No Bits Per Second

Some facts I have noticed about the big city. Everything is big! The buildings are big! The train stations are big! The parks are big! The people are big! Well, almost everything. Not quite everything is big, but most things are. Some things are small. The mice are much smaller in the city than in the country, and the rats too. They're timid things, things that you see out of the corner of your eye as they scurry from one hiding-place to another. You could easily miss them if you're not sure where to look for them, and even then you might not find them. It's not the same as in the country, not the same as opening a barn and going inside to find a tool that you haven't used in years. You might look in the corner of your toolbox and see six little black eyes staring back up at you - nestmates, curious to see what has come to find them while their mother is away. The bit city mice and rats are reared in burrows or nests deep in the underground of the city, in the pipes...

From my place under the duvet, safely cocooned from the seasonal but rather rude sunlight that had pushed its way into my room, I could hear the unusual sounds of people moving around in the front room. It was not strange to hear my mother up early - she was a compulsive morning person, unwilling to sympathise with the idea that anyone might not be as chipper as her at seven o'clock in the morning. But my sisters were more like me, and my father even more so - if it wasn't a work or school day there were even odds that you might walk into our house at midday and find my mother the only person out of bed, the only sounds our snoring and the chip-chip-chip of chisel on concrete coming from her studio. But not that morning. That morning the sounds of girls voices - one loud, one soft - took the place of the noise of my mother at work. Which in itself was strange, because my mother had been compulsively working on piece after piece for several weeks by that time, her rhythms of a...

We fought at dawn, the smack of rough punches echoing through the quiet valley and closer to the noises of exertion and exhaustion, coughing and panting and the crunch of knuckles and jaws and other bones that we could not identify as we hammered away at them. My hands were raw from blows, my knuckles just red ruins perched atop the milk-white of my fists, and I could see the crimson streams of blood rolling down my opponent's skin, darkened by the colour beneath. We punched and punched and punched, tore and kicked at each other, we wrestled so that at one moment my thumbs were pressing into his eyes, at the next his arm was around my throat and the world was all spots and lights and the sound seemed very far away. I stamped or wriggled or punched, or more likely I did all of those things, and I was free again to continue my assault, and to continue the sanctioned assault against my own body by means of a contractor. We tore at each others's faces with our nails like wild cats,...

She was putting her washing out on the line when she saw the bird. She froze, holding the basket of wet clothes in an awkward half-way: not up  entirely and tucked between her arms and her body so that her hips could take the weight, not down on the ground so that she could relax, but a foot or so off the pacing stone of her garden path so that her back was bent over at an awkward angle and the full weight of the thing pressed uncomfortably through her shoulders and in the small of her back. The discomfort grew into pain but still she was unable to move in case she spooked the little creature. It was about the size of her salt-shaker, and about the shape of her salt-shaker, because her salt-shaker (as many of her possessions were) was shaped like a little bird. She'd been given it ten years ago by an ex-boyfriend - well, at the time just a boyfriend, it was the intervening decade, an ignominious break-up and her marriage that had made him an ex - when she first shared with him he...

Four-fifty in the afternoon, and a black cloud of sand and dust rolled over the city, sending the inhabitants scurrying indoors. Shop shutters rolled down, windows slammed, flues were closed and those few unfortunates who had nowhere to go hunkered down in place and pulled fabric over their mouths in the hope of keeping at least the big particles out. Joseph Anonde, who had known about storm for ten minutes before its lazily violent arrival, was counting out the money from his till at the front of his shop, every few seconds peering out through a little window he'd made out of clear wine bottles and had set into the front wall of the building. "Can you see anyone?" said a voice behind him. "No-one," said Joseph. "It's thick out there, like the worst night ever." "Ha, man doesn't know about how bad nights can get," said another voice. "Man has a shop and all the money in town." "Man has a name," Joseph sai...

He shouldn't enjoy it, but he does - the brief sting of pain as the tweezers find purchase and the rogue hair is plucked out of his eyebrow. He examines it carefully, brushing the base of it and feeling the wiry texture. He wonders why they grow like that, when it started. That's being old , he thinks to himself: when even your hair forgets what it's supposed to be doing . Thick beard-like hairs growing out of your eyebrows, sharp black hair in your nose, tufts of white frosting your tragus. His evening face, in the mirror, is the one he remembers when he's out and about. He looks better in yellowish lighting - night handsome, his brother used to call it, half an insult half a compliment. When he's talking to people this is the face he imagines he has, softly lit and slender. His morning face is deadly, pasty white skin lit by the unforgiving daylight and puffy through lying down all night so that the tides of his body have the opportunity to spread out. "Y...

"There was once a man who mistook his wife for a-" "Hat?" The storyteller stared at me, his eyes narrow. "Hat?" he asked me. "A hat. You know, there was a book about it. The man who mistook his wife for a hat. By - I mean, I want to say Jamie Oliver, but obviously it wasn't him. Something Oliver." "Oliver Something," said Besson. "Not Something Oliver. Oliver Sacks." "Oh, right. Yes, Oliver Sacks." The storyteller looked from Besson to me and back again, and clucked his tongue. The sun had begun to set behind him, and from where I was sitting it now looked as though it was sitting neatly on the top of his hat. I closed one eye and then the other, causing the red orb to leap on and off the flat platform at the tip of the fabric frustum. "Are you quite done?" asked the storyteller. I stopped winking. "Oh, sorry." "Then I will continue, if I may be allowed the honour of ...

