Unexplained Experiences

The first thing I hear is the stitcher, I think, still cycling down after the eight o'clock run. That metal tick-tick-tick as the staple arm settles into its rest position. I don't look up from the…

I'll tell you the rule first because you'll want it before anything else makes sense. You never walk the same transect twice in a day. Out then back is fine. Out, back, and out again on the same…

I was cleaning the windlass wrong, running the rag along the square end instead of the shaft, and I didn't notice till I'd taken half the brass off with it. My hands were somewhere else. I kept…

Paulette said it was pigeons at first. That scratching under the sash window at two in the morning, claws on lead flashing, the kind of sound you get used to in old terraces. She told me this over…

When a call goes quiet, you count to ten and you disconnect. That's the only rule Marnie ever gave me, back when I started at Riverside, and she never said why. She just made me repeat it back to her…

Denise told me this three times over about a year, and it wasn't the same story twice. That's the main reason I still don't know what to believe. First time, we were on our break in the staff room at…

My uncle Colm did fourteen years as a warden on the tidal defences out past Wells-next-the-Sea, walking the sea wall at night checking the sluice gates hadn't jammed. He told me this story maybe…

"Third callout in a fortnight, same house, same complaint. He says there's a knock in the pipes." That's my brother-in-law Terry, halfway through his second can, telling this at my sister's kitchen…

I was ironing school blouses badly, which is how I know it was a Monday, because Monday's the only day I bother with the collars. Our iron's an old Morphy Richards that belonged to my mum, no steam…

Rule I keep, even now doing freelance subs at home: once you've typed a caption, you don't read it back. You check the timestamp, check the audio's roughly lined up, and you move on. I don't explain…

I was coiling the mooring rope wrong the whole time Denny was talking, over-under instead of over-over, and by the time he finished I had about four feet of it tangled into something like a fist.…

It wasn't the coffee machine. I want that out the way first because everyone always asks about the coffee machine and it's fine, it's a normal Costa machine, it just runs all night same as everything…

It isn't empty. We want that clear before anything else. Number 9 has no car in the drive and never has, not once in the eleven years we've lived here, but that doesn't make it empty. The first time…

The wingback chair was the only furniture left in Nan's spare room, and it faced the wall instead of the window. We noticed that before we noticed anything about the carpet. We'd come to clear the…

—and we've always filled the tags in the same way, that's the point, that's what I keep trying to tell you. Owner's name goes on the claim slip. Finder's name goes on the tag itself, tied to the…

THREE WEEKS AGO The laminate was still tacky when we found it, that new-plastic smell clinging to the corkboard outside the bus shelter. Our board only ever carries tomorrow's notices. That's the…

We keep the rules taped inside the cupboard where the winding handle lives, typed up by our gran in 1994 and added to since in three different hands. The tape's gone yellow and lifts at one corner,…

We drain the pool the last Sunday of September, always, and for three nights after we don't go near the deep end. That's the rule. Dad never explains it beyond, "because your gran said so," and…

“—no refunds, love, it says so on the sign.” Denise hadn’t asked for one. She’d only picked the photo up to look at it properly, out of the plastic sleeve, and the woman behind the trestle table had…

He starts the way he's started it every time now, flat, like reciting a phone number. "It was a two-pence token. Off-colour, heavier than it should've been. I found it wedged under the claw machine,…