three stories not about birds: gull 2029

I wrote this in spring 2020, because I read that if you write a story a week at the end of the year you have 52 stories and it's unlikely they'll all be completely without merit. It's unedited, and I do know which parts of it are clunky. I pasted together all four stories and put it on Kindle Direct Publishing, where it made about £4.50.

In March 2025 I'm off Amazon, so here you go.

Cara jumped down from her horse before the woods ended, just as Miriam noticed the glitter of sea between the slant tree trunks.

“The ground gets softer, she’ll do better without you on,” Cara called back over her shoulder, comforting the mare Juno at the shoulder and giving her tack and bags a quick glance over.

Miriam slid down from the mare Charity, took hold of her reins beside her neck and continued following Cara.

The air was cool, quick and salted. Soft-looking woodland undergrowth gave way to gorse and grit for a minute before the ground became sand dunes thick with hip-height sharp grasses.

The mare Charity indicated her displeasure with the view, or the smell, and Miriam patted her neck warily. “I know, babe,” she said quietly. “It’s bigger than we’re used to. It’s been a few years for me, too.”

“I didn’t catch that, sorry?” Cara said, slowing Juno to a stop and turning back.

“Not to you, I was agreeing with Charity that the sea is pretty big.”

Cara turned again and looked out over the beach. Afternoon sun glared off the almost-flat wet sand for a hundred metres and then from the sea, hushing mindlessly back and forth. “Is she upset? She’ll get used to it after a day or so. We don’t even need to walk her up to the water if she’s frit.”

Miriam grinned at the word. “Was Juno bothered by it the first time you brought her?”

“Can’t remember. Maybe. Look, this is low tide, that line of whatsits marks high tide, we want to bank up just this side of the line and start the fires.” Cara gestured confidently but vaguely towards a pebbly alley between smooth sand and dry sand.

“Are we unloading everything?”

“Take it off the girls, anyway, even if we don’t unpack here.” Cara was already unbuckling bags and tool rolls from Juno. “Spades first, I want to get a fire up.”

Miriam exchanged glances with Charity and started unloading.

It was at most half an hour’s work for both women to bank up a plateau of wet sand to about mid-thigh height, just behind the tide line. Cara walked all round it, smacking the sides smooth with the back of her spade, and nodding approvingly. “Now rocks to make four fire pits on it, and dry grass and twigs and whatnot.”

“Sure. Are your shoulders aching and you’re just not mentioning it, or am I more out of condition than I realised?” Miriam asked, looking at Cara’s bare upper arms.

Cara laughed. “I’m not aching yet, no - I can feel that I’ve been working, but that’s different. I spend a couple of hours a day shoving goats and sheep around, is all. If they’d listen to sense I’d be out of condition too.”

“There is that. Maybe I should shove the children around sometimes.”

“Long as you don’t tell anyone it was my suggestion.”

Giggling, Miriam set off along the tide line, looking for suitable rocks. Cara pulled a small saw out of her tool roll and walked up towards the woods again, patting both tethered horses affectionately on her way past them. They flicked their ears and continued eating gorse.

She returned to the fire plateau with an armful of straightish sticks, some still with forked ends, others plain as dowels. Miriam was finishing the second circle of stones and trying to settle them together more closely.

“Good work.” Cara nodded towards the stones, and dropped her sticks next to the plateau. “Glad you’re here.”

“Glad to be invited,” Miriam said, automatically but truthfully. “Do you want one finished first, or all of them started?”

Cara looked across at the sun, and back at the stones. “One finished, I reckon. Proof of concept before tea.”

“God, I do not miss those days.”

“No.” Cara shuddered. “Do you want to watch me make the first frame? You don’t want your muscles to seize up from standing around.”

“No, I should probably carry on. I’ll look at it when it’s made.” Miriam trudged off along the shingle line to fetch more stones of the right size, a linen sling fluttering empty at her hip.

Three rings of stones, stacked and wedged, made the first fireplace ready to be stacked with twigs and dry leaves from the woods. Cara smacked two forked uprights into place and slung an empty leather cauldron between them to check it was the right height.

"Looks professional," Miriam said, knuckling her lower back and stretching.

"It do!" Cara said happily. "Let's get some sea in it."

They carried four of their eight cauldrons down to the sea and filled them, then trudged wordlessly back up the slick sand with one in each hand, changing their pace every eight steps to stop the water sloshing out. Cara was first back to the fire plateau and settled her left water bag onto the forked sticks, letting go carefully. It held.

