1

Tower blocks rise out of the pearly mist, the sky glowing pink after the blue of early dawn. There is no horizon. The haze beneath blends into the sky above in pastel watercolours. The boy’s eyes fix steadily on the scene. The dewy grass has long since soaked through the leather on his shoes. He stands on a slope climbing out of the haze. He is not an early riser. He has not slept.

His bloodless fingers rest another ossified sphere on the grass and he looks up. The scene has the beauty of a silent graveyard. A small smile curls the corner of his lips. He sighs and raises the club, swinging in a smooth arc, but clipping the ball awkwardly and sending it shooting acutely to the right. He swears through his teeth.

Another ball is placed and again he fails to make good purchase. He never played golf before. He never wished to, but this pastime is failing to bring the swift catharsis he was expecting.

Frustration is climbing to his cheeks, and he swings again and again at the next ball. He lifts only sods and torn grass into the air. Hot blood climbs to his eyes and he swings again and again, pummeling the dumb earth. He notices the warmth return to his flesh for a second before returning to the richness of his rage.

It is useless. He sits, panting thick clouds of vapour. The pink blush in the sky is blooming steadily. Its simple beauty brings a little calm and resolve follows quickly.

He stands once more and repeats the process. Before he strikes, he fixes his vast target with a determined scowl and a furrowed brow. The club swings smoothly and gives a pleasing pop as it hits true. The ball takes a high arc into the mist. In the distance, the lower buildings are resolving themselves as the new day blows out the cobwebs of the night. The ball disappears into the distance and, after a long silence, the crash of shattered glass climbs to him through the cold air. His lips curl a small smile again, but the old truth returns. The city is dead. You cannot harm the dead. The act was fruitless. He throws the club aside and descends slowly into the nebula, the dead city, his home.

2

The boy mounts the black metal of the spiked fence that encloses the park and alights onto the grey paving of the city streets. Before him a terrace repeats, dwindling into a vanishing point far ahead. Plain two story buildings walled with cheap stone, the regularity of their faces broken only by the flaking paint on their lintels. The echoes of his footfalls are alien in this lifeless place. The soft wet clap of every step repeats back to him and puts him on edge, so he skips to kick the wing mirror of a car. It is a therapy he has become accustomed to. The metallic clatter provides a moment's company and the car rocks on its suspension, emitting small squeaks. For a second he forgets his solitude.

The white stone of this city turns to dull blue in the rain. It puts him in mind of wine stained teeth. The soft rain has stopped but the damp still hangs like drapes on every stone face. Somewhere behind him, a golf ball rests gently in the elbow of a gutter. The sky is growing bright with increasing vigour. He stumbles forward into it, and for a moment is unsure whether he is walking to or from somewhere. The invisible end of the road gives him vertigo so he looks down at the traipsing of his feet. 

Every few hundred yards, roads branch off either side of him. He is unfamiliar with this area. His venture to the park had been unplanned. The previous day had closed quickly as he wandered and he had found shelter in a Victorian terrace. Three stories up and a basement leading out through vast glass doors into an enclosed garden. It had been a grand house. Faded wood work and shining white walls. Far more grand than the nameless terrace he now called home. It would have been a nightmare to heat. He tells himself that, but the rage he had felt in that house had no rationale he could deduce. The clean edges, the geometric canvases on every wall, the bronze statues defiantly middle class in a world where class had no meaning. It had been a grand house, before he found the clubs and reduced its stark glass to sharp piles on the floor. The crunching as he paced about delivering his justice, restoring equilibrium. From castle to dust. His mission was almost religious. He smiles at the thought. The rich smell of paraffin as the white walls dampened with it. The golden light flickering across glossed eyes.

He had made out with the bag of clubs before the smoke had become intoxicating. Out into the still night. Above clouds tumbled on their way, illuminated by the blue light of the moon. In the halflight he could see the park standing on a hill. His eyes with the yawning black pupils looked otherworldly. He resolutely made his way. Before, people would have blamed the amphetamines. He feels like himself now as much as ever.

He stirs from his recollection. Before him stands a corner shop he has not seen before. He is unfamiliar with this area.

He walks to its door and peers through the glass. The window is littered with brand stickers and magazine fronts. Thin cracks radiate from a point like a crude spider web.

His inspection has stimulated his interest and he looks about for a means of entering. About the street lie dust, grit and litter. Weeds peek out their determination between the paving, but no rocks, nothing to wield.

He sighs. His need is not great but a challenge has presented itself and he rises to the problem.

The door frame is metal and the glass thick. He elbows the cracked window, first testing and then with increased ferocity. The glass is firm and laminated. 

 He steps back and examines the street. The next door is double glazed and will prove impossible, but beyond is a wooden frame with thin glass. He walks to it and hammers on a small square pane. It is stained with a simple pattern; a red lily. It collapses quickly with the pressure. He reaches in and releases the latch. He can already sense the warm smell of decay and ferment through the aperture. He cannot desensitise to it and gags slightly as he pushes the door open. He draws his thin collar over his nose and holds a breath.

There is a cabinet by the door. The top is masked by unopened letters and magazines from the old time, for a dead family. He opens the drawer and is grateful to find a car key. His cheeks and eyes are swelling with blood as he holds out the acrid air. He snatches the key and darts out onto the street, panting heavily. 

He pushes the button on the keys and the car chirrups its reply. It is close and he makes straight for the boot, drawing out the heavy metal jack. He returns to the door and hammers in the glass with ease.

There is no latch inside so he scrapes the frame free of shards and lifts his weight through. Inside the shop is still. The ordered rows of bright untainted wrappers tease him. The air smells clean and he breathes deeply in thanks.

He rips open a few bars of chocolate and hastily scoffs them. He eats solely for energy these days. There are endless supplies of crisps and chocolates littered around his city. The diet is causing his digest system distress. He cracks open a can of soft drink and feels drips rolling down his chin to his chest as he greedily slurps it.

He turns his attention to the rows of magazines. Video games, extreme sports and airbrushed models. They all belong to the gone age. The top shelf is lined with plain fronted plastic sleeves and a sign saying “over 18s only.” He slides them along into a pile and lifts them down. He mourns the internet. 

He has to throw his neat stack through the window before climbing through after it. They have scattered about the paving and he slides them clumsily back together before cradling them to the car. He tosses them on the passenger seat and the engine growls a few times before igniting. The car rumbles away and is gone. There is a delicate chiming as wind plays on the mosaic of broken glass before the mutilated doorway. Then there is silence.

