Mum says I was born broken. That was how she found me: a bruised bundle in a pile of old rags left under a footbridge. I cried for the first two years, she said. I don’t remember that. But my first memories are not of her. They are of the blue-eyed bird. He has always been around. The day I turned up, when Mum crawled under that bridge to see what in that little heap of linen could be making such a hellish noise, Goodfellow was there too: sat on the wall, singing like the sun was coming up. Mum says he’s my guardian angel. He keeps me out of trouble, she says.

Only, it’s the opposite. Every time I’ve got into trouble, it was because of that bird. All I have to do is follow him. He takes me to the parts of the Glen no one knows: the villages of stone that disappeared when the forest spread west; the forgotten orchards where fruit just falls to the ground and rots; the old palaces that lie abandoned beneath the towns of Warnock and Greenlaw. Once, he took me to the crossroads at the bottom of the Glen and I watched from the long grass while four men from the Cities, in their shiny suits and breathing masks, set upon a couple of traders.

Goodfellow never looked twice at another person before Heather, and then it was like he had discovered what he’d been missing all along. I’d find him in Greenlaw or thereabouts, following her through the fields our just watching her from a way off. Such was his fascination with her that if I saw him first, I’d start looking around for Heather because she’d nearly always be there.

So now there are three of us. And I realise that I was missing something too. I took Heather to some of the places no one knows. And Mum made her biscuits and told me later that she wasn’t like townsfolk, that she had a wisdom about her. Sometimes Heather asks me where I’m from. I tell her that it doesn’t matter where anyone is from. All that matters is where they are, and a little bit of where they’re going. But mostly where they are.

Vari stands at the edge of the clearing. Her bow is drawn. In the snow by her feet is a spot of blood. Behind her, in the shelter of the pines a wolf, a young male, cowers. The winter sun is low and weak.

She whistles and the wolf comes to heel. Vari commands the wolf to go forward, out of the trees and into the sun, after the quarry, but he whimpers and lowers his tail.

“Cailean!” hisses Vari. The wolf takes a hesitant step forward but stops as his paws touch the snow.

At the far side of the clearing, something shakes the bracken, sending puffs of frozen powder into the air. Vari releases an arrow. Another cloud of snow. She hears the quarry – a doe reindeer – fall to the ground.

“Go on, Cailean” she says to the wolf. The wolf circles her feet.

In the centre of the clearing, the snow is broken by a large black rock, an almost human figure like a stooping giant. She recognises it, not by its appearance but by its character. It was described to her only months ago. And then she realises where she is, and why the wolf is afraid.

Vari crouches beside her companion, places one hand on Cailean’s back and the other between his ears. She buries her face in Cailean’s fur and feels the rapid beating of his heart against her cheek. She pulls the wolf’s head roughly towards her own and places her forehead on the bridge of his nose. The wolf licks her face.

“I know you’re scared,” she says, “just follow me.”

The sun will burn her skin in seconds. She wraps her scarf around her face, pulls her hood down over her eyes and walks steadily into the clearing. Even through her cloak, she can feel the prickling light on her neck and shoulders.

“Come on,” she says. After a moment, she hears the wolf’s feet in the snow by her side. “Good lad.”

Then they come to it: the rock; the place where her brother fell. When Innes was found, the flesh of his forearm was torn where Cailean, then his wolf, had tried in vain to drag him out of the light. But if there was any relic – any trace of the event – it is now buried beneath the fresh snow. There is no reason to pause, nothing on which to reflect.

The deer lies where she felled it. She crouches, pulls her arrow from its throat and heaves its carcass over her shoulder. From there, she takes the shortest path to the cover of the trees and lowers the kill to the ground. She draws a knife from her belt, makes a small cut in the deer’s abdomen, reaches through the incision and plucks out one of the deer’s kidneys, which she tosses to the wolf, before lifting the carcass into her back.

“Good lad,” she says again.

She whistles twice and the wolf bounds into the forest.

The walls of Greenlaw had been built, neither to keep strangers out, nor townsfolk in, but to remind locals and visitors alike that here was a boundary, the crossing of which implied a sort of change. Outside the wall, nature’s law was in force. The grass grew long and wild, narrowing the roads. Inside, the laws were those of men: fragile and short of reason.