Miriam let her two cauldrons down onto a flat bit of beach carefully, watching them belly out but not spill. "Did we put the distilling hats in your bag or mine?"

"Two in each. I saw them when we stopped to eat. Get whichever's nearer." Cara was concentrating on sparking flints.

The distilling hats were cartoonishly curved beaten metal lids on fold-out legs, each with a peak at one side that wrapped round underneath itself to make a spout. Miriam brought all four and held one out to Cara, who was standing back cheerfully watching her fire gather strength, a long straight stick ready in her left hand in case the wood wanted poking.

Cara took it and ceremonially perched it on the rim of the cauldron, spout-beak pointing outwards away from the plateau. "Fetch one of the empty bags and -"

Miriam was already scrambling for it.

"Am I being right bossy?" Cara asked. Her eyebrows were up.

"You're the one who's done this before." Miriam said diplomatically, staring down at the empty cauldron she was arranging beneath the spout.

"I am being bossy, aren't I? I'm sorry. You mustn't be used to it."

"I'm not, but I'm not offended." Miriam shrugged, and winced as her shoulder caught.

Cara noticed. "Alright, well, I'll try to stop. I'll make tea when the fresh water collects, you go and - I mean, you could go and lie down if you wanted to."

Miriam laughed, and after a moment so did Cara.

The ride north to the coast was long enough to require a camp sleep. Miriam hadn't ridden for a whole day since the first summer after the outbreak, and was uncomfortably aware that she'd lost padding since then. The first morning was cool, dry and pleasant. The second morning was bleak above and below.

Cara said, "I swear someone once told me there's a way of swirling the grass down underneath your sleeping mat that makes it stay plump over night, but they might have been full of shit. My bones feel like I slept on a weathervane."

Miriam groaned and pulled her right arm across with her left, popping her shoulder horribly. "I'm never going to tell the cats to get off the furniture again. God. Ow." She repeated the awful sound with her left shoulder. "If I live, let's learn how to make hammocks."

Cara stopped rolling her bedding up and stared at Miriam, open-mouthed.

"What?"

"Hammocks!"

"Well, it would solve the immediate problem, wouldn't it?"

"Yes! Good god, no wonder you're the one with the degrees, hammocks never occurred to me once."

"Oh!" Miriam laughed, startled. "I've never slept in one, mind. They might be worse. The cold air might get in underneath and find... all the places you don't want cold air."

"It's worth a try once, anyway." Cara regarded the sheet she was rolling. "Maybe on the way back I'll try to rig up something with this and rope." She stowed her bedroll in its arrangement of straps on the outside of her pack, and turned to the little stove where a pan of water had just reached a rolling boil. "For now, do you want biscuits or cake with your tea?"

"Biscuits, please. I did bring some, we don't need to eat yours." Miriam finished rolling her bedding up and regarded it. It did not look as neat as Cara's, but she wedged it into its webbing anyway.

"We'll get through all of it, don't you worry. Waiting around for saltwater to boil is boring as hell; I snack much more on these trips than I do at home."

The horses wandered casually over, a little diagonally and a little sideways, as they noticed a package of biscuits being unfolded.

"Juno, you have been eating for the last hour, naff off," Cara said fondly up at her mare, who danced a couple of steps and returned just as casually to the long grass.

Miriam looked at Charity, who looked back with liquid innocence, chewing.

"If you do share, don't let Juno see," Cara warned.

The biscuits were baked with honey and rosemary, and Miriam didn't share even a crumb with the horses. They had enjoyed the camping more than the humans had, even if they enjoyed the journey itself less.

Without discussing it, both women stretched their legs and lower backs intensively before mounting up again, and paid far more attention to their position in the lightweight saddles than they had the day before. Miriam rolled her neck and shoulders as they started off again, and tried to relax her ankles without giving Charity an accidental instruction.

Where ryegrass and clover had reclaimed the tarmac of the road, the horses' hooves were muted. The cotton and linen of the women's clothing and backpacks barely rustled at all in motion, so they rode in a bubble of quiet among fields of birds and breezes.

Finches were raiding a yellow field of early seed. If there had ever been a scarecrow it was gone. Miriam twisted to watch the flocks rise and settle, rise and swirl and settle until they were out of sight behind a hazel hedgerow. The next field had perhaps been onions or garlics, never harvested and mulched by frost and pests. Thistles filled in the ditch between the road and the weeds.  

