How about a story written in the past unreal conditional? Like, if she hadn’t been kidnapped, we’d have met, got married and been in love. Maybe about a woman who was kidnapped at five and escapes aged forty. The whole country’s interested. She reunites with her family, her dad’s dead, but her mum’s still here. Then her husband arrives. He’s not her husband but in the conditional he is. He tells their past unreal story with such detail that people question what it is that divides would have from is. He’s not a good man. Is this now a story?

Or how about a story that’s written on a napkin but it reacts differently depending on what the reader wipes from their lips onto it? So if they wipe purple lipstick (or lilac, etc.), they’ll get a fictionalised account of the Kronstadt Rebellion, but if they wipe blue, it’ll be about an octopus who loses all his limbs. If they wipe pasta sauce it’ll be a story about a boy who gets lost in the woods and is taken by fairies, but beer would get them something about a hooker with a heart of gold. How would that octopus walk?

Or maybe a story where a husband and a wife are in love (or are they?) but then the wife dies and the man can’t stand to see anything that reminds him of her. In his grief, the man starts to eat everything in the house they shared. Her false eyelashes left on the bedside table, her leggings and then her toothbrush. Soon, the man finds that everything reminds him of her and he eats every wild flower and chirruping bird. When he can’t eat the rising sun, he realises it’ll never work and falls in love with someone else.

Or how about a story that’s a combination of all three? It’s in the past unreal conditional and goes: if that octopus hadn’t lost all of its limbs in the Kronstadt Rebellion, my wife never would have been able to catch him and wouldn’t have choked trying to guzzle him down. The story’s told by the husband who’s a good man now and reads it to the reader from a napkin where it appeared after he wiped the rising sun from his lips. In this story he never falls in love with someone else. He would haves her into is.