3

Light stumbles through beige curtains drawn. The room has become a nest. Duvets and pillows twisted together mark the floor’s centre. The cushions have been ripped from the cheap blue sofas, leaving them standing agape and naked; defiled. The lobotomised smiles framed on the mantelpiece have been turned to face the white wallpaper.

The boy enters through a door and eyes up his sanctuary. It is as he left it. Overlooking the scene is the wide black face of the television screen. Its gaze has narrowed since he smashed a small hole in its centre. It had been its moronic blank stare that had originally angered him into violent action. This new look is not much better. He will finish the job soon, put out its broken eye, but not now. He slumps into his worn pile on the floor. His body feels heavy.

He should eat. He has clumsily pushed his empty tins into a corner and he can smell their sweet organic reek. He had found rats investigating his hoard a few days prior and placed pellets in a protective circle around his den. First, the poison would make them thirsty, and drive them out into the street in search of water; he heard that when he was younger. Human ingenuity could make even genocide an art form. He smiles as he thinks of the gutters around the house slowly filling with the corpses of the stupid creatures. He’ll have to move on soon.

His main issue is defecation, especially during the winter months. He has not yet found a satisfactory system. He will use a single toilet for a few days before the condition becoming too vile. He can urinate in the kitchen sink to avoid spending unnecessary time in bathroom. However, his main source of water is in cisterns. Although he has adapted somewhat since the early days, he still finds the problem frustrating. The cistern here is now dry and the bathroom unusable. He has used up the adjacent houses too. He has been on bottled water for a while, but the squalor of the place is affecting his mood. It always feels alien moving into a fresh house, and finding one without that nauseating reek of decomposition can be arduous. But after the detritus of his human needs accumulates, it becomes necessity.

He gathers himself from his pile, needing nourishment and walks heavily through the door to the kitchen. The air is colder here and the chill wakes him a little. Standing amongst the stacks of soiled dishes is a saucepan pan filled with water and the floating remnants of his last meal. He pours the grotesque liquid down the sink and wipes at the soft slime with a limp sponge. The pan is relatively clean but his fingers are caked in the filth. He sniffs at the cleanest looking teatowel and, finding it acceptable, wipes his hands clean.

He cooks in the living room. He tries to stay in one room as much as possible to conserve heat. The fireplace here works, but he hasn’t the energy to collect wood at the moment, so he wraps his duvet around his shoulders as he works. He lights a small camping stove and warms his hands a little by the flame. 

He fills the pan with water from a plastic bottle, which sags a little under the weight and water glugs out onto the carpet. He curses softly. He probably should have got more water at the shop. His mind is not straight.

He places the pan of water onto the flame and watches the weight of the water see-saw across the pan before slowly settling. He turns to eye up his bounty; the wrapped plastic of the magazines. He lifts his weight and sits by the pile. He tears through the first hungrily, and the clean chemical smell of the plastic and the ink fill his nostrils and he yearns for modernity. A naked woman crawls towards him from within the cover, looking up at him, leering. Her look could portray anger but here it stands for lust. His stomach hollows and he revels in the feeling. He opens the pages and flicks through. Orgies and pink flesh fill his eyes and he feels desire stir in him. Leather and whips and mastery, and that look of angry lust. With the intensity of the feeling in his core, he becomes aware of the stone coldness of his hands. He sees the blood in his extremities as thick tar and returns meekly to the warmth of the flame.

The pan is emitting small wisps of steam and small bubbles dance at the base. He feels the damp warmth condense on his nose and puts his fingers to the hot metal. He hadn’t realised the thoroughness of the chill upon him, and he shivers and soaks up the energy.

A few tins and sachets of freeze dried pastas, noodles and soups stand to his side, opposite the shells of used tins he has poorly piled in the corner. He rips open a sachet and pours it into the water, the smell of curry flavourings and MSG fill the air. He opens another and adds it. The flavours have become so familiar that he finds them indistinguishable. He used to look forward to these meals. He stirs the mixture as it coagulates and large bubbles gloop thickly from the surface.

He eats quickly before the mixture has cooled and burns his pallet. He stops and tongues the blistering flesh for a moment before continuing. The meal is over quickly and he feels more wholly himself. He belches his satisfaction and slumps back into the warmth of his nest in the middle of his room.

The woman leers up at him, static in her rage.  He picks up the cover and contemplates her form. For a moment he forgets the sexuality and sees only a beast, caged, bearing teeth at its slaver and master. He turns the page to hide her. A young girl looks up at him, her feet crossed underneath her. She is naked like a bathing child. Her large sorrowful eyes fill him and he hears her laugh and the squeak of the swings. She brushes snow from her pink cheek with a mittened hand and smiles at him. He puts his arms around her and her hair at his face sticks to his lips. For a moment her weight is within his embrace, her breath is at his neck and he is alone in his darkened room with his empty cans. He wants to throw up. He closes his eyes and listens to his breathing.

4

He cannot stay here. He must get out of this place. He looks around his possessions with loathing. He weighs up his distaste with his corporeal needs. They will not move, they can all be replaced. He picks up a small metal tin, as he always does. It is the size of a large bound book and the chipped paint barely shows it once held cigars. He has an urge to grab one of the magazines but then he cannot. The air here is spoilt and oppressive and he turns and exits, leaving the door slowly creaking to.

Outside the sun is blazing but too weak to penetrate his skin. He walks past the car outside and into the middle of the street. He feels his possible courses reach out in every direction, a squirming urchin, the countless arms of possibility all leading outward to nothing. He is frozen at its core.

Again he desires to throw up. He longs to feel the acidity at the back of his throat, the sharpness of the sensation. He wretches hopefully, but to no avail. The tarmac fills his vision, dumb and senseless. He knows he won’t throw up, the feeling will pass, he will continue. He presses his cheek to the tarmac and lies his body down, his mind and his pulse racing ceaselessly. This will pass, he will continue. The certainty weighs heavy on him. He tries to cry, but his first whimper sickens him and he lies still.

After a time, the absurdity of his position impresses on him and he rises, dejected. He lifts his weight clumsily to his feet. The countless possibilities tease him still but he has no energy to indulge in despair. He begins to walk, as if following the slope of a hill, down to the basin of his will. His feet walk and his eyes barely take in the passing streets. The terraces pass beside him. Shopfronts stare out blankly and mannequins paw meekly at the glass.

His eyes have started picking out familiar pocks in the pavement. The gaps worn in the road markings and the missing paving slabs stir his memories and he is a child walking home from school. His uniform smells of grass and the long afternoons are full of promise. A small voice calls his name and he turns but the boy has gone and there is just cold stone and glass to meet his eyes.

