

The wind blew, and I let my message go. I watched the paper flutter until it was gone, and then I lowered my eyes to write another. The wind was wide. It could hold everything I wrote. But one day soon it would change, and words would fly back the

Once each year, on Isy's birthday – at the exact hour she took her first breath – the setting sun threaded through the city to shine gold on her favourite park bench. The bench hadn't been there when Isy was born, nor the park, nor the buildings. And

On the chequered tile floor they pretended to be chess pieces, he a knight and she a bishop. They danced around each other, around the chairs and counters and the cat who wouldn't follow the rules. She stood a square away and taunted him, then he stood on

Lloyd rolled cheap white paint over a sunrise. A spray gun would have been quicker, but he was not paid to be quick. He was paid to be seen. A cruel blank stripe through the colour, then the long covering up: a warning to the artists not to bother. An

Stories about letters, a first date, ice, an egg, a library growing in the rock face, and the nonsense your dad told you.

I have to warm up before I can write to you. A shopping list, to get the ink flowing. An affirmation, to get my head right. A few words about the things I can see in front of me. A poem, a story, a novel, a memoir. A list of

She brought me an egg, pale blue and still warm in her little hand. It was my job to teach her not to touch them, only to look. We couldn't find the nest again. I carried it home in shaking hands and set a lamp to warm it.

Their first date was a picnic by the river. He arrived early at the spot he had suggested: his favourite place on the south bank. She arrived right on time, and right across from him, waving from the north bank. They never settled whether the pin he sent her was

We still had ice. You couldn't swallow it: it would make you so sick you would lose more water than you gained. We should have kept it for injuries, or to keep our scraps of food fresh. But it was melting so fast, and it was so pleasant

I do all my best thinking in my meditation class. There's something about all those quiet minds: like a library, but even the brains are silent. And there's no better motivation than knowing that your competitors are thinking about their breath while you're thinking

Partway down the rock face there was a natural library, where the stone had worn into shelves and rows of delicate lichenous books were growing. Though all the linguists in the world could offer no more than speculation, it didn't matter much what the marks on the fragrant

I destroyed all of your letters. Not because of what you did. I did it as soon as I read them, with the little shredder you bought me for my confidential papers. That way, I couldn't spend all my days rereading them. That way, I would never read

Stories about being on display, hiding from a street party, and things washed up on the beach.

I had been sat on the lid of the toilet for seventeen minutes, looking at the sign on the bin that said "Paper towels only please". How lucky to be a paper towel, I thought: never to disappoint, never to upset. I had tried to be that way

Betthi looked the man in the glass case over. There was an oddness to him, certainly, which was how it should be. One had to be a little odd to choose to go on display, and despite all the pretty words in the leaflets, it was oddness that people came

The day I heard, the air was so still that the clouds seemed to be painted on, and I had lain watching them for so long that I could not see them otherwise. The idea had pressed itself into my vision, and for days after it was impossible truly to

A woman in a museum lanyard was writing on a little white card. From time to time, she stopped to look Carl over. From inside the glass case, he couldn't see what she was writing. He felt his neck prickle as she caught his eye, and he wondered

Alfie had made his money from a pick-your-own blackberry farm, an overgrown site nobody had been able to develop until Alfie decided all it needed was a fence and a Portakabin. Punters signed a waiver, but it was hardly needed: much of the time, when a mother brought

The brothers owned one suit between them, which on average fit perfectly. Each time one wore it he would find in the pockets the detritus of the others' lives: a place card bordered with watercolour roses; a CV, folded and torn in half; a cloakroom ticket; a condom wrapper;

During the street party, my doorbell rang four times. I didn't see who rang it: if I peered through the gap in the bedroom curtains, I might see a neighbour peering back. I wished I had parked my car over at the multi-storey the day before, so

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