It's sad when people haven't found their god, but there was something more sad and Kelly and I agreed on that - it was when someone found their god and it was something pathetic, like a cardboard box or an ant. I think an ant would have been the worst god, because how would you know it from all the other ants? They run around like crazy, you'd be standing their calling down to your god to do you a favour or to find out whether it was hungry or not, and there would be lots of other ants running around like mad. You'd never know which one was yours. What if your ant god lived in the same nest as someone else's ant god? You'd have to be very careful who you were talking to. Then again, that's not the worst I've ever seen. The worst was on a TV show about it, about people who'd found their god in unusual places or where their god was something unusual itself. There was a man whose god was a roof tile. Just one roof tile on a house. It wasn't even h...

On January the 3rd, 2010, spurred on by an unfinished NaNoWriMo novel, I decided that I would write a fixed amount every day - 500 words, which seemed to me like reasonable progress to make. I kept it up until April, when I finished the novel. Then I kept going - just writing little scenes, something every day to keep my fingers limber and my brain generating ideas. I did it every day - one holidays, when I was ill, on Christmas day, and so on. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes it was hard, but I kept at it. When January 3, 2011 came around, I felt comfortable continuing - I increased the writing load to 750 words a day. It was difficult to start with - 250 words extra doesn't seem a lot, but stitched onto the back of another 500 suddenly it seems like a surprise extra mile tacked onto the end of a marathon. Again, though, I got to the end of the year without missing a day. On Jan 3 2012, I started writing 1,000 words a day, and then a year later, this January, I began 1,250 word...

At the edge of the beach, staring up at the land, stood a heavily-armoured fish. It was lying in the shallows, huffing air over its gills and trying to breath. The air was incredibly cold, and every time the fish gaped its mouth it felt a shock of ice passing through its mouth and throat. It was unsure whether the air was doing anything for it - it was still alive, but every minute or so a larger wave washed up the shore, pushing warm water over it. "Is it working?" called a voice from further out. "Not sure," gasped the armoured fish. It shifted awkwardly from side to side, evening out the pressure on its fore-fins. Its actual fins were splayed out on the sand, the weight of its body (not inconsiderable) taken by the heavier bones further up the limbs. It flapped its tail, pushing it a few millimetres further up the sand. It had been doing this every so often for the last few hours, pushing itself an infinitesimal distance with each Herculean effort, and it h...

"This is all very well," she says to me, brushing the sand out of her hair, "but it's not really getting us any further in there "--she gestures towards the opening to the crypt, which is still covered by the carved stone block. "Look. Do you really want to go in there?" I ask. "Of course I want to go in there. It's the whole reason I came here." It's not the whole reason she came here, and I know it. And she knows that I know, and I know that, of course, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell you. But we haven't yet crossed that line, the line where she admits to me that she came here to seek revenge as well as fame, and I admit to her that I know that, that I've known it all along, that anyone who met her during her voyage has a good chance of having worked it out too, that it is, as they refer to them, an open secret. "I came here to get my place in the department by being the first person into the to...

When there were just three of them left, Rama's composure began to slip. It stared to its left, at the ragged hole in the earth where Cospid had been, and its outer tendrils writhed with a nervous energy that caused them to brush against Laxi. "Stop that!" Rama said nothing. "Stop that!" Laxi repeated. "Stop it this instant!" "Sorry," said Rama, its voice shaky. "It's - look, maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is something bad." "We told you that," called Polis. "I know, it's just-" "Cospid told you that," said Laxi. "I know, I know. Where's Cospid gone? One moment it was there, the next moment: nothing! I didn't expect that. I thought there'd be some warning. I thought I'd see something." "I thought you said there was nothing to worry about." Rama twisted back to look a Laxi, bowing down with an expression of shame. "I thought it was lyi...

We carefully retreated across the ice and viewed the scene from a distance. The "plane" was stuck at a forty-five degree angle, its tail about twenty feet in the air. It looked like a whale that had breached the surface and then become stuck somehow. "I don't think it's a plane," said the older of the two women. "Of course it's a plane," I told them. "It was flying." "It was flying alright, but that doesn't make it a plane. Birds fly." "Superman flies," said the younger woman, giggling. "Well it's no bird, and it's no superman. So that only leaves a plane." "No, boy," said the older woman harshly. "There's all sorts of other things. Especially up here in the north." "But it's a plane," I said. "Just look at it! It's made of metal and everything." "Funny looking plane, though." She was right. It was funny-looking....

"I hate tunnels," she said, her body rippling with disgust. I pushed past her, peering into the darkness. There were tiny points of light inside, tiny points that I could just about see if I was not looking directly at them. I tried to catch them sidelong, but they really were just indivisible atoms of light, impossible to place as distant or near. I moved aside, sat on the ledge and scratched at my tail nervously. "I'm not fond of them myself," I told her. "Although I am a little surprised about you. Aren't you - I mean, don't you live in a tunnel or something?" She rolled her head slightly so that more of her eyes were facing me - an unusually Tillian expression, one that I hadn't thought to see from a Polypede. "I live in a warren," she said coldly. "A barbarian lives in a tunnel." "What's the difference?" "You might as well ask what the difference is between a house and a cave." ...

"Oh, this is intolerable!" the major blustered. He waved at the cloud of flies that attended him like a halo, succeeding only in dispersing them for a few moments before they regrouped again into their holding pattern. Frobisher could see that one of the insects had made a daring landing on the very tip of the major's ear, and was dabbing cautiously at the skin there with its proboscis. It was a brave creature - there had been many a larger animal that had wanted a piece of the old soldier, and Frobisher had seen an array of them strung up on the man's wall at the hunting lodge. One, in particular, came to mind at that moment - a rather surprised looking elephant whose head took up the greater part of the north wall between the two windows that overlooked the gardens. It seemed to have been killed in a manner entirely unexpected to it, judging by the look on its face, as though it had stumbled in upon its wife in the middle of a sordid affair with a kangaroo, and hav...