The houses here stand in a vast square, enclosing an arena, a park at its centre. The grass has grown long and wild like the untrimmed face of a vagrant. It looks inhospitable and he wonders what could hide beneath the tall blades. He knows there is nothing to harm him but he still feels uneasy. He remembers his mother warning him of needles in this park as a child. He imagined sewing and couldn’t grasp the gravity of her tone. 

He jumps the fence and walks to the swings. There is a particular house his eyes avoid. He is not ready yet. 

He sits and eyes the familiar setting. Although the flaking paint and the ragged grass poking through the wood chips have an air of the sinister, he feels at home here. His mind drifts back to his sister; her young, bright face; how she would scream as she descended the slide and laugh drunkenly as she alighted. His eyes flick across the forbidden house and its unmentionable door. The inescapability of the present is upon him and with irrepressible determination time’s arrow pierces him and carries on its path. He turns his attention to the metal box now on his knees.

He opens it and takes account of its contents. Little bags dirtied with white powder. Blue and orange pills huddle in plastic packets like neat honeycombs. A rolled American bank note and a broken bank card. These are his most gloried possessions. 

He found these treasures a long time ago, and very few others since. In the corner of the box is little ball of cling film. He unwraps it carefully and cradles its small payload in his palm. It is the last of his cannabis. 

He has held on to it for a long time, for a special occasion. Days have long since become nameless and birthdays and Christmas disappeared in kind. He can’t think of any occasion that could be celebrated. No day is unique or significant. Time goes on in an unbroken march. He pulls tobacco from his back pocket and begins the familiar task of rolling.

The town must be full of the stuff. He has the thought regularly. The people all squirreled it away in shame and selfishly died with their secrets.

He had taken this stash a long time ago. 

There had been a dark time…

He senses the doorway that he still will not fix with his eyes and his fingers pause in their work. He will not think about the dark time now.

After a time the darkness had passed. He could not say how long a time. His rational mind had slowly restored itself, and days took form again. He had been very thin, but with no cause to seek his own reflection he had only a little sense of it. His days took shape around scavenging and exploration. He treated them as missions, and the significance of the play gave him purpose.

He had sat before the familiar front of a house, the engine of the car idling. The house was similar to the others of the row, but had been special to him. Many nights had bled into days and back into nights behind its nicotine stained curtains. An older boy with unkempt curls and a wild stare was the host. Together they would idle away hours; cigarettes would fill the ashtrays, stimulants and hallucinogens would pass around the circle as friends and strangers joined and left. Music would pulse through the room and shake the drum of his thorax. Light would climb the walls and sink below the horizon and still the pulse would go on, and more people would come and go. He met many beautiful people in those times. Young and passionate, they would spill their chatter in hectic frenzy, and the drugs would fill their bodies and pulse would drive everyone on and on. And then the time would come to leave and the world outside would seem washed out and all pleasures unpalatable.

He gripped the steering wheel as the engine hummed on. He dreaded confronting what lay behind that familiar door. His mission had to be done.

He smashed through the window with a stone from the garden and opened the latch. As the door opened, the gust kicked up dust from every corner and he could see it dance and spiral in a ray of light that had snuck between the low clouds. The stench lay heavy on the air. The pulse was there no more and his creaking steps moaned through the empty space. He stepped delicately to silence his footfalls, but the silence was as eery.

He picked his way up the stairs. He had gone this way many times before. The room at the back was his safe haven. With every step upwards the smell became more intoxicating.

He stepped past the door to the bathroom at his left, all his attention on the blank white varnish of the monolithic door before him. The image of his friend’s form melting like organic wax into the bed linen played across his mind’s eye. Nausea climbed to his head through his throat and he begged not to go inside. He raised his hand to the handle and pushed it firmly, allowing it to swing open.

Inside the room was unaltered. The curtain pulled in protest to the light, the bed unmade, the ashtrays pregnant, chairs and cushions pulled around in circus and huddled like whispering conspirators. Looking around the familiar posters that filled every wall he realised he had never seen this room empty before. He sat on the bed and pulled a half smoked cigarette from the ashtray, lighting it and sucking it down like water.

He looked around the room through the trailing wisps of smoke- at his broken kingdom, at the tomb of his hedonistic youth. He wished he could stay, but the smell continued to assail him and he knew his mission.

To the side of the bed stood a low refrigerator in place of a bedside table. Still seated he opened the door and looked inside. Several great bags of different substances rested, swollen on the bottom. He pulled them out and inspected them hungrily. He dipped his finger into each one and touched them to his tongue, wincing at the bitterness, like a child tasting sherbert. He smiled and bundled them into a bag. The cigar case rested on the counter next to him. He had always coveted it. He dashed it into his bag and made for the door.

As he made his way out onto the landing he was first aware of the door opposite. He had never seen that door open or what lay beyond it. It stood ajar with great crest of darkened blood across it, splattered like a great pair of open wings. He turned his head from it. Through the bathroom door to his side he could glimpse two shod feet facing down, their toes pointing outward against the wooden floor. He pulled the door gently to and made his way down stairs and out of the house.

He breathes the fresh air of the park and rolls the finished cylinder between his fingers, examining it for creases. The swing next to him sways back and forth a little in the light breeze. He lights the joint and breathes it deeply. Blades of grass all jostle in unison and catch the light as the breeze plays upon them. He can track different shapes in their fleeting arrangements. The light bleaches his vision and he is lost to the dance of the grass.

Memories of destruction creep up on him and begin tumbling in avalanche. He sees himself wandering through this city, leaving dust and shards in his path. He yearns to create, but what, and for whom? He is just a child and he hates himself for it. He grits his teeth and feels a pounding at his temples. The forbidden door to his side grows in his mind and he sees young sister's face smiling before him. His face and stomach twist to suppress the thought but her smile grows before his eyes and taunts him. In his hand, the joint is quickly burning to ash and he hastily sucks on it.

The world around him is bleaching out with the stark white light. Her face won’t leave him and he realises he is staring at the door. He sees himself as a child disappearing through it dressed in uniform and trailing a heavy backpack. He sees himself fully grown, but much younger, opening the door, entering the darkness, entering his doom.

The smell of death fills him. He wretches and feels the smoke as molasses in his throat. He sees her smile.

He tosses the ember from between his fingers and opens the cigar box with trembling hands. One of the small plastic packages contains small paper sheets perforated into small squares. He tears off a length and throws it onto his tongue as tears swell in the corners of his eyes. The saline taste of LSD washes over his tongue and he takes his feet and runs. Tears stream down his face as he alights the fence and leaves the park and the door and memory and any sense of home. Buildings stream past him as he runs and tears wet his cheeks and his breath comes out in ripped rags. The sky is darkening now and the heavy clouds look cancerous and full of chaotic energy. His treasured box springs to his mind, lying discarded in the park. It will be safe with dead.