Heather knew the outside better. This was a world where events that seemed arbitrary and strange had simple, sensible explanations. At home, even everyday events often had no explanation at all.

But Heather knew why doe rabbits sometimes would kill and eat their young. She knew why field mice sometimes would go stiff and fall to the ground when startled. None of this knowledge meant much in Greenlaw. She was well known and liked by many of the older townsfolk, but other children thought her contrary and gave her little time.

As such, she was alone and outside the town walls whenever she had nowhere else to be, and she was a mile from Greenlaw late one afternoon, watching a kite circling over the Glen, when a sparrow, with deep blue eyes like sloe berries, fluttered onto a low-hanging branch above her head, blinked at her and took off again. It was a funny little thing and she followed it from one tree to the next until she reached the river Dovern and realised that she had come too far. The blue-eyed sparrow had perched on a rock on the opposite bank, where the edge of a dense old pine forest – like the wall of anther town – was all that could be seen upstream and down.

She made a decision. She was already lost. To go a little further couldn’t complicate her return journey a great deal more. And she had never seen the forest but there were stories – myths – of fey folk who lived deep inside it, fleeing the light and running with wolves. She could cross the river here, just to step inside the forest for a moment and see it from within, the way the mythical figures of her imagination might.

There was a crossing of sorts: a chain of large, round boulders, evenly spaced between the banks of the river. She was confident on her feet, hopping from one stone to the next, until, more than halfway across, her attention was drawn to a flash of silver in the trees in front and she lost her footing. Before she landed in the water, she glimpsed a hooded figure in the forest and, at its feet, a wolf.

The water was icy and strong. The cold squeezed the air from her lungs. Without air she was unable to swim and the current dragged her away.

*

She found herself on her side on a shore of shingle. The river was wider and more placid here. The blue-eyed sparrow stood on a nearby rock, bobbing its head.

“He likes you,” said a voice. She sat up.

And that was how she met Simon Crumb.

Simon was holding a fish by the tail and beating its head against a large stone. He had thick hair like curls of shaved wood and a long brown coat. She guessed that he was the same age as her or younger. He was not from Greenlaw.

He told her that he had been led to her by Goodfellow. Goodfellow, she learned, was what Simon Crumb called the blue-eyed sparrow. He gutted the fish quickly and held it with a stick over the embers of a small fire he had built. She said she had to go home. She had come too far and would be missed.

“Do you know where you are?” asked Simon Crumb. She shook her head. “I’ll walk you back to Greenlaw,” he said.

“How do you know I’m from Greenlaw?”

“Of course you’re from Greenlaw.”

She knew that people lived outside the walls, in the wild parts of the Glen. There were travelling folk and outcasts from the larger towns, bushmen and rangers. She wasn’t sure if this boy was any of those. He seemed more delicate, like an elf, if such things existed.

He offered her the fish and she dried herself by the fire while she ate. The meat was soft, oily and tasted good. When she had finished, Goodfellow hopped onto Simon’s shoulder and they made their way through the gorse and bracken back to Greenlaw. It seemed to Heather that Simon’s mind was only half-present. His eyes flitted between the ground in front of them and the far horizon, and he spoke only when prompted. She managed to establish that he lived in the lower Glen, in a cottage with his mother, and that he regarded the sparrow – Goodfellow – as his pet (“although it sometimes feels as if I’m his”). She asked if he had a father but instead of answering he drew her attention to a black cloud hanging over the upper Glen.

When they were just in sight of the town gate, he stopped and took his leave, but before turning her back to him, Heather said, “Was it you I saw? In the forest, with the wolf, before I fell?”

“No.” He laughed, and then he must have seen that she was embarrassed because he said, “But folk do live in there. And they do keep wolves. I’ve seen them myself.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Most likely.”

The sparrow jumped from Simon’s shoulder and landed on her head. She felt herself blush again. Simon held out his hand and the bird hopped onto his index finger. Then he smiled, turned and walked away.

As she passed through the gate and into Greenlaw, Heather was aware that a change had taken place, because she felt she was returning to a world of safety. A world she understood better.

