The risk was, of course, that the river might be so wide that they never made it across, and spend the rest of their days drifting through the fog in a little boat, with nothing to eat except tic tacs and raw fish. Nevertheless, they decided to try it. So Bianca brought her Dinghy to Nicole’s house on a little trailer, which she towed behind her bike. They packed some provisions (crumpets with honey, vegetarian pasties and a thermos of apple tea.) They put the dinghy in the water and set off. Nicole rowed first, then when her arms got tired Bianca rowed. Then they both rowed about who would row next. It seemed like hours and hours since they had set off. Nicole looked behind her and could no longer see the shore with her little house on it. She wondered if they had made a big mistake. There was no other option than to press on though, so that’s what they did. They kept going through the night and into the next morning. They finished the last of the crumpets, the pasties and the tea. They were hungry and thirsty, and their arms felt like they would drop off if they pulled on the oars any longer.

Suddenly, they saw something in the distance. It looked like a thin black line across the sky. It grew thicker, and blacker, and then took on a different shape. It looked like a toothpick standing up next to a biscuit tin. They quickened their pace. As the boat came closer to the shore, they could see what it was. They brought the boat in to land and shakily got out. In front of them was the totem tennis set, and Nicole’s house was next to it. They were home. “We must have just rowed around in a circle!” exclaimed Bianca. Nicole was disappointed, but realised that she was just never meant to reach the other side of the river. It was late, and they were both very tired, so Bianca decided to stay the night. They ate dinner of tomato soup and toast and then went to bed. The cottage was dark and quiet. The dinghy lay upside down on the grass next to the totem tennis set and the river flowed smoothly from right to left past the house.

Looking down over the wing, from seat 14C, the dried river beds they were flying over looked exactly like the branches of winter trees. He thought about this.

If the rivers were trees, then the base of each tree must be the mouth of the river, which meant that the ocean must be the land. And if the ocean was the land, then the land must be the ocean. Which meant that the trees (which were really rivers) grew on the ocean, while absolutely nothing grew on the land.

Like a desert.

As I was walking through the school gate, someone asked me what had happened. I told them. Then, as I was at my locker, someone else asked me.

By the time I got to my first class, I had been asked 9 times about my arm, and each time I had told the story of how I had broken it.

By lunchtime I was so sick of telling people the story that I wrote it out in the back page of my science book, and whenever someone asked me about it I stayed silent and handed them the book. It was no use though, because they kept asking me questions about it, and I’d end up telling the whole story again anyway.

I was so tired of telling people the same story, that I started to embellish it a little bit. And then a lot. First, it wasn’t a tree that I had fallen from, it was a big rainwater tank on my father’s friend’s farm. Then, instead of my father driving me carefully to the hospital, he had been speeding and we had had a car accident along the way. No, the car accident was actually how I broke my arm in the first place. And my father was still in hospital. And I hadn’t been in the car, but on my bike, riding to buy my father his newspaper because it hadn’t been delivered that morning. And a big dog had chased me and while I was riding away as fast as I could I’d pedaled off the gutter and knocked my arm on the edge of a payphone.

I told different stories to different people. If I liked them, they’d get a version that was closer to the truth. If I didn’t like them, they’d hear that I was helping my uncle move house and a fridge had slipped from our hands and crushed my right arm against the stair-rail in his block of flats. By the end of the day, everyone in the school was talking about how I had broken my arm. There were arguments, people would disagree with each other and assert their version of the story as fact. There were even some fights, I think. The teachers tried to keep the peace, but the boys were viciously defensive of the stories I had given them. I was so sick of them all that I couldn’t be bothered setting them straight, I just stayed silent. The funny thing was, I hadn’t really broken my arm; I’d used some bandages and some of my mother’s plaster to make the fake cast. I can’t remember why I did it. To get attention, I suppose.

Then I remembered that someone had told me that some traffic lights work using sensor pads, that when you drive over them they register that a car is waiting and then they change the traffic lights accordingly. Perhaps I hadn’t activated them properly. I reversed a few metres, then drove forward again. But still the lights didn’t change. I kept doing it, over and over again: nothing. I would have looked strange to an onlooker, driving back and forth like this, but there were no onlookers. I was alone.

I thought a lot about the moment I’d decided to stop instead of keeping on going through the orange light. But there was no going back to that moment now. I turned the radio on in the car. I waited for what seemed like a lifetime. I got cold and tired.

In the end I got out of the car and left it waiting at the intersection in front of the red light. I walked home and I never went to see my aunt.

The foolish man, he built his house of doilies, and his friends ridiculed its daintiness. (Although he did often find cake on his roof.)

He adds, as always, a dash of maple syrup, then settles himself down to work.