He retraces his steps back without thought. His energy doesn’t seem to fail or falter and he is soon back at the car. He opens the door and turns the key.

The car rumbles excited and complicit. The pedal and the metal floor collide like punched teeth and the world outside springs to life and dashes past his wide eyes. Buildings flow and strobe past either side of him. The narrow roads with looming buildings give way to open mouthed carriageways and signs shining out alien hieroglyphs. 

The sky is wider now and is infected with malice and gurns and grimaces and lowers to suffocate him and the road conspires with it and evaporates in ribbons to meet it. The buildings have been replaced with wide fields of salted earth peopled with ghosts that walk through each other and continue on and their evil is without emotion and the senselessness and ceaselessness of their tragic march breaks his heart. And the fields are lost behind high brambles that bind the sky and his hands are glued with mucus and when his eyes return to the outside countless trees are fingering the skies. They are countless and their branches branch into finer branches until they are so fine that they bond with the wind and are lost in it. And they are separate but their sameness is innate and he sees a great tree beneath them all feeding them like a great ancient octopus. They are one and they are many. Infinitely many, and in their multitude they are one and this truth taunts him again and again and does not stop. It does not stop and the darkness climbs down and scratches at his windows and will consume him and will consume everything and nothing and all will be darkness. And there is no fight.

The darkness is broken as orange light swirls before him and peaks to sharp white splinters. The air is still. He is numb with cold. There is something hard at his cheek and warm pain chimes through his face like a struck wine glass. Outside a bird is singing. It rings all around him. It is a melody as clean as mathematics, as unique and inimitable as this fresh dawn. The sound of life is so sweet he could weep. For a long time he is still, his mind lilting with the delicate song and at peace.

He lifts his head from the leather of the steering wheel and opens his eyes. The windscreen is cracked and soaked in blood and a face stares blankly through the glass. It is masked in deep red, the mouth open in a silent scream. The eyes are hollow pits and the stare unblinking. Arms are sprawled out on each side in a wide embrace. The dead face meets his eyes and they are frozen in their unbroken stare.

5

The need to vomit comes suddenly upon him and he fumbles for the door handle. He cannot stop looking into the hollow eyes. As his fingers move clumsily across the door the need becomes greater and he wretches violently and silently and finally takes his eyes from the face. He pulls the handle and quickly bursts out of the door. He coughs and throws up the little he has in his stomach. 

The tarmac moves a little before his eyes and his small puddle of waste slithers unnaturally. The drug is still in his brain. Nearby the bird is still singing. He cannot stand it.

The memory of the face returns quickly. It suddenly seems absurd and unfeasible, like a remembered dream that seemed so real. He turns to the car. The wrecked body remains slumped, prostrate across the bonnet. He is only glad that it is no longer looking at him.

He stands for a long time, staring at it, waiting for it to move. It cannot be true. Why were they here? What chance was there?

The sky has calmed since the night. Clouds roll hastily and silently across bright blue, but the wind is calmer on the ground. It cuts through his clothes and his skin is picked out with goosebumps. 

The bloody form still refuses to move. The brutal spectacle of it will not end. He prays for it to move, he begs it to. He prays for the blood to be wiped and the bruises to be bleached and the soul to be restored. He prays for it, but it will not happen.

The gravity of what he has done rises from his stomach to his chest and tears begin to fill his eyes. Stumbling from the weight of his sorrow he tries to throw up again but in vain. His brain runs through the chances, through the events of the night before, what he could have done differently, what he can do now. The whirl of thoughts is dizzying and he has to sit down on the tarmac. There is nothing to be done. Hatred for the world and for God fills him and crystallizes in his clenched fists and he sits, nursing his sweet loathing.

The bird is still singing and around him a gentle breeze plays with the branches. Water has soaked his jeans and a stone cold is moving through his flesh. There is nothing to be done. He stands to confront his work. As he approaches the body he screams fierce abuse at himself from within. He glimpses the great dark eyes again and a curse comes to his lips and out into the air and is lost in the wind.

The body is small. The jeans are tight fitting and he examines for the bulge of a wallet, standing at a distance, afraid to touch. Their is none, but he is aware for the first time that it’s the shape of a woman. The face is gored and indefinable but the hair is tied up into a tight bun and she wears a thick wax jacket. Her old hiking boots are caked thickly in mud. Only one is visible, as the car has crumpled into a low stone wall, trapping her far leg with it. 

He must bury her. There must be a ceremony. He looks around. On every side fields roll into the distance. Some trees stand nearby, stripped naked by winter. A little way down the road, the wall gives way to a metal gate. Beyond it a meadow stretches back, sloping upward, the grass bulging and slumping back upon itself, pushing eternally upwards. It will do for a resting place. 

He is still afraid to touch her. He approaches her shyly and watches her hair moving with the wind. He knows she was beautiful. In this moment he feels that no one has ever been so close to her. They never shared a word and yet they caused each other such pain. They could have been so happy together. He silently whispers his apology. His love for her solidifies to a stone in his throat. 

Grabbing the shoulders of her jacket, he pulls her across the bonnet. She slides easily and limply at first, but there is a sudden resistance. His wet fingers loosen on the fabric and he slips backwards onto the small of his back. The drugs are still defiantly working on him, spiralling around endlessly and he is acutely aware of the awkwardness of his movement. Gripping the door handle, he climbs to his feet. The woman now lies diagonally and her arm hangs pointing downwards at an incongruous angle. She looks dishevelled, like a discarded ragdoll. He grimaces slightly. Her leg is stuck fast between the metal of the car and stone wall. He goes to tug her form towards him again but as he does the act seems crude and sacrilegious. He ponders the scene for a second before climbing into the crooked car and turning the key. The engine does not respond. He strikes the steering wheel with his hands in frustration, but reassesses his problem and turns to release the handbrake. He climbs out again. The front wheel has sunk into the ditch at the roadside and looks fast. He pushes his weight against the frame of the car door and strains against its bulk. The suspension gives slightly but springs silently back when he releases pressure. 

The sun is climbing in the sky. He sighs and wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and walks from the vehicle. He cannot bare the gracelessness of her position and imagines pulling against the elastic flesh of her leg, he imagines the birds picking ribbons from her ruined face. Gritting his teeth he strains to think against the circular chattering in his brain.