Jim had been dead for sure. He was cold and limp when I pulled him out of the sea. I’d watched him dive off the rocks beneath the Lookout. Dived in after him. The water was fierce enough, and with a bottle of whisky in him, the cold would’ve got to him as surely as the current.

I was reporting the incident to group headquarters, a good five minutes later, when I heard him puking and spluttering in the corner. I said there had been a mistake and hung up. He was lying in a little puddle of saltwater and he rolled onto his back and stared at me as if I was the one who had come back from the grave.

“It was warm, where I was,” he said.

He didn’t speak again until we were changed and dry and I’d put the kettle on.

“Michael, is it you?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Why am I here?”

“Because you’re a lucky little bugger, Jimbo. You should be dead. I saved your bloody life.”

“Yes, you did.” He looked at his hands, front and back. I heard him mutter, “It was a dream, then.”

“Did that sober you up? Your little swim?”

I was taken aback by how fondly he looked at me then. And he grinned.

“I had forgotten what a sarcastic prick you were, Mickey.”

I didn’t see him drink again for a month. Not on duty anyway. He would arrive at the Lookout early, do his shift quietly and then go home. He had a jotter and when I was on the telescope he would sit and scribble in it. This was before the Blitz, when we still watched the horizon with one eye on the Daily Express.  I took his reticence for embarrassment. One day he seemed so subdued I had to ask him if he was feeling alright. He said that the war was getting to him and that he would get over it.

Then, in the spring, Jerry invaded France. That day Jim arrived with a half-finished bottle of whisky in one hand and his jotter in the other.

“This is it,” he said to me. “This is how it happens.”

I told him to go home. He was stinking drunk. He pushed me into a chair and forced the jotter into my lap. I didn’t know what I was looking at. Lines and circles, maps and unfamiliar names that I would later come to know better. Names like Montgomery and Patton, Arnhem and Dachau.

“I lived through this,” Jim said. “I thought it was a dream. The night I drowned, you saved me twice.”

“You’re not making any sense, Jim.”

“You pulled me out. I had a whole life. I got old. I had grandchildren. And then I was back in the sea, swallowing water, and you pulled me out again.”

“Jim, you should go home. I’ll say you were sick.”

“Look at this.”

He flipped through the notebook. There was the history of the War: Finland, rationing, Norway, Scapa Flow. He continued: Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Normandy. I can’t explain why – whether it was the conviction with which he explained his notes to me, or whether it was the notes themselves, the  detail, the diagrams, the scored-through errors – I realised that I believed him. And then he went past the War: there were the names of his grandchildren, the town where he would retire and eventually die.

“This is important,” I said. “You should show this to someone.”

“I’m showing it to you.”

“We should get this to group H.Q.”

He snatched the jotter and crammed it into his trouser pocket.

“And what would that make me? A commodity? A target? What if the enemy gets wind of it?”

“This is bigger than you and me, Jim.”

“No. This is me. This is my life.”

“Millions of people are going to die. You’ve written as much yourself. Perhaps, with what you know, you can stop that.”

“What if I don’t want to? People died, yes, but we won. What if, in trying to make it better, we wreck everything? No, I’ve thought about this. I’ve been thinking about it for months. This goes no further.”

Jim didn’t arrive for duty the next day. After the shift, I called at his house. He was gone. In his wife’s handwriting, a notice was pinned to the door: “No more milk please”.

Conscription was extended, and a month or two later I was called up. I wondered often whether my recollections of Jim’s visions could be of use to the effort, but I only remembered the names. The detail always followed after the fact. I asked myself why he had chosen to share his knowledge with me and not the service, and could conclude only that he trusted me better. It wasn’t until after Nijmegen, when things were bad, that it struck me. Among the names in his jotter, I hadn’t seen my own.

We were reposted to support the Indians in Burma and the day I arrived at command, a postcard was waiting for me. The stamp was Irish and the hand was unmistakably Jim’s. It read only “March 28^th. Big day. Take care”. The words “take care” were underlined.

