Example Stories

The dragon had been living in the quarry for two hundred years and was extremely tired of being extinct.

"You are the fourth person to find me," it said. "The first three ran."

Brin did not run, mostly because her legs had stopped taking instructions. She was fourteen and had come to the quarry to avoid her apprenticeship, which involved a great deal of grinding pigment and very little of anything else.

"Are you going to eat me?"

"I eat sheep," said the dragon. "I have eaten sheep for two centuries. Do you know what happens when a dragon eats a sheep every week for two centuries?"

"No."

"Neither does anyone else, because nobody asks. That is the entire problem with being extinct. It is not the hiding. It is that there is no one to complain to."

Brin sat down on a rock. It seemed like that kind of conversation.

"You could complain to me," she said.

The dragon looked at her for a long moment, in the way that very old things look at very young ones.

"That," it said, "is the first sensible offer I have had since the reign of the third Aldric."

The file was eleven seconds long and had been flagged for deletion nine years earlier.

It was not, as Osei had hoped, a crime. It was a kitchen. Morning light, a radio playing something with strings, and a woman at the sink with her back turned, doing nothing in particular.

He played it again. Eleven seconds. The woman never turned around.

The deletion order had been filed by the memory's owner, which was the part that would not sit still in his mind. People deleted assaults. They deleted accidents, and the last hour of a hospice, and things they had done that they could not carry. They did not, as a rule, file paperwork to destroy eleven seconds of a woman washing up.

Unless.

Osei sat back. Outside his window the city did what it did in the evenings.

Unless the eleven seconds were all that was left, and being able to replay them was worse than losing them. Unless someone had decided that a memory you can summon perfectly, at will, forever, stops being a memory and becomes a room you live in.

He looked at the file for a long time.

Then he filed his own deletion order, and did not watch it again, and found that he could still see the light on the water in the sink, which was, he supposed, the entire point.

The flat had one bedroom, one sofa, and a landlord who had taken both deposits before mentioning that the previous tenant had not, in fact, moved out.

"You take the bedroom," said Theo, in the voice of a man making a chess move.

"No," said Ines.

"I'm being gracious."

"You're being gracious so that for the next six months I have to be grateful, and I would rather sleep in the bath."

Theo considered this. "That is an extremely accurate reading of my intentions."

They drew up a rota. The rota had clauses. By the second week it had an appendix concerning the airing cupboard, and by the fourth it had been abandoned entirely, because it turned out that two people who had spent three years competing over the same clients had a great deal to say to each other once nobody was keeping score.

The trouble started when he stopped being annoying.

It was a Tuesday. He came in soaked, said nothing, made two cups of tea without asking and put hers down beside her laptop, and went to have a shower. It was such a small thing. It was so completely unremarkable that Ines sat looking at the mug for some time.

"I'm still going to take the Brennan account," she called.

"I know," he called back.

"I just wanted that on the record."

"Ines," he said, over the sound of the water, "nothing has ever been off the record with you."

The surveyor's report accounted for every square metre of the house except four.

Marcus found this out on a wet Thursday, standing in the upstairs hallway with a tape measure and a growing sense that he had made a mistake with his life. Nineteen metres along the outside wall. Fifteen inside, across two bedrooms.

He knocked. The wall knocked back, in the way that walls do, which is to say not at all, and he stood there listening to nothing for slightly too long.

His aunt had lived here for thirty-one years. She had been, by every account, entirely ordinary. She had a bridge night. She left the house to him with a letter that said only: the upstairs is fine.

He had read that as reassurance for a month.

The access hatch was in the airing cupboard, behind the immersion heater, painted over so many times the hinges had become suggestions. It took him an hour. The space beyond was four metres by one, with no window, and someone had put a chair in it.

Only a chair. Facing the wall that backed onto the main bedroom.

The carpet in front of the chair was worn through to the boards, in two patches, the size and shape of a pair of feet.