He walks to the car and pulls some leaves of paper from the glove box. Stepping to the back, he removes the fuel cap and forces the scraps inside. He pulls his lighter from his pocket and sets them aflame before quickly making back to a safe distance. 

The flame is near invisible in the sunlight but he can faintly see the shadow of its small heat haze. For a long time he stands silently watching. He suddenly wishes he had covered her up, had straightened her body instead of leaving her reaching lopsidedly to the ground. He has the urge to go to her and has to stop himself as sheets of deep orange come in wide licks from beneath the car frame. They move steadily towards the bonnet and begin to work on her body. Above, the orange gives way gradually to great black clouds, undulating and swelling into the sky. The flames begin coming in irregular spurts and gain momentum. A loud roaring covers the sound of the breeze as her torso is lost to the flame and then her arm taken in by the inferno. The flame climbs higher and he sees forms in their liquid movement. Seemingly human faces come fleetingly from the blaze but he cannot discern their emotions. For a long time he stares, open mouthed, lost to the chaos.

The flames are growing lower and the needs of his body are beginning to play on him. He is suddenly aware of his hunger and more pressingly his thirst. He winces as he thinks of the reservoirs in the car radiator and windscreen wipers, but they were probably no good for drinking anyway. With regret he turns away from the flame and his lost love.

6

The black shell of the car continues to cough noxious black clouds someway behind him. The horizon gives no clue to a direction and he senses for the first time that he is lost. The feeling is strange. He lives day to day lost in the maze of streets in his city. He favours the areas he does not know as this new world is typically devoid of surprises. But no matter how lost, he knows that shelter and sustenance are never far. Scanning the horizon he suddenly feels very small and the wide green fields seem gaping and hostile. The dumb grass rattles its spears in every direction. He is suddenly overwhelmed by homesickness and has to remind himself that he has no home.

There is no feature on the landscape to aim for, so he faces down the road he has no memory of coming down and begins walking. 

His progress feels painfully slow and the sun glares down at him. Somewhere behind, just beyond his periphery, he senses a great darkness, a large emptiness staring across at him from beyond a quiet field. He turns to it but it knows his mind and quickly hides out of sight. It returns to its vigil as he looks away. He examines it while staring defiantly down the road before him. He feels the light around its edges bending as though warped by a lens. His mind moves to examine the centre of the thing and he feels chill within himself. It is as a doorway to some cold and lifeless realm. He forces himself to ignore it and makes his feet continue their movement.

The road is uneven and his feet scuff on loose pebbles as he walks. It is a narrow country lane that snakes lazily to and fro, and each gently curving segment mimics the one before. His thirst is making him irritable and he is convinced the tarmac is mocking him as each turn in the road reveals another identical mile. Every now and then he senses the dark spectre to his side but its game has become tiresome and he cannot afford it any fear or spite. 

The lane is penned in by high hedges and he intermittently scans the branches for berries. He has memories of picking bitter brambles on long hot walks as a child, but this is one of the first sunny days since the long winter and the stems are still bare. He winces as his mind goes back to the regimented rows of cans in the shop he raided the day before. He feels the sugary liquid dripping down his chin. He smacks his tongue and feels it stick to his pallet and rasp against the insides of his cheeks.

A bend in the road reveals another bare mile. His anger is rising, the sun is unrelenting and he cannot discern the time he has spent on this dry track. He is aware again of the black spectre mocking him. He turns and shouts his anger in a syllable, but it has hidden again and his anger is forced inwards and he wants to beat his chest and tear at his skin. He begins to run and is soon sprinting. The road keeps revealing the same unbroken hedge and he feels the heat of his blood pumping and radiating around his cheeks. He stops and gathers his breath, his panting giving way to pained laughter at his stupidity. He pushes himself upright with hands on his knees. Nearby, across the hedge, several great trees huddle together. The swelling dome of living matter calls him, and it seems to him as some great fruit. He keeps his eye on it as he walks down the hedge, trying to find a gap in its forbidding mesh of branches.

He walks quickly, eyeing up the trees hungrily. The hedge thins out here and there along his way, but remains unbroken. He settles on a more barren segment, and steps carefully towards it. He pushes its dry tendrils with his forearm and feels a way between the branches. It runs along a long ditch and he places his foot between the dead branches and vines that are coiled at its base. He pushes harder with his arm and his forehead, forcing a gap. He feels a sharp pain across his forehead and whimpers a little, wondering if he should stop. He gives one strong push and falls through. He lifts his leg to support his weight but it catches and twists cruelly against a bramble. His head and arms are through, but his midriff is amongst the branches. He can see the soft pale flesh on his belly scored by countless barbs, and he thrashes away from it and pulls the rest of his body out with his arms.

He stands and assesses his injuries. Blood beads like small rubies from his arms and stomach, and he feels a hot pulsing around his ankle. He touches his forehead with two fingers and withdraws them to find a red circle on each tip. 

He looks across the field towards the trees. The field is broad but they are close by the opposite side. The field is covered with low grasses and it’s impossible to discern what grew here before. The tight hedged borders enclose a field of weeds in a perfect square, as do the adjacent fields, as they do for hundreds of miles around. He sets out straight towards his destination.

Beneath the grass the earth is uneven and juts out awkwardly. His feet can’t find any consistent surface and he winces at the strain on his ankle. He steps carefully back to the hedge and resolves to follow the border around. The going is still awkward and he treads a path perpendicular to his destination. He clenches his teeth and for a moment he longs for the road. He chides himself and tries to forget his body and his rage, and focus on each step and each breath. Gradually approaching his destination, he is able to slip between a gap in the border.

Three trees enclose a small sheltered space and the boy hurries to them. He runs his palms across the bark, feeling for warmth or a pulse. The contact makes him feel safe. He envies their mass, their immovability. The light filters through the leaves and dances with the changing breeze. Between the trees, the brown earth is pounded flat like a wide floor. The perimeter is carpeted with lush green and the air seems filled with organic music. He sees his old room, his heaped can shells, the dank smell. A cool breeze brushes his cheeks and fills his nostrils. He breathes deeply and is elated. The gentle music continues in his ears, until its familiarity grabs him sharply. His eyes narrow on the direction of its source and he moves purposefully towards it. Beyond some of the low shrubs, the earth falls away and water stretches out into a wide stream. The sun chimes off in fleeting points on its surface in time with its strange music. His thirst is painfully acute and he kneels by the bank. As he dips his hand beneath the cool surface, he is suddenly aware that he cannot drink it. His fingers beneath the surface are so clearly visible. The water’s clarity seems so honest and unsullied, but he knows it can’t be trusted. Invisible evil lies within it; blind, dumb, beautiful, vicious; mercilessly replicating again and again and again; billions upon billions. It happened before. The rot and ooze of a million bloated bodies have been draining steadily into the rivers for a long time now, and he remembers the last time, the violent distress churning within his core. The spasms of pain, the writhing on the floor. Diarrhea, though never glamorous, was far more manageable in a world with plumbing. He eyes the water up with calculating eyes. He resolves to sit by its edge and removes his shoes, dipping his feet into the soak. His skin looks plump and amphibian as he watches his feet bob lazily beneath the surface. He sits for a long time and loses himself to ripples on the water, the swaying of the leaves. Calm spreads through his bones and a lost feeling returns to him; this place was made for him.

