Listing to Port

1. By burying them in a big jar under a major city for the recipient to find and analyse in several thousand years’ time
2. By hiding your message 75% of the way through a licensing agreement
3. By tracing the letters of your message on the intended recipient’s genitals with your tongue during a seemingly anonymous sexual encounter
4. By teaching your message to the parrots of a region that you know the recipient will walk through, but in a language that no other local walkers speak
5. By dropping a drop of water from your window onto the head of the passing recipient each day; the information being encoded in the ratios of different isotopes of carbon and oxygen in the water (the oxygen being in the water molecules themselves, the carbon in carbon dioxide dissolved in the water)
6. By feeding your message to a large, gormless and tasty fish that you then release into a pool that the recipient is about to go fishing in
7. By writing the message on the internet, sandwiched between two or three of your favourite conspiracy theories and/or racist memes
8. By hiding your message in a relatively anonymous post on tumblr

1. Queen Victoria was largely absent from public life for years after the death of Prince Albert. The public were given to believe that this was due to unbearable grief; however, in truth this was only the initial cause of her absence. In fact, she was engaged in a titanic secret struggle for the future of London. After Albert died, the Queen made certain consultations with dubious magicians, leading to a midnight ceremony in the gardens of Buckingham Palace at which they attempted to talk to Albert’s shade with the help of John Dee’s scrying-glass. The ritual went disastrously wrong, raising something from the deep that should never have been wakened. Some of the survivors claimed that it had Albert’s face; but it is certain that it was not Albert. For the next thirteen years, Victoria and her inner circle fought the beast, which was intent on making a nest in central London, eventually defeating it in an epic battle in Regent’s Park which was successfully passed off as a firework display.
2. Greta Garbo did not actually retire from acting at the age of 36. In fact, she was replaced by a robotic replica from the future in 1940, the film Ninotchka having become a quasi-religious obsession in the Patagonian robot cultures of the 3970s. Following this replacement, the real Garbo made a further fifty-seven films in the future before her eventual death at the age of 118. The robotic Garbo tried its hand at acting but proved to be an imperfect copy; it executed its emergency retirement routine and spent a significant proportion of the following years on standby mode in a cupboard. Interestingly, Garbo’s future grave site has become temporally dislocated and tends to wander through time between her original birth date and 4450 or so. Interested hikers near Ushuaia should keep on the lookout for a large and mysterious cube.
3. Another victim of body-swapping was Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion. During a particularly inspired game in 1973, Fischer’s pieces were infested by the Zugzwang collective, a team of sixteen floating spirits who had taken to defining their hierarchy in chess terms. The queen of the Zugzwang collective, angry at being sacrificed, executed a bellybutton-level essence swap with both players, essentially splitting herself in two. Fischer’s body was rather inexpertly controlled by half of the Zugzwang queen for the rest of its life. The whereabouts of his mind is currently unknown.
4. It may seem odd to suggest that Kanye West has a reclusive secret life, as he is not known for being exceptionally reclusive. However, this is because at least sixteen clones of West have been made. Each one spends ten months of the year in strict seclusion, before telepathically communicating with the others for an update on the outside world and spending the next two months as (part of) West’s public face. What they are doing in their ten-month sabbaticals is unclear, but I’m sure the world will find out eventually.