The mare Juno flinched and danced sideways, and Charity copied her. A long zip lay in the road, left from some polymer thing that had blown into the countryside before being corroded away by the outbreak.

"What do you think?" Cara called back over her shoulder, stilling her offended horse. "Too long for clothes. Sleeping bag?"

"I had one like that on a portfolio case once. For conferences."

"Could be, could be. Want to get it?"

"If it's still here on the way back, yes. No sense carrying it to the sea."

"Alright. Come on, wench."

Miriam blinked, but then realised she was talking to the mare.

Juno and Charity sidled round the long zip and then made a great performance of being glad to be past it, but settled into their pace again before too long. Miriam relaxed again, even loading both reins into one hand in order to fluff up her short hair with the other. The east wind off the fields was fresh against her neck.

"Did you ever come this way before?" Cara asked conversationally, riding beside her.

"Must have, but I don't remember any landmarks."

"There weren't, really. This was the old road, only farms and the old pubs. The wider road's running parallel to us about two fifty, three hundred yards that way." Cara nodded past Miriam to the east. "Council weren't even repainting or repairing this one before the outbreak, but it's a good old road."

Miriam looked across the fields where Cara was indicating, but saw only green separated by darker green, dappled with amber and yellow.

"Have you used the wider road?"

"Only once. There were car wrecks in a couple of places. Not nice. Juno didn't like them at all."

Miriam nodded, startled at the thought. Of course. A family perhaps, returning from the seaside, driving at seventy miles an hour on a new wide road, perhaps switching off the annoying news on the radio, and the outbreak slowly but suddenly eats through enough of some unfathomable piece of polyester or polystyrene in their car's control system, and the engine's still firing because it's metal but no steering and no brakes and yes, of course there would be wrecks.

The emergency services were overloaded in the cities, no wonder nobody had been along to clear the roads.

Charity fidgeted, catching something of Miriam's mood. Miriam shook her head clear of the images and concentrated on the fleck of a goshawk up ahead.

The two women lay back on their elbows in the sand and regarded their work. Four fireplaces made, one cauldron of seawater boiled down to salt mush and its distilled runoff repurposed into two very large mugs of tea. Three more cauldrons of seawater were suspended over the other fireplaces, at various stages of boiling. One wore a distiller hat, but the other two were steaming into clear air.

And the apricot cake Cara had brought was completely demolished.

"Do you know any of the species of seaweed?" Miriam asked sleepily. "I don't. Should have found a book."

"Only bladderwrack. And I've no idea what it's good for, except drying and burning. They've got tons of iodine in them, haven't they, seaweeds?"

"That's about all I know too. But why? I'll find a book when we get home." Miriam rolled over with a great effort and reached into her pack for a notebook and a steel pen.

"Have you written down hammocks?"

"I had not, but I will."

"I was thinking, for keeping the weight down on the horses, what if it was a hammock that was also something else. Coat?"

Miriam nodded, scribbling. "Smart."

"End point of that line of thinking is a hook on the back of your coat and you just hang yourself up in a tree to sleep." Cara sounded sleepy too, but happy.

"Hooks on the heels of your boots. Hang upside down."

"Lost boys!" Cara sang out, horribly out of tune.

Miriam cracked up. "Oh, ok, now I'm adding the Lost Boys to the list of plays we should put on." She ostentatiously flipped back a few dozen pages.

Cara cackled. "Is Gremlins on there?"

"It is now." Miriam said, still scribbling.

They fell quiet again, in their separate memories.

Miriam chewed the end of her pen, staring down at the sand and shells just beyond the hem of her blanket. She remembered a childhood afternoon separating sand by colour - clear to pale to dark - on a piece of white card; the kind of childhood memory to make people feel comfortable about later decisions to study sciences. She remembered flower presses, untalented botanical sketches with lines too thick and too rigid, memorising linnaean names.

Later, there were other sunny afternoons of collecting and observing. Later, linnaean names became the outer coat of a whole set of rules about relationships, the way leaves attached, the functions of fragrance and colour, the cycles of minerals and sugars. And later still, chemistry itself.

Then, over the course of an English autumn, the world lost its five favourite polymers. A clever idea in a landfill grew faster, then grew better, then got out into the world and gorged itself.