Very little changes in this sacred place, but time is creeping ever forward. His thirst and hunger wear on him. He knows he must go. Casting fond eyes around his haven one last time, he wearily climbs to his feet.

He looks each way down the path of the river. He must choose a path and decides to follow the flow of the water. There is something of a track along its edge. It gives him hope to know others walked here before. He maintains a steady pace but it is not long before his mind resumes its frantic churning. In his glade, all had been cyclic and eternal. Now he tracks a linear path, and it’s length and destination are unknown. His mind returns to the crumpled body he left behind. He sees it’s charred skeleton, screaming silently into his windscreen for an eternity and sickness churns in him. He looks thirstily at the water. He carries on.

He tries to force his mind beyond the body, but it disobediently orbits around the subject. He sees them, in another universe, laughing happily around a fire. They boil beans in their cans, prodding them carefully into place with sticks while sharing their tales. He speaks and she throws her head back in ecstatic laughter. He looks at her and their eyes meet for a long moment and before returning shyly to the tins amongst the flames. They eat and feel every mouthful is a blessing. And every breath and sigh and laugh is a gift and they are each other’s happiness. And as the night grows old their shared looks linger, and they move closer, and they entwine the tips of their fingers. And they kiss and the night is so warm.

His world reassembles itself before his eyes and he shakes himself. The path goes on before him, but the air seems cooler than on the road and his ankle pain has diminished to a warm thrumming beneath his skin. He coughs a dry thirsty cough.

Many months past, he had found company wandering amongst the dead city. They met on a nameless street and shared an odd dance, balancing a mutual need for friendship with a more urgent need for security. They had tried so hard to spark friendship, sharing what they could, goods and anecdotes. They ate together over a small camping stove in a convenience store. He remembers the ragged man slurping at spaghetti hoops and telling racist jokes through yellow teeth. He could smell his reek from across the room, and snuck away in the night whilst the man snored and spluttered in irregular spurts. He creases his nose at the thought.

The regularity of the movement is quite therapeutic now he is by the river. The shifting reflections on the surface calm him. He thinks of the contents of the box. He does not know if his fixation is unhealthy. He does not know if health matters in the new world. This time is not his. It is borrowed from the cruel earth. People used to call it mother. Now they do not.

He is progressing slowly but contentedly. His eyes are fixated on the water’s surface and a few times he stumbles on tufts or divots along his path. Thirst is overwhelming his rationale and he sees himself scooping up handfuls of the sweet liquid and drinking it down. A moistness sparks on his palate for a short moment. He remembers writhing on the floor, the agony. But the agony is not certain. His thirst is certain. It is a fact. Right now it is the only fact. He checks himself and carries on. 

He makes steady progress. But is it progress? Intuition tells him he is approaching home, or the city he inhabits. Regardless, he is following water. Where there is water there is life. He is sure it will lead to civilisation. No, that is untrue. To former civilisation. To a graveyard. To the graveyard he calls his or to some other. He sees the endless houses filled with death.

They kiss by the fire and the warm night swaddles them, but as they embrace she coughs crimson red and wheezes and her screams gurgle from her soft lips as her eyes fix him in wide terror and her flesh melts, her form succumbing to entropy as the night laughs at the absurdity of affection.

His eyes go to the water and the air in his throat catches like thick porridge.

He sees his home, his kitchen, the crayon drawings on the fridge. A small, motionless figure slumps over the table, her face is down turned in her cold bowl of cereal. Water swells and runs from the sink to the floor and the puddle stretches across the room and wets the toes of the girl’s shoes. The tap keeps running and will never stop.

The mass in his throat like a sewer rat moves up towards his teeth and he tries to draw air. He looks over his shoulder as the dark mass rises behind him and its wide mouth opens to consume him.

He falls to his knees as tears bleed from his eyes. He looks at his morphing reflection in the crystal water as his wide eyes and gaping mouth warp before him. The mass at his throat is clawing out. He plunges a hand into the water and lifts its nectar to his lips in cupped hands. The precious liquid washes down his throat and he feels life spark within him.

 He is hyperventilating and heaves in quickening breaths. He does not look but he feels the darkness standing over him. The ripples from his frantic hands fade and his face reassembles in the water before him. He looks so young and he is overwhelmed by self pity and is ashamed of it. The dark form falls upon him like a guillotine as his eyes look up and out of the moving fragments of light, something catches him, something steadily moving with a familiar gait. The darkness fades from his mind as he watches this small figure, moving upside down in the face of the water, undulating with the lumbering swell of the river. He looks up. It is a young man. His stature is middling and his shoulders slump over his chest. He is looking into the tree line, away from the boy on the opposite bank. The boy stands and barks a herald. He cannot talk, words escape him. 

The figure opposite turns and gives a curious sideways stare at the boy. The boy smiles and jumps into the water, pushing through with urgent hands. The water is freezing but it can’t numb his progress and he fixes his mind on the figure, his friend, his brother. He shivers as his hands slip on the mud and he clambers awkwardly onto the shore. The stranger is onlooking still, and his curiosity is turning to concern and he turns to move away from the boy. But the boy is clambering to his feet and already running. He jumps on the figure’s shoulders and they fall in a clumsy embrace and the boy’s laughs ring loud and shrill between the banks. 

The sound of laughter is acute and cutting. A gull turns its burning orange gaze to look across the water and its irises narrow. It is frozen in stealth. The laugh echoes and rings out. The gull turns back to its work. Its beak cuts impatiently into flesh, and tears a pink slug of meat from its carrion. Intermittently, it scans for the source of the strange sound, but the day is peaceful and the threat is soon forgotten. The body lays face down, and the crown of its head points to the sky. The gull stands on its back and picks from the flesh between the shoulders and is content. This winter has been kind.

