Best British Short Stories 2020

^{SARAH SCHOFIELD} SAFELY GATHERED IN

Thank you for choosing SelfStore4U! Please rest assured – your belongings will be safe within our temperature-controlled and fully monitored units. We pride ourselves on wall-to-wall security. Whatever your reason for requiring self storage we’ve got it covered – be it house renovations, de-cluttering, or simply to stow your skiing or fishing equipment. Are you moving back home because of break-ups, work commitments or financial problems? Rather than sell all your possessions, and have to start over again, you can store your items with us at SelfStore4U.

We adhere to the highest self-storage standards to provide you with a permanent convenient off-site storage solution.

This is containerised storage. This is your affordable and safe long-or short-term solution. This is the fix for residential and commercial customers alike. We are just a phone call away. Boxes? Parcel tape? Acid-free tissue paper? All your wants can be supplied.

We are the answer to all your storage needs. With 24-hour onsite security and CCTV monitoring across our premises, you will have peace of mind that your goods are in safe hands. Free from sorrow, free from hidden service charges.

Please note that we cannot accept flammable, perishable, live or illegal goods.

Read our great customer reviews! Find us on Trust Pilot. Our customers come back time and again. Each walled-off pod is your own private world. We are only here to help you to fulfil your storage needs. We care about you. We see how fearful you are of forgetting.

Late payment fees apply. Responsibility for insuring possessions remains with the customer.

In our fully air-conditioned units, your possessions there, for ever purified. We are a hive, honeycombed cells holding your collective dust. Each one sings sad lullabies that map your route back.

We know your possessions are important to you…

We hear you, valued customer. The corrugated door rolling open is a sigh. You pause, before your footsteps crunch over the unit floor. Come to our own temple. Come.

Each unit is a harvest and a grave. Wheat and tares together sown. All is safely gathered in, ere the winter sales begin.

And this is where it will begin. In UNIT 322. You have no way of knowing. How can you? About the chemicals in the Chemcraft set. Their shelf life. Their instability. The vial within the box that has, over the years, been eroding to become hair thin, until it will finally crack. The solution will bleed from it and react instantly, flickering a livid blue flame. How fragile it all is, really, when you think about it.

The flame will shiver through the tinder-like chemistry box and caress the corner of the auction catalogue. It is all so dry. We pride ourselves on our anti-damp technology! See how the pages will arch and splay, touching onto the tips of Elise’s real hair, licking across her fine features, the glaze crackling. See how her hands will melt to flippers. It will drip drip onto the Dinky cars like fat oily rain as the heat rises and the leaden chassis will soften and soon they will run and form mercurial pools on the Willow Pattern platter. Flames will dance across this, hungry for the synthetic furred monkey, where the heat will spread through the mechanism, setting spasms in the springs and he will bang his cymbals frantically.

The heat will lean whispering against the unit walls, and the laced hem of the bridal gown in UNIT 323 will warm and soften. The bodice will crackle to life, beads popping, the plastic boning melting. The flame will flit up the polyester lining and char the garter suspended secretly from the hanger…

Flyers will burst from their box and spin to the ground like blackening sycamore seeds…

Bottles and tins will explode, Rioja mulled to volcanic anger hitting the ceiling, baked beans firing a tattoo against the corrugated walls…

The mahogany bureau will creak, the joints warping. A secret drawer will spring open and a small twist of paper will burst out. A photo? A love letter? A threat? A promise? It will be sucked up by the heat haze and disintegrate into skin-thin fragments…

Leather coats will raise their leather arms in the blast of the fire. The duffels will dance and pop their collars. And finally the sprinkler will start, the fine mist vaporising. And, of course, it will be far too late.

The sprinkler system will shower the unicorn chairs that have sprung from their bags into angular forms. The gas bottle will bulge. It will vibrate and the valve will hiss. The gauge arrow will melt in the moment immediately before the explosion.

And so later… much later… what do you think they will do?

Well, you have no way to tell.

But you secretly hope that they will come with their fine sieves, soft brushes and sifting trays to salvage fragments from between the ghosts of buckled corrugated walls. That they will catalogue the remnants and display them on soft velvet cushions behind glass in the city centre museum. Come see, thankful people, Come! Scraps of smutted lace, a tattered label clinging to a curved shard of wine bottle, the charred bones of a folding chair, one warped miniature cymbal… Sticky-fingered children will glance at them on their way to the gift shop, where they will pester their parents for erasers and pencils and snow globes decorated with the SelfStore4U logo. And nostalgic, misty-eyed parents will dig out their wallets.