Miriam looked across at Cara. She'd already been in the village when Miriam moved in, keeping goats and sheep.

Abruptly, Miriam asked, "What do you miss?"

"Oh, let's not."

"Sorry. I just. I don't know what you do for fun, sorry, I was thinking about films."

"Music, I suppose. I miss music. I can't sing, and it used to be everywhere."

"I can't sing either. Someone once told me it was teachable, but I doubt it." Miriam rolled back over to look up at the deepening sky, holding her notebook on her belly with both hands. "I miss looking things up."

"That's why you robbed the libraries."

"I didn't - yes, it is. But a room full of books is a poor substitute for typing in anything you're wondering and having the answer flash at you. I am upset we only had that for, what, thirty years?"

Cara sighed. "They'll get it back. It's all saved somewhere."

"It might not be."

"It will be. It wasn't all gone in a flash, there was time for someone to write it all to metal or glass or something and vacuum seal it."

"Did you hear of anyone doing that?" Miriam said, surprised, propping herself up on one elbow again.

"Course not. But someone will have. Clever sods in Cambridge or somewhere," Cara said, sounding completely confident. "We just have to live long enough. When we were little, we just had to live long enough to get to Mars, right? Live long enough to solve climate change. Live long enough to see the world go vegan. Live long enough to see the cancer cure. Well, we still do."

"That's... actually really positive. Thanks."

There was another long pause. The four fireplaces crackled purposefully. The mares trod and chewed gorse. The sea crept closer, giggling.

"You didn't need a chemist for this trip, though. Why did you bring me?" Miriam asked, as though continuing a conversation.

"Cos I thought you were quiet," Cara said wryly.

Miriam snorted.

Miriam had been shredding mint leaves when Cara appeared in the kitchen doorway. She was in a trance state of boredom, her hands moving from the beaten basin of freshly cut old sprigs to the chopping board to the pan of salted water.

"Busy?" Cara asked, for form's sake, but came in anyway. "Brought you a cheese. Better for spreading than for slicing." She put the little parcel on Miriam's long dining table and leaned next to it.

"Thanks very much," Miriam said, waiting for the rest.

"Been well?"

"Yes, pretty well. And yourself?"

"All in top health, thanks." Cara shifted her weight from one foot to the other and looked around the kitchen. "Making mint sauce?"

"I hope so, yes. It's all old growth from the mint bed out back."

"Should make a device to chop it up quicker. Rotary, maybe."

Miriam regarded her chopping block. "I'd still have to comb through it for caterpillars and birdshit and other things you don't want to preserve."

"Point." Cara gazed at a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling over the window.

Miriam gave in. "You're always welcome, but is there something I can help with?"

"I'm going on another salt run next week." Cara sounded pleased to be prompted. "I wondered if you'd like to come along."

"Oh!" Miriam put the knife down and went to rinse her hands. "Yes, I would like that. You're normally away for four or five days?"

"Yes, but could be only three. Doesn't have to be as much salt as usual, only to show you how I've been doing it." Cara pulled out one of the mismatched chairs around the long table and sat down. "Which is just distilling."

Miriam chose another chair and sat, leaning forward. "Any sudden reason you want someone else to know how to do it?"

Cara looked at her sharply. "No, but good catch."

"Well, it's a fine idea. Which days next week?"

"Depends which days you want off teaching. Rosie'll watch the goats for me any time." Cara pushed the little wrapped cheese towards Miriam. "Bring things to do. I knit. It's a lot of waiting around, mainly."

Miriam looked away from the night sky towards Cara, who had just said a very rude word in a very relaxed tone.

"You alright?"

Cara looked up, startled. "Sorry, thought you were asleep. Yes. Miscounted stitches, that's all." She held up her knitting, burgundy in the firelight. "I get used to cursing at the goats, you see. It don't hurt them and it calms me."

Miriam settled back onto her pillow of folded clothes. "Wish I could curse at the children."

"I can't see why you don't. They'll have heard all the words at home first." Cara put the knitting down and flexed her hands and forearms. "And everyone's a farmer these days, even the youngest ones know what the body parts do."

"It's a suggestion." Miriam said absently, focusing beyond the fires' smoke into the stars.

"Not like you actually wanted to be a teacher anyway, am I right? They should be glad to have you even if you call each child each hole every day for assembly."

Miriam hooted with laughter, surprising herself.

At the edge of the firelight the horses huffed, annoyed to be woken.

