The Last Two Stars

I fear this week's Scattering has turned out a little bleak. Let's call it the last gasp of winter. The spring equinox has passed, and next week these stories will be all blossom and gambolling, I'm sure.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

Through hedge archways and little doors in walls, I passed from one part of the garden to the next. Each was laid out the same, down to the flaking paint on the bench. In one it might be spring, everything in bloom: in the next it was winter, the bench recoated in white and a smiling snowman next to it. One showed the garden as it was at night, the sky always perfectly clear and full of stars. My favourite to walk in held a frosty morning, with the sun risen just enough to sparkle on the grass but not thaw it, and everything silent but the birds. I walked and walked, but could never find it.

Tuesday

A cluster of brown leaves had clung on all through winter and into the spring. Amy, always thoughtful of things smaller than herself, was afraid that they would stop the new leaves coming through. My voice pressed at my throat to reassure her, but I stopped, and stooped, and bore her up on my shoulders so she could reach to tear the dead leaves down. The old may fall away for the new, but doesn’t always. I would not have her complacent. Let her own hands clear the way.

Wednesday

After the flood, when everything was rearranged, we left things as they were. The cars haphazard in the streets looked much as they always had. Less so the ice-cream van in my garden, which gaped its serving window down into the mud and wouldn’t chime no matter what we tried. I planted in the sediment that lay over the Co-op car park, recalling my Year Five topic book on the Nile. Nothing sprouted. That silt was all plastic scraps and spilled petrol and concrete, and the wrong type of shit.

Thursday

The rollercoaster stopped before the drop, with the harnesses digging into our shoulders and our faces tilted to the ground. I thought: how can it break down here, when all it has to do is fall? The longer we hung there, the more I hoped they would winch us back or walk us out. My need for gravity had bled out of me. But then we fell.

Friday

When they opened him up they found a puzzlebox in his ribcage, halfway solved. They peeled away the blood vessels and lifted it to the light. It was hard, with gloved hands, to feel the subtle click and give of its mechanisms, and the dried-up stuff of life had stiffened its subtle joints. But they could see how close it was to being solved. How close he had been to being saved.

Saturday

We remained calm. We walked and did not run. We awaited instruction. Somewhere in the world were serious but friendly people in reassuring uniforms who would tell us what to do, and we, for the good of all, would obey. And soon we found them. We watched them through the window of a locked door, running with the crowd and not looking back.

Sunday

I dreamed I was a mayfly, skimming over the water and not knowing my brevity until wakefulness came. Then I feared to die. I thought that dreaming of a life so short might mean my body knew that it was dying, too. But a mayfly's life is longer than a dream. I woke with my wings still beating.

I have been reading...

• Architecture by Clive Wilmer. Clive died last year; this is his final collection, published posthumously. He was a fine poet and a generous teacher and much more besides, and I'm grateful that he left us these poems.
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny), which, thanks to a couple of long train journeys, is making its last appearance in this section. It's telling that, after 1200 pages and innumerable diversions, I'm tempted to pick this back up and read it all again. A remarkable novel.

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This week’s story: The Last Two Stars

When night fell I looked up at the glow of the sky and tried to find the hole punched in it. I imagined I might see a little patch of darkness, the kind the whole night used to be stitched from. I imagined I might see a star peeking through, and that would make three. Three bright steady stars amidst the haze and the frenzy. Wouldn't that be a sight to see? But the crashed satellite was one pebble taken from a beach. The sky was as full and as empty as ever.

More than a hundred years ago, a bomber came down in that same meadow. We saw photos of it in school, though you couldn't make much out in them. We used to go out sometimes and try to dig bits of it up. Whatever school year you were in, there was always someone a few years above who had found one of the pilot's medals and got rich. The teachers would warn you off, some of them saying there were unexploded bombs, some of them saying if you found a medal it would be a Nazi medal and not worth having. But we knew they'd all been out digging in their turn.

It was the schoolkids who found the body, of course.