By March 28^th, we were under siege by the Japanese at Meiktila and the fighting was the worst I’d seen. I kept low that day while the Japs bombed our airfields and I saw the day through without a bruise. A week or two later, the siege was broken off and we never saw fire like that again. A few months after that, another two names I recalled from Jim’s notebook: Nagasaki; Hiroshima. Then we all went home. I never saw Jim again.

This week I learned that if you’re trying to write 52 stories in a year, you shouldn’t start a story unless you’re sure it’s going to take less than a week to write. I was a couple of hundred words into Flashes when it became clear that the usual 500-600 words wasn’t going to be enough to tell this one properly. So the ending is rather rushed, the characters are not very distinctive and the central idea isn’t exploited to anything like its full potential. I’ll come back to this one when I have time.

So, you want to try spearfishing.

You will be in excellent physical shape. The best you’ve ever been. You will have considered how it might feel to take a life.

Spearfishing could make you very, very rich. You will have considered what it will cost you.

You must complete the act on a single breath. Breathing apparatus scares them. Very few people know how to breathe properly. You can take it right down into your belly. Push aside your guts. Make your ribs swing outwards like a gate. Your whole body is transport for air. The weights will take you down. Let them.

Here’s the trick. You have to decide that you’re ready to die. It’s cold down there, and dark. All you can hear is the sound of your blood surging past your ears.  You will feel your heart slow until seconds pass between each beat. The moment will come when you no longer expect the next beat to follow the last. You’ll look up, the surface an impossible distance above you. Then, you’re ready.

Close your eyes. Hold your spear tight. She will come to save you when she sees that you have given up hope. She will know if you fake this, but if you do what I have told you, you won’t have to.

When you feel her hands on you, strike. You will be surprised by how warm her touch is. Don’t flinch. Don’t hesitate. She will not fight back – it isn’t in their nature – but she will struggle. If you don’t kill her with the first thrust of the spear, you won’t have the heart to make the second.

Mermaids bleed a lot before they die.

The skeleton is worth more intact. Spearing the heart without damaging the ribs takes practice. Don’t expect your first few kills to make you the big bucks. Persevere.

Remember, when you’ve made the kill, you’re less than half way there. For the ascent, you’ll need oxygen enough to carry two bodies. When you surface, the sunlight will make her hair look like gold thread and her skin look like silk. Don’t be dazzled. Get yourself back on the boat first. Then, salvage the kill. You’re more important than she is. There are more fish in the sea.

One day, sitting on the seabed in the blue twilight, in readiness to die, you will realise that you don’t want her to come and save you. You will know then that your account is settled, and it’s time to give up. Pray that when this happens, you have enough air left in you to reach the surface again.

In Sao Rafael , we say that the five winds do God’s work on Earth. We used to believe it too. Some do still. When Mother instructed us to carry Father’s ashes out of the city and throw them into the hot wind that climbs the cliff face, we understood that to her this was more than an act of ritual and symbolism. The Black Wind would carry father’s soul up into the arms of the Lord.

“She is weak,” I told Miguel. “She sits on her bed, sweating, too fat to move, and she makes us do this stuff because it saves her from having to question any of it.”

“She is weak,” my brother replied, “and that is why we have to do it.”

Sao Rafael nestles on the shoulder of Mount  Oliva, where the Boreal wind (bringing warmth) meets the Occidental (bringing moisture). It rains for much of the year. When the rain stops, you look for shelter.

I followed Miguel across town, him cradling the urn in the crook of his arm like a baby, and me tugging on the tail of his shirt, telling him to stop. The clouds had cleared. I could feel a cold breeze circling my ankles.

You feel the White Wind when the Occidental wind slows and stops. It slides down the mountain from the frozen peak, like melted snow. You feel it on your feet, like waves on the shore of an icy lake. Then you know the Storm Wind is coming.

Father had died in the middle of winter. Custom dictates that you wait until the summer, when the Black Wind is strongest, before you cast ashes. There are four miles of slate between the walls of Sao Rafael and the far side of the ledge on which the city perches. We had no shoes. By the time we felt the storm rise we had come too far to start heading back, so we kept on. The winds were screaming in our ears before we reached the cliff edge. Miguel lost his footing and fell. I lay beside him and we held hands, dust and leaves kicked up around us. I felt the wind trying to get beneath me, trying to lift me into the air and throw me off the side of the mountain.