The difficulty with Mrs Vaughan's alibi was not that it failed. It was that it did not.

Between seven and eleven on the evening in question she had been seen by a taxi driver, two waiters, a theatre usher and a neighbour walking a dog. She had kept the ticket stub. She had paid by card. She had, at one point, complained about the interval drinks to a member of staff who remembered her clearly and without affection.

Inspector Vail laid the statements out in order and looked at them the way one looks at a wall that has been very recently painted.

"She's covered," said Sergeant Odell.

"She is thoroughly covered."

"That's the same thing."

"It is not remotely the same thing." Vail tapped the theatre stub. "Consider your own Tuesday evening, Odell. Could you prove it?"

Odell thought. "I was at home."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

"So you could not. Nor could I, nor could anyone in this building, because innocent people do not construct evenings. They have them." He set the stub down. "Mrs Vaughan did not have an evening. She assembled one, out of witnesses, at considerable expense and inconvenience, and the only question I have left is what she thought she was going to be asked about."

The river was not where the map said it was, and had not been for some time.

Daniyar worked this out on the fourth morning, sitting on his pack with the chart across his knees, comparing a printed line from 1987 against a dry gravel bed that had clearly been dry for a decade.

"Say it," said Feng.

"The river moved."

"Rivers do that."

"Rivers do that," Daniyar agreed. "Cartographers are meant to notice."

They had four days of water and ninety kilometres to the next marked source, which was itself marked on the same chart, drawn by the same office, in the same year.

Nobody said this part. They all worked it out separately, at different speeds, and Daniyar watched it arrive on each of their faces in turn, which was worse than saying it would have been.

Feng stood and shouldered her pack.

"Then we walk to the one we can see," she said, "and we stop trusting paper."

It was not a plan. It was the absence of one, spoken in the voice of a plan, and they followed it because the alternative was to keep sitting on a gravel bed doing arithmetic.

Ms Adeyemi submitted her resignation on the fourteenth. On the sixteenth she received an acknowledgement thanking her for her feedback.

She replied to clarify that it had not been feedback. It had been a resignation. She attached the original letter for reference.

On the twenty-first, Human Resources scheduled a meeting to discuss her concerns. She attended the meeting and explained that she had no concerns, only a resignation. The meeting was recorded as constructive and a follow-up was arranged.

On the fourth of the following month she was informed that her request was progressing through the appropriate channels. She asked which channels. She was told that this information was not held centrally.

On the eleventh she stopped coming in.

On the nineteenth she received an email marked URGENT asking whether she was intending to take the unallocated leave she had accrued, as it could not be carried into the next quarter. On the twenty-second she received her performance review. It was, on balance, positive, though it noted some recent issues with attendance and suggested that she might benefit from clearer goal-setting in the year ahead.

The argument was about the chair, which was not a good chair.

It was brown, and the arms had gone shiny, and one castor had been replaced with a different castor in about 1994. Their mother had sat in it every evening for thirty years and had referred to it, without irony, as the good chair.

"It goes," said Rachel.

"It doesn't have to go today."

"Everything has to go today, Michael, that is what today is for. We have the van until six."

Michael did not answer. He was standing in the doorway with a roll of bin bags, in the posture of a man who had been standing there for a while.

"If you want it, take it," Rachel said. "Take it. I'll help you get it in the car."

"I don't want it. It's a horrible chair."

"Then why are we-"

"Because if I take it," he said, "I have to look at it. And if I don't take it, then in about an hour a man neither of us has met is going to put it in a skip, and that will be a thing that has happened."

Rachel sat down on the arm of the sofa.

The van was returned at ten past six. They were charged for the extra ten minutes, and neither of them mentioned the chair again, and it is in Michael's garage, and he does not sit in it.

The invented island was a joke that got out of hand.

Per had drawn it during a long winter, in the corner of a commissioned chart, as somewhere to put his initials. It was the shape of a boot. He named it after his landlady, who was not kind to him, and thought no more about it.

