The Thing on the Shore by Tom Fletcher

tiller with both hands and the wave crashed over him and he came and he beat his forehead against the edge of the desk as he did so. After he was done he collapsed and lay on the floor, conscious but completely silent. Salt water ran from his body. The sound of the waves echoed around inside his skull. Above him the recorded voice continued.
    Do you have an outstanding balance?
    Would you like to pay in full?
    Would you like any plumbing and drainage insurance?
    The voice of his wife.
    What he really missed, though, was her body.

W ITH THE A NIMALS
    Isobel opened up the hand-held games console and turned it on. She never tired of this beautiful object, was constantly delighted by the perfect tactility of its buttons and its plastic gleam and its pale, chalky-blue color. It was small and rectangular and she opened it like a book. Two screens welcomed her in.
    She was sitting on the sofa in the living room while Bracket was doing the washing up in the kitchen. Yorkie humphed around in between. Outside it was raining again, another reason not to go out. Sometimes she felt guilty for staying in on a Saturday night. Like she was wasting her life. But really, after being out all week at work, all she wanted to do was curl up somewhere warm, like a cat, and rest. God, another week of it. Sometimes she felt sick at the length of time she spent at work. But best not to dwell on it. After all, everybody else did the same, didn’t they? Everybody hated their job, it went without saying. Bracket probably didn’t want to hear about it, so best justfor her to get on with it and shut up. And when the weekend came, she would use it however the fuck she wanted to. Which, more and more frequently, meant disappearing off to visit her friends in the video game
Animal Crossing.
    In
Animal Crossing
you play a character who moves into a small town populated by animals. Except all of the animals behave like humans: living in houses, going to shops, talking, that kind of thing. The town is idyllic: all grass and fruit trees and irregularly shaped buildings and crystal-clear streams and butterflies. You take out a mortgage and have to pay it off, except, instead of getting some kind of boring, realistic job, you do things like dig up fossils and sell them to the museum. You could spend any spare money you had on decorating your house, buying new clothes for your character, or maybe buying presents for other characters. You could design and make things: clothes or ornaments or images. As the game progressed, more and more shops would open up in the town, selling a vast array of different virtual objects. You could go round to the other animals’ houses and talk to them, or meet up in the local pub for a drink. You could write them little letters, too, or send greeting cards.
    If you connected to the internet, then you could visit other towns and meet up with other people playing the same game—real people, that was, not the computer-controlled characters who lived in your own town. Isobel had tried that once, after seeing a hot-air balloon floatthrough the distance in the rich blue digital sky of her screen. The most exciting thing she’d found was an incredible range of things for her character to buy; the number and variety of objects that had been created for buying and selling seemed limited only by the collective imagination of all of those worldwide players and, of course, the filters that blocked out any content that might make the world unsafe for children.
    But the downside of this wider exploration was that the real people she’d met in various communal online areas were not as interesting as the fictional animals populating her small town. Their lives were not as interesting. They communicated in typing errors and bad spelling and the ugly, lazy elisions of “txt spk.” Their comments and opinions were not as surprising or insightful as those of the AI animals with which she had made friends. Or maybe they