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.

Frank Golden had a new bag. He surveyed his room, seeking to find something to put inside. A pen! He put the pen inside. Everyone needs a pen. Then he saw a better pen, one that was less likely to leak and mess up his new bag. So he took the old pen out, put it in Grandma’s mug, and put the new one in. Lunch! He slid a Wispa between the zippers, shortly followed by a carton of ribena. He didn’t dare put his sandwich in, due to fear of spillage. So he carried that. Next time, he thought, I’ll make less sploshy food, so I can put it in my new bag. He threw in a red hat, a book about things, and some hand sanitiser, and topped it up to the brim with air, so that it was full.

In Greenwood, Seattle there is an unlocked car on a quiet street. The assumption is that the owner, whoever that may be, has just popped out for a bit, and will be back any time. As weeks go by, the car is painted with summer dust. The residents think, oh, whoever owns that unlocked car, and is about to come back, wouldn’t want it to be dirty! So they take it in turns to wash it. The children buff the hubcaps. A cat sits in the car to keep its heart warm while the owner is away, atop a blanket, of course, lest any stray hairs fall upon the upholstery.

An octopus holds seven bananas high above her head, one for each spare arm, the eighth being of course necessary for peeling. If she had picked up eight bananas from the store, she would certainly have had a hard time skinning them, and she might perhaps be stuck holding bananas high above her head, like some perverse aquatic chandelier, forever. And that wouldn’t be a nice way to live, she thinks to herself, as she sets about peeling her meal.