I

‘Of course, darling. But if I left it to you I’d be waiting all year.’ Wire penetrates the tip of her finger and blood bouquets a rich dome. She sucks, a taste of iron and iron. Not like fruit; like factories or gunpowder. She wipes her hand carelessly on her jeans. The finger rejoins its bloodied company, working the chicken wire, the mesh also browning and dark with blood. 

‘Milk, two sugars.’ She smiles. ‘Don’t you take such good care of me.’ These conversations are ridiculous.It angers her that she casts herself as the dutiful handmaiden, even in her own fiction. It wasn’t true before, the long nights cradling the wounded child of his ego, hushing the past he could never quite shake off. 

Forget it, he’s dead, and his ghost is absolved of such flaws.

He looks down at her swollen belly. The threads of her muddied t-shirt are pulled taught. She instinctively rests a hand on it. A warmth fills her cheeks and for a moment the world crackles with possibility.

‘You’re a fucking idiot.’ She knows it’s true.

She pulls her mind into focus. Pull, twist, bend. Pull, twist, bend. The wire imprints white, bloodless lines across her hands. She grits her teeth. The chickens cluck, their warm, throaty voices as comforting as old friends.

‘You’re lucky I’m here, ladies. You’d be fox food without me.’ They meet her eyes and look away uncomfortably. ‘Don’t even mention it.’

She is young, in her early twenties. These days could pass as a seasoned farm hand, even though a short two months ago her hands had been as soft as fresh butter, her back as weak as a skewer. Behind her the cottage squats on the earth like an ancient mushroom, as though many years ago it broke through the grass and is of the same nature. The soft pocked stone is picked out with dark moss. Her eyes go over the windows taped up with bin bags, wheezing in and out with the breeze like the lungs of an old smoker. Its time isn’t up yet. The tape is holding better than expected, and the twisted wire holding the front door against the blustery chaos has a strength that isn’t apparent in its charmless appearance.

The house and the garden sit on the shoulder of a hill which slumps down into a valley with a small stream. The gully formed with the opposite slope form a perfect aperture to capture and amplify even the smallest wind, and she spends her nights bracing against the cold. No dust settles in there. Even the most sheltered corner is constantly aflutter with the turmoil of busy air molecules. Every fissure in the room she calls her own is taped up with gaffer tape or else the polyfiller that she found a small supply of when she first arrived. It is a constant pressure, the ceaseless gale, and the most unlikely of things blow away. Just this morning, she looked up to see her spool of wire cartwheeling gracefully down the grass, leaning into the wind as delicately as a ballerina, before sinking quietly into the eddies and whorls of the stream. She hasn’t yet decided whether she will attempt to retrieve it.

The only road out is no more than two muddy imprints from the wheels of vehicle long forgotten. She arrived here by foot and quite by accident. She has yet to try follow the road to see where it leads, beyond its winding over the adjacent domes of the green hills  The shoddiness of its two tracks tell it is a forgotten extremity of the great network crisscrossing the country. It is as the frayed end of an old spider web, tossed carelessly in the breeze. She is grateful that her thread is so forgotten by the spider.

The chickens cluck impatiently, reminding her that though she may succumb to idle daydreaming, the fox does not.

‘Alright, alright,’ she goads them. ‘Just remember where your grain comes from.’ The nearest one looks boldly up at her. Just remember where your eggs come from. 

‘Even stevens then.’ She twists another wire through to grip like a lifeless fist.

After a few more links, she leans back and surveys the structure, testing it with her hands. It is a little incongruous, but feels rigid as she moves the weight of her hands across it left to right.

She turns back to her voiceless lover. ‘See, not so bad. I think I missed my calling… Don’t be a dick. It’s not supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be secure.’

What would he do, what would he say? Always the ruthless voice of reason. The fox isn’t so easily dissuaded.

She crouches on all fours, leveling with her friendly hens with a hunter's gaze. Down lower, she traces the bottom edge of the wire, testing it with her fingers. The pegs she has placed to hold it down stay firm. 

But there, see, the earth is soft. She digs at the ground with her fingers and the soil comes away easily; a perfect route in; the soft exposed belly of her cold, hard barrier.

She groans into the wind. ‘Alright, smartarse.’ She looks down to the running water of the stream, and thinks of the spool of wire hidden below. ‘No, don’t worry. I can sort out my own mess.’

She listens to the steady reply of the wind in her ears. 

‘I wish you were here.’

The wind carries on whispering its indecipherable secrets.

‘Are you real?’ The question comes to her across the breeze and she freezes, opens her eyes. A real voice. She strains her mind across the moment as time stills. Was it in her mind? No, it was in her ear drums. It was unfamiliar, and as ugly as crunching stone after the long company of the wind. She stops breathing and stays as still as possible.

‘I can’t believe your real, it’s been so long.’

She turns to face the stranger, as the chickens cluck apprehensively at the hole she has left.

7

The boy is lying with his arms around the stranger. He is pulling away from the boys wet embrace and tries to stand. The boy has stopped laughing and his gratitude slowly gives way to embarrassment. He pulls away from the stranger and stands uncomfortably before him, meeting his gaze and then dropping to look at his midriff. 

‘Sorry. It’s been a long time.’ The boy’s voice cracks and tears as he speaks and his words come out as rags and fragments and feel incongruous and misshapen in his mouth. The stranger stares back without judgement or malice. His expression is open: stupid or at peace.

‘What’s your name?’ The words still seem unfamiliar and fall clumsily from his mouth. The stranger stares back, dumb and the boy contemplates his face. It seems ageless. The scraps of beard across his face indicate youth but the lines around the eyes look weathered but not worn. The stranger’s eyes drift from his gaze and stare at the tree tops across the river. They stand in silence for a time.

‘Do you know where the city is, or where there’s shelter?’ The stranger’s gaze lolls lazily back to meet his own and gives no hint of comprehension. The boy is becoming impatient at the stranger’s silence. His stoicism is grating.

‘I think it’s this way,’ the boy continues. He gestures with his hand for the stranger to follow. His face has an animal innocence and curiosity, and he follows as though guided by the contours of a hill.

They walk together as the sun moves slowly towards the horizon and the coming twilight blunts the sun’s teeth. The stranger walks with a slightly odd lope and follows the boy with the sceptical affection of a stray dog, pausing every now and then to gaze at something nearby. The boy stops to check the curiosity that is capturing him, but whatever it is is hidden, or perhaps it is invisible, requiring a certain eye to reveal itself to.

The boy leads the way, occasionally turning to share some anecdote, some witticism, but invariably as he does he feels shame and his eyes return to the track. The stranger doesn’t seem to notice. When the boy meets his eyes, the pupils are wide in something like wonder, but seem to hold a secret knowledge; that there is only void and matter and all else is hollow semantics. The boy shivers. The dirt track gradually gives way to gravel, and then on to concrete and pebble dashed terraces appear here and there beyond the trees and scrubs. 

