Widdershins

This week, the sun shone briefly, and apparently this was such an inexplicable occurrence that it prompted a story about the heavens going wrong. Or perhaps there are other things going on in the world that might leave me feeling something is fundamentally wrong. Who can say.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

Kit had a good job, making sticks of chalk for mathematicians to turn into ideas. It had troubled him at first that for the things he made to do their good work they had to be reduced to dust. But then he thought of all that dust drifting out and settling on the city, coating it with elegant truths, and smiled. A mile a way, at the university, a first year student drew a penis on the blackboard and captioned it “please leave”. Knowing that would have made Kit smile, too.

Tuesday

I woke in a vast library of rolling shelves, which slid past me propelled by mechanisms unseen. A title caught my eye, and I tried to chase it down, but another bookcase cut across between us, and by the time the way was clear again, the book I was after was gone. I thought I might search out a few favourite novels, but it was impossible, with everything shifting around. But there were comfortable chairs, and so I took a seat, reached out a hand, and accepted whatever washed past.

Wednesday

When she passed the cone back, he found she had taken the entire Flake. There was a little tunnel where it had been, a negative space flecked with chocolate crumbs. Her usual selfishness. He turned to complain, and saw her with ice cream on her nose and the Flake between her teeth, grinning and waiting for him to take his share.

Thursday

In my parents’ house there is a drawer of birds’ eggs resting in crumpled paper, perfect and protected and cold and dead. I keep them half from pride and half from shame. Even as a boy I knew better. If I hadn’t been told not to touch, not to take, not to go hunting, then I never would have thought of it.

Friday

Grandad had that drum up on the wall his whole life, and it felt like I spent my whole childhood staring at it. The fading paint, the real hide stretched so taut it looked alive. I imagined all the things it would summon if I played it: friendly genies in the day, strange monsters when I spent a night on his sofa. Then one winter it was time to clear the place out, and I touched the drum for the first time, to lift it down from its bent nail. I struck it once with the pads of my fingers, and the dry skin split, and nothing came.

Saturday

I am a grown-up now, and I can play in quarries and on building sites if I take care not to get caught. I can’t climb fences like I once could, but I can buy bolt cutters with my Screwfix card. I am a grown-up now, and I can fetch my frisbee from the railway line as long as there’s no train coming. I am a grown-up now, but I grew up learning to be scared, so I don’t break locks or snip fences or put carpets over barbed wire. I just watch, and tut, and wish that I was braver.

Sunday

There was something new in the little lake by the playground. Something like a seal or a walrus, huge and whiskered. Something you could imagine might let the children ride on its back. It ate the bags of old food that were sometimes fly-tipped in the park, and it left the ducks alone. We loved it, and we knew it wasn’t dangerous, and so we knew that when they came to take it, they would have to come at night.

I have been reading...

• "The Jejune Cruise" by Kristopher Jansma, this month's One Story. A fun, charming story, with a strong, clear voice: I almost gave up on it after being irritated by the first page or two, but it is in part the story of its narrator becoming less irritating.
• Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (translated by Norman Denny). One of Denny's slightly odd choices in this edition is to remove a couple of books and stick them in appendices on the basis that they do nothing to advance the story. I'm not sure that cutting 12 pages does much to pick up the pace of Part 3, or that his suggestion that Hugo could only have left it in for "purely personal reasons" is terribly convincing. But we must allow artists their idiosyncrasies, whether it be going off on a tangent about convents or snipping that tangent out.

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This week’s story: Widdershins

She was woken by the rising sun streaming through her window. Her bedroom was at the wrong side of the house for that. It meant that either the turning of the earth or the turning of the time had got itself turned backwards. Neither was convenient. She creaked out of the bed and let herself out into the garden.

It was spring, and everything was holding its breath. On days like this the world could change in half an hour, and so she sat on her smooth oak chair and watched it. It was not a matter of waiting, because the change was always there. It was a matter of settling into it, until she could feel the current of time, whichever way it was flowing.

A bud began to open; a slender branch reached a little further to the sky; a creature with iridescent wings emerged from its pinprick egg. The time was right and the sun was wrong. A shame that it had happened overnight: it would have been something to watch the sun go back on itself in the heavens, like it had forgotten its coat. She wondered about the people half a world away who had seen it. She hoped they had not been too afraid.