"I didn't know you knew I didn't want to teach," Miriam said, and winced at the untidiness of the statement.

"You're a them as can." Cara said simply.

"Well, thank you."

In the quiet that followed, one of the saltwater cauldrons began to hiss. Miriam scrambled to her feet, groaning as she put weight onto her left shoulder.

"Think you can transfer it by yourself?" Cara asked. "I don't mind getting up."

"No, I've got it. It's only my feeble muscles, I should keep them moving." Miriam reached to unhook the cauldron from its frame of branches over the fire. The salt sludge in the bottom made the weight distribution strange, and she lurched but didn't fall.

She placed it carefully on a patch of flat sand they'd cleared of seaweed and watched it twitch as the hot leather evaporated the water in the sand.

"Step back, case it spits," Cara called over.

"I know, I know," Miriam chanted, stepping back grudgingly. She stooped to pick up a cauldron of distilled water next to the fire plateau, and trudged with it up the beach towards the two mares. "Guzzle guzzle, girls."

The two horses sniffed widely as she approached.

"Do I smell of fire? You're being very brave, Charity case, and probably so are you, but I don't know you well enough." Miriam patted the side of Juno's face and held up the water bag. "Get this down you, so I can fill it up again."

They obliged.

"See you in two hours," she said, and walked back down the beach towards the tide with the empty cauldron.

The little waves weren't as cold as she expected around her ankles, but wading into the dark sea took some nerve. Something wrapped affectionately around her foot and she suppressed a yelp. "It's seaweed, obviously," she told herself in her worst teacher voice, and bent to scoop up saltwater.

Straightening up, her eyes suddenly found focus in the stars over the horizon. "Oh, my," she breathed out, and stood still while more and more points of light filled in her view. There wasn't a single cloud over the sea. Everything was clear all the way across to the horizon, and all the way up into space. Miriam wondered, briefly, whether to summon Cara to look, but then decided she'd probably seen it on previous trips.

A patch of starlessness lifted up off the surface of the waves, about ten metres ahead of her, with a sound like an umbrella blowing inside out. She flinched hard enough to lose her balance, but flung out the arm with the water bag in as a counterweight and didn't fall down. The starless thing flapped twice, three times, and circled round to pass by her face. She saw a round eye reflect the firelight and a shining-wet yellow beak tilt towards her and away.

The gull circled again, settling into its rhythm, and flew away along the waterline.

Miriam watched it until it was too small to see against the stars, and then stooped to refill the water that she'd spilled before turning to walk back up towards the fire and Cara.

"Something spook you?" Cara called out as she approached.

"Gull. I probably spooked it first." Miriam wiped water off the outside of the cauldron with her skirt and hooked it onto its frame. She balanced the distiller hat above it and arranged the beak to drain out over the edge of the fire plateau.

Cara nodded approvingly. "Amazing how they're going back to how they were supposed to eat. Now people don't waste food."

"I suppose they only had thirty years of easy food, like I only had thirty years of easy data. How long do they live?" Miriam sat back down and settled into her wraps, not really expecting an answer.

"Dozen years, maybe fifteen," Cara said. "Enough time to forget real scavenging. Remember, for the first year they'll have seen more waste food than usual, because containers decomposed before the food did."

"That's true! So maybe there was a gull boom then."

"Probably a rat boom too. Crows, carrion. Glad I didn't live in a city." Cara shuddered. "Thinking about it, I only had thirty years of easy music, too. When we were kids it was just the radio, get what you're given."

"True. And then it was like, people like you listen to this, and people like her listen to this," Miriam mumbled, nearly asleep again.

"Knew a girl in high school who used to dole out burned CDs from her older cousin who was a music reporter," Cara said, turning a row in her knitting and peering closely at the stitches. "The only influencer in the village. This was before even the scout hut got dial-up. We had rhinoceros notebooks with the band names and star ratings and who they reminded us of."

There was a pause. Cara looked across at Miriam, who was asleep.

"Might still have those notebooks in the loft. Dad didn't have the strength to clear it out and I've had other things to do. The pens will be powder but I should go up and get the paper. Reckon there's crates and crates of it."

She rolled the knitting round its needles and tucked it into the side of her canvas pack.

"Reckon there's a crate of just cassette inlay cards and dust. Little whatnots will have been up there with their enzymes, eating away the tape and the cases. Maybe even the ink."

The salt fires and the tide hushed her.