We lay for an hour before the storm began to die. At some point, Miguel let go of the urn and Father’s remains disappeared into the storm. If Mother had seen it, I wondered, would she think he had been spirited off to Hell? But I understood now why the old beliefs persist. Lying, clinging to the rock, more than once I heard myself say, “Please stop,” and then wondered who I thought I had been speaking to.

After the storm, we sat by the cliff, waiting for the rains to return. In the clear air, we could see the next mountain and the valley between.

“One day, I’m going to walk that valley,” Miguel said.

“I believe it,” I told him.

The clouds came in from the West, and we returned to Sao Rafael.

Kelvin Adams lived in a billion dollar apartment with his son, Kevin II, on the 448th stratum of Very Large Habitation Cube 66E. Their home had north-facing windows, through which they had a perfect view of Very Large Habitation Cube 66F, but of little besides. A penthouse, with rooftop access, was Kelvin’s dream but, with five years left until his retirement, he understood that it would have to remain as such.

Kelvin II was a singular sort. At twenty-five, he had yet in his life to experience a day of hard work or earn an honest pound. Yet he seemed to want no part in the world of privilege into which he had been born: the corrective surgery; the expensive education; the outward-facing flat. Instead, he spent weeks at a time exploring the interior, sleeping in the hostels and pleasure palaces, or not sleeping at all.

When home, he would sit by the front room window, gazing across the divide at 66F, drinking poteen from a bottle.

“Why don’t you make something of yourself? Do something constructive?” Kelvin would say.

“Some people are destined to construct the world,” Kelvin II would reply, “And some are destined to experience it.”

*

One day, Kelvin returned from work to find his son packing a travel bag.

“I’m going away,” said Kelvin II, “And I’m not coming back.”

“You always come back,” said Kelvin.

Kelvin II shook his head. “I want to show you something,” he said.

*

The Muawe Skybridge connected the 200^th stratum of Cube 66E with the 198^th stratum of Cube 66F. Crossing the bridge was not forbidden, but no one crossed. Iannus Muabwe had constructed the bridge in the hope of opening the world to the people of 66E. On the day it opened, Muabwe walked out, stood in the centre of the bridge, and threw himself off. Only a handful of people had gathered to watch the bridge open, and they stood silently as Muabwe disappeared into the clouds below. Then they went back to their business.

*

A small, plastic sign now marked the place where Iannus Muabwe had stood before jumping to his presumed death. Kelvin II pointed it out to his father, who stood yards away, too scared to step onto the bridge.

“Muabwe never intended for us to cross over,” said Kelvin II, “He showed us what he wanted us to do.” Kelvin II then climbed onto the railing and stood with his arms out like the wings of a bird. Kelvin Adams felt a rushing in his ears and a tightness in his chest, and he realised that he had never feared for his son until this moment and that his fears for himself had gone. He ran to his son’s side.

“Don’t jump,” he said.

“It’s alright,” said Kelvin II. And he jumped.

*

As Kelvin watched his son fall, he thought momentarily of his penthouse dream. He forgot who he was and thought that he was watching himself fall. He imagined that he could feel the wind on his face and the cold, damp stickiness of the clouds. He looked back at Very Large Habitation Cube 66E, turned toward Very Large Habitation Cube 66F. He couldn’t remember which was which. He looked down again. His son was gone. Then before he understood the reasons why, he climbed the railing and leapt off.

As he emerged, falling from the belly of the cloud, he saw for the first time in his life the ocean that surrounded the Cube, and he knew that he was going to die. But as he came to accept this, a shadow came across him and he felt himself lifted up.

“I caught you,” said Kelvin II.

His son carried him away from the Cube and across the ocean, and they landed on a distant beach. Kelvin saw that his son had built a glider: a strong and light wing that folded neatly into his travel bag. It was a marvel.

“Where did you learn to make something like that?” he said.

“I taught myself,” said his son, “Now we can’t go back, but look around you.”

Kelvin did as he was told. He looked around and saw the dunes and the forest, and the gentle waves. He buried his toes in the sand and he stretched out his fingers and felt the warm wind between them. Then he and his son ventured inland.