The Night Flight to Zanzibar

He fell asleep on her shoulder on the night flight to Zanzibar.

Well, not Zanzibar. Milan. And he didn't so much fall asleep on her shoulder as fall asleep and end up on her shoulder, but Jessica wasn't going to entertain such quibbles. Not while she could feel his hair against her neck.

He was Will Scathlock, Jessica's sister's wife's considerably older half-brother. And they had just spent the week of Lily and Rhea's destination-wedding-slash-two-family-vacation (a terrible idea) in charge of the five children who had been dragged along. The argument being that as the only single siblings, they should give the parents a chance to have a break on the vacation.

It had been a lot.

At first, Jessica had been both skeptical and kind of mad about it all. Five was a lot of children, and Will was a stranger to her. He had travelled straight from a business trip, and her first impression of him was of a severe, frowning man in a dark suit and tie. Not the look of a man ready to shepherd five children around Sicily.

And then he smiled, and his entire face became boyish. And Jessica had always been a sucker for a pretty smile.

They spent four days herding the kids around beaches and historic sites. Which turned out, despite the ice cream smears on their clothes and the way at least one child always objected to the planned activities, to be the more relaxing end of affairs. Weddings were stressful things. And the brides couldn't be put to bed at eight thirty.

But the problems had untangled themselves, and the wedding had happened, and now they were all on the plane to Milan, where they would go their separate ways. Will had lasted maybe two minutes after take-off before he fell asleep. He slid towards her when the plane turned, landing against her shoulder before making a tiny, sleepy noise and curling into a more comfortable position.

Jessica, who never slept on planes, watched over him until it was time to wake him for the landing.

As they were making their way towards the baggage claim, Jessica's sister drew her to one side.

“I wanted to say thank you,” Lily said, “for dealing so well with the kids. It was an enormous help. And I hope it wasn't too hard spending all that time with Will. I know he can be ...” She paused, apparently searching for a word. “Cold.”

Jessica looked towards where Will was standing waiting for the baggage carousel to start moving. She thought about her first impression of him, and of the way he had scooped up a crying six-year-old who had just tripped and sung to her until her tears had eased.

“I'm going to marry him,” she said.

She grinned at her gaping sister and kissed her cheek. Then she turned and went to wait for her baggage to arrive.

Owls

There are owls in the forest. The normal kind, of course, but there are carved owls too. Made of wood and bark, they sit beside the trails and scattered through the undergrowth.

During the day, children run from owl to owl, shrieking as they reach them before their sibiling, or wailing as they don't. Adults think the owls are charming/whimsical/cutesy/insufferable (delete as appropriate), and wonder at the work that went into them. (Or why someone would bother, if they are at the cutesy end of the spectrum.) Teenagers, it has to be said, occasionally take swings at them, out of a desire for credibility or a need to get all the unnameable emotions inside of them out. (More than you might think also quietly put the owls back up on their stands once they're sure no one is looking.)

And at night – well, at night the forest belongs to things older and more enduring than people. And there's a reason why some of the owls face away from the edge of the woods.

And the Poor shall Wear the Crown

They had been known as the Diggers. In the chaotic world of the English Republic, groups of people had moved onto common land and begun to plant vegetables. It had been a brief spark of agrarian socialism, before they had been run out of town by the people who owned the land. There had even been a song.

In the world on the other side of the second civil war, Aiden stood in the hazy sunlight and looked at the stretch of newly turned earth in front of him. Behind him, the concrete mountains of the tower blocks stretched into the sky. In the distance, he could hear the voices of the others as they made their way towards whatever was for dinner. He thought about them, about the work it had taken to get this plot of earth turned, and about the two other plots that needed to be done, and came to a conclusion.

They were going to need a better song.