The Cat Flap

This week's paid story concerns cats. This means I can illustrate it with a picture of cats, and this will surely drive engagement. I am a content wizard. Please buy my online passive income course.

Next week, I will be on a Hebridean island. I will still be writing daily stories, but they may not reach you until I return to these shores. I don't know exactly what will reach you when, but I will make you whole before too long.

This week’s daily stories

Monday

It looked like rain, so we walked up to the train station. There you can stand on the ridge, under the big canopy that covers the platforms, and watch the rain fall all around without getting wet yourself. But it's no good if you get rained on walking up there. You have to go before the rain comes, or step off a train. After an hour's joy there the rain showed no sign of relenting. It would be a wet walk home. So we caught the next train, without checking its destination.

Tuesday

When the birds spoke we learned they had names for us too. Not as many as we might have liked: not as many as we had for them, or for each other. A little brown one, a sparrow or a wren, I thought, alighted on my shoulder. I asked her what they called me. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “I’m terrible at names. But I love the way you sing.”

Wednesday

Dr Popovik turned a little dial on the lectern, and slowly the clock wound back. It was a cruel trick, she knew, and self-defeating. She had her bit of fun, and the students got grumpier and harder to teach, and she reached for the dial again to keep herself going. She couldn’t give it up. The looks on their faces, baffled, aghast, were just too much. And on the second row there was this girl, who saw ten more minutes left than she expected, and smiled.

Thursday

There were new flags flying, slow-stitched and unique. You couldn’t rally under them on a battlefield or dress in their colours – they were all the colours, made to clothe all who were in rags. On the third night, a boy with blood on his boots climbed the city gate and tied the old flag there with his bootlaces. But that flag was everyone’s, too, and it soon grew flowers and feathers and threads in every shade.

Friday

We drifted between McDonald's and the university library. We were not hungry for fries or learning but they were the only places open 24 hours. At McDonald's the crew and the security guy started greeting us by name. They dropped in an extra nugget, another half-scoop of chips. At the library, there was nobody, and the lights went off everywhere we weren't, and our fingers were to greasy to handle all the books we didn't want to read.

Saturday

Something rattled in the vase when I picked it up, but the light wasn't good enough to see it down the neck. I had to buy it. Seven pounds! The man on the stall – the boy – was twitching at the cheeks trying not to laugh. When the deal was done I turned the vase over and shook it, right there over his trestle table, but nothing came. I laid it in the bottom of my shopping bag and swung it against the wall of the church, and then I went home. It's in the hallway now, waiting for me to look through the shards, to slice my thumb open searching, and decide whether what I find was worth the breaking.

Sunday

As good as their word, the new council ripped out the bike lane, leaving a yawning crevasse down each side of the road, a wound in the skin of the world that none could see the bottom of. A child or two fell in; they should not have been playing near the road in any case. The voters were delighted. But, they asked after a week or two, where were they to park?

I have been reading...

• Vaim by Jon Fosse (translated by Damian Searls), a short novel in three parts, each of which is one rambling sentence looping through the thoughts of one of its male characters. Eline, the almost supernaturally forceful woman who drives the story, remains a mystery the narrators can't begin to comprehend.
• Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo, a remarkable collection which, among much else, captures they way a tragedy can haunt the mind. I suspect this book may haunt in a similar way.

If you buy books linked to from Scattering, I may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

The Cat Flap

When Mr Greystones adopted cat number four, his neighbours began to worry. Mr Greystones adopted cats a little at a time, but the street first noticed the new one (who was ginger and friendly and stupid) on the same day he was seen cutting a hole in his front door for a cat flap. The cat flap was, on the whole, a sensible addition: before it, cats one to three had their comings and goings through the permanently-open kitchen window, a temptation to burglars and winter winds alike. But the simultaneous arrival of the fourth cat, who was not only ginger and friendly and stupid but also slow and a poor jumper, gave the business an air of madcap destruction. A rumour quickly started that Mr Greystones had made several ill-considered alterations to the inside of his home for the cats' sake. And, well, they whispered, wasn't that more the sort of thing you expected of a spinster, more than a widower?

And yet there was an unthinking male confidence to the installation of the cat flap that reassured them. He had set aside the included screws in favour of his own hardware, and thrown away the paper template in favour of his measuring tape and spirit level, and these acts suggested a solidity of thought and purpose that set the minds of Mr Greystones neighbours at ease.

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