Hello, she writes. My name is Lucy. She stops for a moment. Pulls a blanket around her. Huddles into it. Then she picks the pen up again. It doesn’t work, doesn’t want to listen to her, so she scrapes it up and down the paper. The noise it makes is loud, and disturbs the strange peace of the house. She likes it. It’s comforting. It makes her feel that this must exist; that something, at least, is solid and real. The pen works, now, and she adds that she is fourteen. Writing makes such a comforting sound. As long as she doesn’t put the pen down, she understands where she is. She can’t float off into space, or disappear altogether. But she pauses, all the same. What to write? The truth is a miserable thing, especially now – but the introduction points to it. So she crosses it out with a neat line. And then again, and again, for the reality of it. The scribble is ugly, messy. She turns over the page, but it has gone through and made a hole; anyway, the paper’s thin and it’s visible from that side too. So she crumples it, shapes it into a ball. She savours the movements. Then she throws the paper in the bin. It makes a little thud, and she smiles. She picks up a new piece of paper and places it on the table, tries to think of something. Anything. She pulls the pen lid off and on again. Click. Click. Click. It’s too quiet. She can hear the clock across the room ticking, and it irritates her. Somehow, it’s a noise that she’s associated with silence. It’s as bad as nothing at all. Worse.

Once upon a time, she starts, there was a girl who wanted to be invisible. 

In the country where she lived, there were wonderful shoes which made whoever wore them disappear. But the shoes cost a fortune. The girl could never afford them, not even if she did paper rounds for the rest of her life. And she knew that she couldn’t have them – but that didn’t stop her from dreaming. Her only dream was to become invisible. All she had ever wanted was to put on those shoes. She was obsessed with them. She often took the long way home just to pass the shop which they were sold in, just for a glimpse of them. She had to have them; it was that simple. So she thought, and she thought, and she thought. And, eventually, she thought up a plan. She would make the shoes herself. She would go to the shop every single day, and she would copy each single stitch. Once the girl was finished, she would have invisible shoes.

She is writing faster, now. Her eyes are concentrated on the paper, on the pen’s frantic movement. She has stopped looking up, or pausing for thought.

The girl’s plan, she writes, worked perfectly. It took her four years and three weeks to make the invisible shoes. By the end, she was completely exhausted. And she was scared. She had worked so long to make these shoes that their not working would be devastating. But when she carefully pushed her feet into them, they did indeed make her vanish. There was a problem, though. She had copied the display shoes without ever checking their size. She could wear the shoes, but they were painful. They pushed her toes painfully into one another, gave her blisters, and stopped her from being able to walk quickly or run. The girl was horrified. All the work she had put into them, and they didn’t fit! But she wouldn’t give up that easily. She decided that she would stretch the shoes into fitting her. And so she did. Every day, she used all the suggested methods: shoehorning, steaming, simply wearing them. And bit by bit, the shoes expanded. By the end, they fitted almost perfectly. They were a little tight, but she could ignore that. Being invisible was wonderful enough to conquer the pain.

She slows and then stops. She becomes aware of the silence again, of the confusion of where she is. She doesn’t know how to write the next part. She taps her pen absent-mindedly against the table.

But then the girl became ill. At first, she simply had a headache. A cough. Nausea. But as time went on she developed a fever, and then... well, the next stage was swelling. Despite her illness, the girl had been taking a walk in the shoes every day to make sure that they still fitted. They became more and more uncomfortable as her feet became redder, swollen, sore. She still forced them into the shoes, even though she was too ill to walk far, even though her feet hurt for hours afterwards. But the walks just kept getting shorter and more painful, until one day the shoes burst open. She appeared, suddenly, standing in the middle of a street. She was still wearing her pyjamas and dressing gown, as the shoes meant that she didn’t have to change, and all the passers-by in the street stared at her. Humiliated, she hobbled all the way back to her house in socks, and when she got there, she–

Another pause. She ponders: What does the girl do when she gets home? She sighs and puts her pen down, because she doesn’t know. Maybe she fixes the shoes, she thinks. Or maybe... maybe she does nothing. Maybe she sits at home, day after day, too scared or sick to go out. Maybe she sits on a broken chair with three legs, and writes stories which she doesn’t want to understand. Maybe she sits and listens to the clock tick, and maybe she coughs because it reminds her that she exists. The pen rolls off the table and falls onto the floor. She is glad.