“You want it rising, or butt?”

For a moment Miss Fletcher did not know where to put herself. She had been following the young man’s conversation almost as diligently as she followed him around the apartment, but somehow she had let her mind wander and allowed her imagination to take over.

Miss Fletcher was small and grey. She lived quietly. Miss Fletcher’s imagination drove a bright orange car that growled around the town centre on Saturday night, with the tinted windows cracked open and the bass cranked up. Miss Fletcher did not know what the tune was called, or even…

I always wanted to study astronomy. Who wouldn’t want to look through a giant telescope aimed at the edge of the universe, hurtling back at the speed of light towards the Big Bang? And on the way, to observe objects and structures and vast arrays of matter whose grandeur dwarfs humanity, its planet, its solar system, even its entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars?

Always, of course, is a relative term (as is relative): in this instance, it meant about three years. I’d been advised at school to go to university and study for a B.Sc., and I kept…

“Wakey-wakey, rise and shine!” called Mrs Hudsonson, pulling back the curtains so that the sun streamed in. Dust-motes danced with delight. “I need this room by ten o’clock!”

“I do apologise, Mrs H.,” I said. My co-tenant, Shylock Homes, was away in Europe, and in the still silence, I had overslept. “I did have a very peaceful night.”

“Oooh, don’t say that, Doctor,” Mrs Hudsonson shivered. “A very peaceful night. It sounds like someone’s at death’s door!” She bustled about a little more. “Ten o’clock, mind! The man from Bartercoolers will be here!”

I was up and about well before…

The girl hung on her garden gate, watching me walk by. Her silent stare felt judgmental, and I became self-conscious: was there something odd about my walk? Did my new school uniform offend her in some way? Was my hair too untidy for her liking? The deeper question, of why the opinion of a three- or four-year-old girl should matter to an eleven-year-old man, went unasked. I looked straight ahead, tossed my hair back, and lengthened my stride by the maximum amount I thought would be imperceptible.

She was still there, still watching, when I passed by on my way…

“A guinea on a locked-room mystery,” said Shylock Homes.

“A political scandal,” I proposed. “Involving a foreign agent, or a scarlet woman.”

“Which?” Homes challenged.

“Either-or?” I offered. “Or to clinch it, both?”

“Done,” said Homes. And shaking hands, we opened the copy of The Times that Mrs Hudsonson had left on the breakfast tray. Having little else to occupy us, and unwilling to venture out into the unaccustomed stifling heat of July, we had taken to making wagers, the winner being whichever of us could first find a report in the newspaper to match our one-line description. …

The river ran oily black beneath the bridge. Above it, the sky was golden, a uniform glow that cast no shadows. Alongside the river and on the bridge, people walked or drove, going about their ordinary business. There seemed nothing untoward about the day; although a disinterested observer with the time to notice might have commented that despite the apparent size and wealth of the city, its inhabitants here at the centre were sparse, not crowding the pavement or queueing at lights.

An enormous BLAAM! filled the air. Only a single citizen happened to be looking that way at the…

“Hey, Christine, what size are you?” Molly called from the back room.

I’ve told her often enough, but she never remembers. “Ten, why?”

She held up a raincoat from the pile she was sorting through. “What do you think?”

There were no customers in the shop just then, nor any potentials outside that I could see heading for the door. I left my station at the till to take a closer look at the what Molly was showing me. I could see why it had caught her eye: this was a cut or two above anything we’d expect to come…

Davey was nearly four years old when he dismantled his first clock. That is to say, the first time he dismantled a clock: the clock he took apart was not his, not by any means.

And indeed he did not take it so far apart that it would not work. Having opened both the attractive crystal-glass front door and the less promising painted back, he unhooked the pendulum and undid the two screws that held the timekeeping apparatus in its block of decorated slate. …