1. There was a woman who had a secret. The secret was in a small box which had been kept, unopened, in her family for three generations. No-one remembered what it was, only that some vague danger had been involved in its acquisition. On her seventieth birthday, believing the danger no longer applicable to the modern age, she opened the box. Three days later she was seized with a premonition of awesome and terrifying force. Placing the secret in an anonymous storage facility, she retired to a nearby park, where she was suddenly devoured by a horde of rampaging chinchillas.
2. After some time, the storage facility sold off its abandoned boxes, sight unseen, to the highest bidder. The secret passed into the hands of five triplets who were trying to raise funds for their magic show. As soon as they saw the secret, they knew they were in trouble. They gave one last spectacular show (in which they disappeared fully fourteen people, a rabbit, a barrel of laughs and the number nine), placed the secret into the trunk of a hollow tree, and purchased plane tickets to Venezuela. Sadly, near the entrance to the airport, while gathering for a group photo, they were fatally stuck by a frozen wallaby which had fallen from the wheel well of an incoming 747.
3. The secret passed into the hands of a prospecting squirrel collector. During to his long years in the squirrel trade, he had become incapable of considering an object other than through the lens of squirrels. He showed the secret to his squirrels and they became extremely agitated, throwing their entire nut store out of the window.. He decided to post the secret to the Vatican, but in his rush to get to the post office he accidentally picked a carnivorous hat from the hat stand and was devoured in the middle of the local high street. The letter was seized by the police as evidence.
4. The police measured the secret and discovered it was exactly 3.1 cm long and did not have any discernible fingerprints on it. Due to an administrative mistake, it was charged with resisting arrest and placed in cell 8a. When one of the detectives went in to interview it, the cell collapsed, crushing everyone inside. The secret was taken away by a haulage firm contracted to clear the debris.
5. The debris was used as ballast to shore up a local hill that was subsiding. Meanwhile, mathematics had gone haywire due to the lack of the number nine. The hill was a common place for suicidal mathematicians to come and contemplate slipping cliffsides. One of them found the secret. In a frenzy of discovery, she proved its existence in six pages of densely spaced pencil text, with two lemmas. Subsequently she was caught on the horns of a dilemma and fatally impaled. The secret, attached to the proof, was picked up by the mathematical recovery team and  placed on a truck.
6. The truck was suddenly stolen by a rogue chinchilla breeder who hoped to use it to set up a chinchilla monster truck show. The secret tapped her on the shoulder at a major junction and she jumped out if this plane of existence in alarm. As a result the chinchillas were abandoned. After a number of days without food, they went on a ravenous rampage and devoured a local pensioner.
7. A hat dealer who also worked as a lost vehicle investigator took the secret from the truck. Realising its import, she wrapped it up in a banana skin and threw it in the bin. Then she attempted to secretly flee the country by hiding in the wheel well of a 747, but was instead bounced to death by a wallaby who was trying to get to Australia and had got to the wheel well first. Due to her untimely demise she was unable to sort the carnivorous from the non-carnivorous hats in the next day’s hat batches, and several carnivorous hats were sold before the problem was noticed.
8. The banana was taken to the tip, where the secret was extracted from the skin and swallowed by a hungry seagull, who subsequently became able to speak six languages and understand the trouble it was in. Sadly the six languages were all extinct ones, although the seagull’s antics entertained the local university’s language faculty for the next few days. Subsequently, it shat the secret out onto a terrace outside the university’s library cafe. The next day, walking past the faculty of squirrels, it was struck on the head by a falling nut and died.
9. Finally the dean of the university, who had been watching this all from afar, scraped the secret off the terrace and put it in a box. He sealed the box up in his attic and warned his family that it was not to be opened for at least three generations.
10. Everything became very quiet.

1. There was a man who had a secret. He had always felt it was a very bad secret, and perhaps it was. But he had spent so long trying to avoid it that it was like a heavy stone in his mind that he could steer the waters of his thought around; the consequence being that all his thoughts were twisted round it, but never quite touched it. One day, after many years, he finally turned his thought towards it. But all he found, to his surprise, was a hole. He felt an odd sense of loss, as if he had suddenly been erased from the dictionary. After that, his secret became that he had lost his secret, and his story remained that the secret was too bad to tell.

2. There was a man who told him that no secret was too bad to tell, and then proceeded to tell him four or five things that could perhaps not quite be called secrets any more. And his real secret was that he liked it: all the telling of his vulnerable stories, the rush of it, showing his woundable parts to someone else like an upended snail.

3. There was a woman who comforted him one time, and she told him in reply that she had no secrets and no stories. Her secret, of course, was that this was not at all true. Once, as a child, someone had told her that good girls were smooth, seamless. That they lived lived like unblemished eggs, with no way in, beautiful and without feature. It was hard, very hard. But she built that egg, piece by piece, and sealed everything with awkward edges inside.

4. One time she was talking to a woman who replied in turn that she once found an egg inside an egg; an incredible curiosity. The story was well-honed and came out at parties a lot. Her secret was that it had never happened. She had read about it happening to someone else. She felt that her life was not very interesting. Why not add a little extra wonder, why not live some kind of magic realist life? Once, she told the story to a famous actor, and she later read an interview where he claimed the story as his own. Ever since then she had known a kind of smug kinship.

5. Here was the actor’s other story: when he was a child, he saw seven magpies in a storm, tumbling fighting through the sky across the roofs of the housing estate. And after that he always thought he must have a tremendous secret, waiting and gestating somewhere inside him. But as the years went by he realised that the real secret was that he didn’t have one. What is your secret, a fan would ask. I can’t tell you, he would say. And then he’d tell the magpie story.

6. Here is the fan’s secret. She didn’t want to go to bed with the actor, though she sensed that he might ask her, and that she might even accept. What she wanted was to be him. Under her leather jacket she had his tattoos, and sometimes she went for walks out in the flat fields, under the huge skies of her home lands, with her breasts bound. Twenty, thirty, forty miles. And when she came home she went into shops she didn’t know and imagined she was the actor, incognito.

7. Here is the secret of the shop assistant: she knew. She always knew. Somehow she was very good at knowing, when people came in, the things that they were not going to tell her. At first, she would slip these things into conversation in a smug way. By and by she came to know that most of the customers were not comforted by this, and so she stopped. But one day a man came into the shop and she could not tell his secret at all. It was as if it was missing.