The chart was copied. Charts are.

Eight years later a whaler put in at Marta's Boot to take on water, and found a harbour, and forty houses, and a woman who told them the island had been settled by her grandparents.

Per heard this in a tavern and went home and was sick.

He spent a week trying to establish the mechanism. He drew a coin on a scrap of paper and it stayed a drawing. He drew a house in a field outside town and walked out to look and found the field. It was, he concluded eventually, something about the charts themselves, or the copying, or the believing, and he was a mapmaker and not a philosopher and the distinction had never mattered before.

What he could not establish, and what kept him awake, was the woman's grandparents.

He had drawn the island eight years ago. She had said grandparents. He went back to the tavern to ask the whaler which of them was wrong, and the whaler had sailed, and Per stood in the road for a long time doing arithmetic that would not come out.

The bolt was seized, which was not an emergency, and Vasquez had eleven minutes of margin, which was also not an emergency.

The emergency was that these two facts were about to meet.

"Talk to me," said Ito, from inside.

"It's corroded. I'm getting nothing."

"Come in and we'll schedule it."

"If I come in now, the panel stays half-open, and if the panel stays half-open we lose the array on the next pass through the belt, and then we are having a completely different conversation in about nine hours."

Silence on the loop. Vasquez could hear Ito thinking, which after fourteen months she could do fairly accurately.

"Nine minutes," Ito said.

"I know what the number is."

"I'm aware you know the number. I'm saying it because if I don't say it, then in the report it will look like nobody said it."

Vasquez laughed, which cost her air, and stopped.

She braced her boots against the strut and put both hands on the wrench and thought about the fact that the bolt had been installed by someone on Earth, in a clean room, eleven years ago, who had almost certainly been thinking about lunch.

It moved a quarter turn.

Eight minutes.

The cat belonged to nobody and was fed by everybody, which meant it was enormous.

It had a name on each floor. On the ground floor it was Biscuit. On the second it was Mr Henderson. On the fourth, where Ama lived, it was simply the cat, because Ama had moved in eleven months ago and had not yet spoken to anyone long enough to learn otherwise.

She found out about the names on a Sunday, in the stairwell, when the man from the second floor said good morning to Mr Henderson and Ama said, without thinking, "Who?"

It took forty minutes to sort out. By the end of it they were sitting on the stairs, and the woman from the ground floor had come out to see what the noise was, and the cat had left in the middle, apparently bored.

"Eleven months," said the woman from the ground floor. "You've been here eleven months and you thought it was called the cat."

"I didn't want to bother anyone."

"Nobody wants to bother anyone. That's the whole problem with this building." She stood up and brushed off her skirt. "Tuesday. My flat. There's usually four of us and there is always too much food."

Ama said yes before she could think of a reason not to, which she recognised, even at the time, as the correct way to do it.

The toolbox was the only thing Nadia wanted, and it turned out to be full of somebody else's tools.

She noticed it on the second evening, sorting them onto newspaper. Two chisels with the initials R.M. burned into the handles. A plane with a repair to the sole that her father, who repaired nothing and admitted it cheerfully, could not have made.

Her mother, on the phone, was unhelpful in the specific way of someone who has decided a subject is closed.

"He had them from before."

"Before what?"

"Before us. Nadia, it was fifty years ago."

R.M. turned out, after a week and a phone call to a man in Carlisle, to be a name her father had never once said in her hearing: an apprentice master, forty-one years dead, who had taken on a difficult sixteen-year-old in 1968 and taught him a trade he then did not practise.

What Nadia could not work out was why he had kept them. He had not been sentimental. He had thrown out her school reports.

She cleaned the chisels because they needed cleaning, and put them back, and kept the toolbox in the hall where she would see it, and eventually stopped constructing explanations. Some things a person keeps are not messages. They are only kept.