She moved her chair slightly towards the east window. The floor scraped against the wood, and the scrape echoed and bounced around the walls, and the echo pulsated against the stream of sun which warmed the hazy air toward the bare boards. And she ran her ear over the imprints in the silence, left by the shadows of voices peeled away. And she knew that hers was the last voice left.

Who was she going to discuss The Archers with now?

She brought in a yellow plastic bag filled with elastic bands. She took a carrot from her pocket, and began to wrap each band around the helpless root. She talked about the weather, and rye, and her favourite colours, and quantum physics, and Debussy, and the creatures of the sea, and Mount Etna, and telephones, and clock hands, and Scotland, and wine, and rhythm, and politics, and jelly beans. And on the last band she spoke of you. And she parted the soil and planted her work. And then she walked away.

There’s a jar of dice on the table, organised in layers by colour. I’d say there’s about 100 in there. Thats a lot of combinations. A lot of improbable things sit bottled up in that container.

In the kitchen the cat moans a meow. She won’t eat her biscuits. Not good enough for her I guess. She wants fresh, juicy, chicken. Go out and get one then, I think. I glance back at the jar, take out three dice, and roll them. The cat ceases her mewing, strolls over and jumps up onto the table, surveying my ⚀ ⚄ ⚅ with a gentle purr.

“Well that was unlikely”, she says.

Against the back of the pew, among the nebulae of cobwebs and old ash, stands a half-open matchbook, on end, from which the heads of seven still-unfreed flames peer through the woods of worshipping legs, prayer cushions and the dangling buckles of the restless young, hoping for a power cut.

Unpin the calendar. Strip the days of their names. The months too. Forget to notice when one year ends and the next begins. Stop counting. Unpack the moments from their folders, from their boxes on shelves upon stacks, let them swell and wash around your toes as they tumble from their cages. And in the rubble let stand only that bare beat:  sunrise, sunset. And you will feel the dusk light on your cheek, and the crunch of leaves beneath you, and the cold young mists on your nose, and the colouring of woods as the trees clothe themselves. Without being warned, by paper and ink and dots on a screen, of their arrival. And behind and before you, gates left open, will lie nothing but time.

Zebra chateau.

Manatee mansion.

Wallaby warehouse.

Ungulate bungalow

Dugong duplex.

Pangolin pagoda.

Dormouse greenhouse.

Pelican igloo.

Crocodile hut.

Earwig wigwam.

Cat shed.

Dog box.

Capybara bus shelter.

A soft ginger glow from the back seat rendered visibility into the grey outside a strain. He drove slowly as road signs condensed out of the dark mist ahead of him. He thought about the light behind him, how his curious young son would fiddle and toy with the switches and buttons and knobs and sliders of the car. And how, now, he couldn’t bear to turn it off.

Rain snaked helicoid around the salt-blue columns. Sunlight evaporated from the reeds toward the moon. A tin soldier beckoned toward the shore, shimmering through gaps between monoliths. Son hesitated, looking back to the land he knew, crumbling into nonsense, and then forth, to the unknown, with its coat of suspicion. The soldier stopped his gesturing, and began to wander into the yellow sea. Son, with a deep, hungry breath, picked up his cat, and followed.

There was gum on the sole of her shoe. It made a sort of quick, tacky, squelch against the linoleum as she walked to the door. He wondered if she knew. He wondered who dropped the gum. He wondered what flavour it was. Cherry? Mint? Was it even gum? It could have been tar. Maybe she’s a roadworker, he thought. Even if he knew the answers to all these questions, he probably wouldn’t have been able to help her with her sticky shoe.

The next day, when she came in again, he listened to hear the characteristic tick-tack of a begummed heel. Hear it he could not. He decided not to ask her about it.

A dense frost nibbles at the toes of morning, invisible crystals dance in the pale wind and scratch your throat. At the foot of the walk is a stone bird bath, a simple roman column, atop, a rink, a drink kept secret by a cold crust. A blue tit encircles the rim, puzzling over the whereabouts of today’s breakfast tipple. You edge closer, not wishing to scare the thing — she sees you and flits to the ivy. You break the thick surface of the pool with a pebble.