Marv makes lampshades for a living. Sally is a pastry chef.

They are on a date.

At Kevin’s.

“The thing about lamps is that the light they give out is not diffuse enough. So it’d be blinding, if you didn’t use a lampshade.”

“Why don’t they just make lamps with built-in lampshades?”

A waitress rolled over on skates with two colas, one with a lemon but both with straws.

“Thanks.”

“Thanks.”

“I hate these straws.”

“Yes they are not good.”

“Sometimes they do make lamps with built-in lampshades, Sally. Well, I mean it’s a special coating that diffuses the light. Maybe you’ve seen them? Anyway it’s better to make the diffusion happen as far away from the bulb as possible. That’s my opinion, anyway.”

He takes a handful of Bombay mix from the bowl and cranes it into his mouth.

“I suppose so. So interesting Marv.”

Marv chews and crunches and licks the salt and paprika from his lips.

“What kind of pastries do you make, Sally?”

I look around the Wetherspoons at Gatwick and wonder.

How many of these people are excited? Going on their hollies? Seeking a drop of sun?

It’s February.

Are they off for a swim? Smiling and laughing?

How many of them are running.

It’s February 7th.

It has been seven months and six days since she died.

I figured, ghosts can’t get on planes. She can’t follow me across the water. They’re scared of heights. If they weren’t they’d have left by now. She’d have left by now. Because why stick around and haunt me in the cold and grey, when she could enjoy her afterlife in Bali?

A man clutching a small paper bag asked for a coffee.

“A coffee, please.”

The woman behind the counter wore a name badge that said “Tina”, and blue eyeliner with Cleopatra ticks.

Her name was not Tina, and he did not want a coffee.

“Americano? White? Sugar?” she said.

“Yes please,” he leant down briefly to scratch his knee, and as he rose up, placed the small paper bag on the counter, “To all. Except no sugar. And no milk.”

A delicious web of spiders, covered in silk. I ate them all, they were nice.

I started on Tuesday.

“Robert,” I called, “Fetch me my pen, I must write this down.”

And here we are. It’s still Tuesday. And what a day.

Robert sits across from me on the box bench by the window. He’s looking out over the green toward the copse. Why is he looking?

“Robert,” I called, “Why are you looking?”

“Ma’am?”

“Why are you looking?”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am, I…”

I point to my empty plate, licked clean but for a few bare threads of sticky silk. And Robert looks at it, with his eyes, sees that it is empty, nods in apology, scuttles off to the pantry, to fetch me more delicious, soft, silky spiders to chew on.

Last May I saw a firefly.

That’s great, you might say. Last month I took a shit and drank a cold coffee. It was last May, who cares?

I had never seen a firefly before. And I’ve never seen one since. You don’t get them round these parts. And I was. Round these parts, I mean.

What was she doing there? I’ve wondered ever since. Maybe she was on a language exchange from South America. Unlikely, unless her parents had very good jobs and she went to a very good school. Which I suppose could have been true. Maybe she got lost and flew into a shipping container? She would have died, almost certainly. Unless the shipping container was carrying bananas or other food products. And maybe she would have had other flies for company.

Maybe I’m being an idiot. Maybe it wasn’t a firefly at all. It was probably just a bluebottle, using the torch on his phone to look for his keys.

On the three-hundredth day since her arriving on the island, Alice decided to have a party. Just for herself, but if anyone else wanted to come they were perfectly welcome. In fact that would be really nice, she thought. But she didn’t expect anything of anyone. So after her breakfast, of palm nuts and captured night dew, she wandered down to the shore, and waited for someone to tell.

“Little crab!” she said to a little crab who had appeared out of the sand, “I’m having a party tonight, do come! In the clearing, when the sunlight hits the western face! There will be singing! And laughing! Spread the word!”

And the little crab looked at her with his crab eyes, and said, “Sounds great Alice, I’ll be there!”

A wide and neatly plastered white archway opened the street onto the sea, just opposite the post office and next to the mosque. Ray held his letter in the mouth of the postbox, double checking the address and that it was adequately stamped, glancing back and forth to the ocean window. He let it drop and swung round to cross, dodging a cyclist who cursed him, and, paying a little more attention to where he was going now, reached the hole in the city wall.

The first time you meet Mister Pogo, you’ll say, “Good evening, sir!” because that’s what they will have told you to say. But you’ll be thinking, “This is a very, very, tall and quite scary person, and I find the slugs very offputting.” Probably you won’t be thinking that in words, but in that distilled syllabary that your brain uses to represent ideas in single squirts of neural activity.

The second time you meet Mister Pogo, you’ll say, “Good evening, sir!” because that’s what you remember from last time. And this time you might even mean it, just a little bit, because it will have been several years at the least, and you’ll have learned a lot more about the slugs, and he won’t seem so tall because you’ll be slightly further away, or perhaps he will have shrunk, you can’t be sure. In any case, these aren’t the sorts of things you will be worrying about.

Should you meet Mister Pogo a third time, you’ll probably say, “Good evening, sir!” and this time you really will mean it, because it really will be a good evening, and it really must be, because you know better than anyone, that no-one meets Mister Pogo a fourth time.

“Now, a little known fact about the octopus—”

“Yes I know the fact about the octopus.”

“What fact about the octopus? The one about the—”

“Yes the one about the—”

“Excuse me may I interrupt?”

“—may you—?”

“I’m sorry we’re busy here, now a—”

“I’m sorry but I really must interject—”

“Excuse me who are you?”

“I’m sorry but your—”

“Excuse—”

“What is the meaning—”

And that was the last time anyone mentioned octopusses. Anyone. Ever. Again.

The close was carpeted with halogen glow from the streetlights overhead. Photons crawled sleepily out from their lamps and, with no sense of urgency or duty, floated through the quiet winter air and melted on the cold pavement, flickering only for a second and leaving a dull haze of vague yellow glimmer.