Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

Sometimes I run classes for children, teaching them how to read books which cannot speak to them, how to close the covers and lie down when they are tired because the pages will not detect their fatigue or tell the house to extinguish the lights so that they know they should sleep. Sometimes I let my small students stay up with a torch, and read under the duvet, though I am careful to be sure they do not know this is by my permission. They rustle and hide and derive great pleasure from flouting my law. I teach them reading and disrespect for authority, and I consider my work well done.

Hunter, who wrote angry letters and disliked the spontaneous nighttime gatherings of bored local youth on the benches opposite her house. The same Hunter who loaned those same disaffected kids books and probably made them meals. Is that a contradiction? Or a deception? Or is it just people? People are inconstant.

Oooooh, spooky! I have penetrated his disguise with my special uterus magic. Father Fishy looks as if he knew all along this was a bad idea – meddling with alchemists always is, and girl alchemists are worse than all the others because they have internal pee parts.

Once, as a child, Mielikki Neith read a story about an old man who lived in the forest and was kind to all the animals, and when he eventually died the forest was silent and dark for a year, so that the people of the town believed it cursed, until the old fellow’s daughter, hearing of the darkness in her father’s favourite place, came home and chose to be married in a sunlit clearing in the heart of the wood and occupy his home with her new husband, and the whole forest rustled and awoke, and the birds and the flowers bloomed once more.