A stranger knocks on the door.

A STRANGER: [knock knock]

There is a pause and a muffled bark from behind the wood. Bolts clunk and keys jangle. The door slips open without a creak. A girl stands before the open frame.

A GIRL: Hello?

A STRANGER: Good day. Who are you?

A GIRL: I— I live here!

A STRANGER: Good day Olivia. May I come in? Awfully wet out. [barges in]

A GIRL: I — no!

A STRANGER: Well, glad we’re agreed then!

Stranger takes off coat and throws it on the hearth. Stranger isn’t wearing any shoes.

For her seventh birthday Jane asked for a red giant. One of those big old stars who’ve learned the virtue of living life in the slow lane. “But where would you put a red giant?” asked Dad. “I would put it in the garden next to the birds, so that they would be kept warm on cold winter nights”. Dad couldn’t argue with that. So he went to the shop to see if they had any red giants. “Excuse me, do you sell red giants?” he asked the shopkeeper. “Not here, no. Give Fred’s down the road a go”. So he went to Fred’s. They didn’t have any red giants either. Time was short. “Any other stars or celestial bodies?” he asked.

The next morning Jane tumbled down the stairs with glee, and ripped the wrapping from her gifts. Her face fell. She was not one bit happy with her neutron star. So she threw it out the window in a rage. “A neutron star is far too warm for birds!” she cried. No fooling that one, thought Dad.

There are about forty steps remaining before she reaches the top. She’s counted before. Her body aches from the climb. The corner prevents her from seeing very far ahead; she perseveres under the sensible assumption that the route to the top is still stable underfoot. About twenty steps and seven-hundred-and-twenty degrees around the corner, her path is blocked by a large ragged canine, staring her in the face, tongue wagging, smiling broadly. “Hello dog, may I pass?” she asks. “No, sorry!” says the dog. “Okay then.” she says, a little glumly. She turns tail and counts backwards, downwards.

Each year, ten metres to the east of the last, another is planted. A centuries-old family tradition. Most of the trees grow tall and strong. Some fail to germinate. Some bear the scars of cold winters. Some lie uprooted by the gales. We used to stroll along the Boulevard of Ages, young to old: dirt became saplings, then spindly wooden teenagers reaching up, to wise old monoliths. And the thousandth metre and the fifteen-hundredth metre would look more alike than the five-hundredth and the thousandth. And the two-thousandth and the twenty-five-hundredth would be closer still. And soon enough we’d forget which direction we were walking.

A crane and a pelican wade by the water’s edge.

“Have you seen Stork today?” asks Pelican, glancing up as he wets his beak in the stream.

“I haven’t seen him in days, Pelican!” replies Crane, “He’s been pretty tough to get hold of with the new job and all.” Crane changes legs.

“I’m happy for him and all,” says Pelican, “but I feel he thinks we’re not, you know, ‘his sort of birds’, any more. I get the impression he doesn’t want to hang out with us.”

“I wouldn’t worry Pelican. I think he’s just got a lot on his plate.” Crane stretches his neck and ruffles himself.

“Yeah maybe.”

Her house is filled with pencils. To the North lie the faded, discarded, blunted ones; to the South sit the pointed: primed and ready to contour faces and rhyme. She does not fear the sharpener, but she does not respect it. A pencil loses a little soul each time it is shown a blade. And the words and lines it spells, though firm and crisp, lose clarity.

I tore a corner from the page and put it in the tin of torn corners. I clasped the tin shut and wrapped two rubber bands, a red and a green, around it. I closed the book and slid it back into its slot on the shelf, along the neat parallel tracks of dustless wood that had been formed by its retrieval. The codex, my tin of little corners, was nearly complete. Just a couple of stacks away.

“I thought I saw your father yesterday.” said Dmitry, as he guided his knight to the defeat of his opponent’s bishop. “In the market, buying tulips. He was wearing a blue suit, no tie, a long tawny coat, and a grey tartan scarf. He carried a wine red umbrella: the forecast for the day had misled the rest of us, as had the bright sun of the earlier morning. He was almost alone at the stalls, the other customers had fled to seek shelter from the downpour for which they were so unprepared. It took me a while to remember that it couldn’t be him. And now, I am sorry, I know it wasn’t him. But for the ten seconds or so when I had not remembered, when I had forgotten logic, there he was, standing right in front of me, dry in the rain.”

You glance to your feet, they are freer than usual: you see that they are a good three inches from the ground. You check to your sides, and above, there’s nothing holding you. There’s no one else around with whom you might compare altitude, to check that the Earth isn’t just sneaking away. You nudge your mind upward a little, the tiles below gain distance. You swallow your surprise and conclude that you must be dreaming, as experience would suggest. What a treat! You rush outside to explore the air. The streets are quiet, most people have gone to the island for the festival.

You fly and fly, and then get a little tired, and lay down. Probably about time I came out of this now, you think to yourself. Three weeks go by in this dream of yours and there is still no sign of Waking Up. You sleep and rise in the delusion, of course, but your invisible wings remain. You start to wonder whether you were wrong, maybe this is real. Or you’ve gone mad. Or you start to panic that you’re locked in, and are vegetative, somewhere, surrounded by crying family, silently hopping from breeze to breeze in a world of your own comatose creation.