Intervals

Three stories. Three objects. Three connections across time that should not be possible.

In Hello, Across the Silver Line, a woman moves to Bath carrying the wreckage of a life and finds, in the back of a dresser drawer, a silver hairbrush that opens a doorway to 1919 — and to Lydia, a seamstress navigating grief and survival in the aftermath of war. What begins as a conversation becomes something neither of them has a word for.

In The Level, Ruth is a structural surveyor tasked with assessing a condemned council house in Stoke-on-Trent. Inside the cavity wall, she finds a brass spirit level that reads every surface as true — even the ones that are not. In 1947, Agnes tends a cold kiln and a grief she cannot name, and the walls of her cottage begin to warm from within.

In The Interval, a retired music teacher collapses on a Northumberland towpath and wakes in a concert hall where the music is everything music has ever tried to be. When he returns, he carries something back with him — something he will not understand until a fifteen-year-old girl sits down at a piano and begins to search for a sound she can almost hear.

Intervals is literary speculative fiction at its quietest and most precise — three stories about the objects that outlast us, the connections that should not survive time, and the moments when something true passes between one life and another.