The boy dashes into the first house they pass to recover water. The stranger waits outside, kicking his shoes and pondering the grass. The boy comes out and is angered by the strangers empty stare, but as he does the memory of his former loneliness takes the breath from his lungs. He forces a smile and summons the man towards the town he now knows is getting closer.

Night is setting in and the sky is flushed pink blending to bruised purple. Terraces embrace them and the boy is warmed by a sense of home. The air is still and the temperature mild and he feels an old sensation; that life is good. He turns to the stranger, who is lolling along distant and distracted, but quickly stands to attention.

‘You don't talk much, do you?’ The stranger looks bored by the statement playing at a question, but perhaps he looked bored already.

‘I still like you though,’ the boy carries on, unfazed. He is thinking over their options. He doesn't want to return to his room, the organic smell, the creased pile of pornography. He has been trying to think of alternatives. He recalls a grand house he scouted some time ago. He had found it and decided to save it for a special occasion. He is at least aware enough of his destructive tendencies to preserve certain aspects of his universe by keeping them at a safe distance.

‘I’ve got somewhere we can go. You’ll like it.’ The stranger gives a subtle nod and smiles, and the boy feels the warmth of affection for the first time in a long time. ‘I’d been saving it for the day I find a chick, but I guess you’ll have to do. My God I miss having women around. The things I’d do if I found one.’ He turns to give a knowing smile to the stranger, but receives no validation. 

‘I’m going to need to call you something. If you won’t tell me your name, I’m just going to call you Lenny.’ The stranger shrugs. 

The night is settling in and the pair increase their pace through the town. The familiar sights that would usually cast the boy into depressed reverie pass by them, and the boy affords them little thought. The buildings around them become increasingly grand and are split up by green parks with imposing gnarled trees. Every now and then the boy pauses to orient himself before continuing on. The night is cold but they are getting close. 

They climb a shallow slope leading to a circular terrace of tall houses with balconies surrounded by ornate railings. Their grand doors face into a park in the centre, and the vista gives the perspective of being in a fishbowl. Between two houses a road carries on to the left. They follow it around and find a line of detached houses, great stone cubes with bold lines of chimney stacks visible against the dark of the night sky. Beyond them, a great park slopes down towards the city and the many lines of houses disappearing into the distance below look silent and quaint.

The boy approaches down the uneven paving of the garden, leaning away from the strange exotic limbs of the overgrown plants in the front garden. The paint on the wide door is flaking slightly and the leading is missing a small square from his last visit. He puts his hand through and pulls the latch.

The boy steps inside and tries to make out the inside doorway. His memory is of earthy wooden flooring and tall, floral papered walls, but inside looks cold and sinister. He suddenly feels self conscious at having brought his new friend here, and he suddenly feels self conscious of thinking of him as his friend. He turns and the shape of the stranger is standing in the entrance, looking over his shoulder into the night.

‘It’s really nice,’ the boy says weakly. ‘Just need some candles.’

He still has the lighter in his pocket and strikes the flint several times, casting shadowy shapes around the atrium. There is a damp smell in the air, and dozens of shoes and boots, lined up or clumsily toppled over each other and embracing. The flame catches and weak orange light plays on the walls, large shadows warping and stretching around them. They step through the interior door, their footfalls heavy on the floorboards and the air frigid. A staircase climbs up to a forbidding chasm above, and the shadows of the banisters expand and contract like the ribs of a giant accordion.

The boy remembers that the living room stands to their right and twists the bronze sphere of the doorknob. The ceiling is high and the room vast. The forms of great, plump couches and sofas sit like gorillas on their haunches around the room’s centre. They stare inward at a large mantelpiece on the opposite wall.

‘Candles!’ The boy dashes forward. Two candles stand on bronze sticks shaped like ballerinas on point. He holds the lighter to them in turn and casts golden orbs of light on the patterned wallpaper.

The stranger pokes curiously at the upholstery on the sofa before sitting cross legged on the floor. With the warmth of the light the room looks more like home and the boy begins rifling through the wood by the fire for small pieces of kindling. The wood chimes and cracks softly as he handles it, and before long there is the gentle crackle as the first twig catches and white smoke plumes and billows up the chimney. He settles down and sighs with the relief. It is with the sound of his sigh that he realises the course of his day, that it began with the horror that now seems a lifetime away. The crackling of the fire conjures that moment but he is too fatigued to torture himself with it. He turns and finds the stranger looking at him. They exchange a brief smile and their gaze steadily wanders back to the stirring flames.

‘Do you have a name?’ the boy asks, almost to himself. He sees the light from the fire dance across the stranger’s irises. ‘Well, I’m going to call you Lenny.’ The stranger doesn’t seem to mind and so it is settled.

‘So, you don’t talk much.’ Lenny turns to look at him, nonplussed. ‘Were you always like that or is it since… you know?’ A pause. ‘Do you drink? Would you like a drink?’ The boy hops to his feet and grabs a candle to light his way. ‘There must be something in this place.’ 

He returns quickly from the darkness of the house beyond their small sphere of warmth and light. Two glasses clank in his hand and he bares a full bottle of whiskey. He hastily pours two glasses and passes one to his companion. ‘To new friends,’ the boy smiles and raises his glass as Lenny sniffs the liquid exploratively. The boy swigs first and splutters as the fiery liquid catches his throat. Lenny takes a sip and eyes him curiously.

‘So what’s your story? Were you an architect, a painter? A pimp? Lenny the pimp. I bet that was it. Strong silent type. Probably perfect for the pimping game.’ The boy snorts a small laugh at his joke and drains his glass.

‘What do you do for fun, man?’ He asks the question as he prepares a larger measure for himself. ‘What do you do in this dead town?’ The stranger sips contentedly at his glass. ‘Read philosophy I bet. Chill in a library all day. You probably love this wasteland. Easy street, no worries.’ He senses a break in the strangers calm, but he considers he may have imagined it. ‘I don’t know anymore. I used to love smashing up sports cars. I’d spend all day looking for the fuckers. Then that got boring. Glad I’ve got my drugs.’ His mind goes back to the box he left at the park. It must be there, safe, waiting. ‘Do you partake? I’ve got everything in that stash. We could have a proper party with all I’ve got. Shame we’ve got no women. Ah, why couldn’t you be a chick, Lenny? Why!? No fucking justice. The things I’d do!’ His sister smiles at him from across the table and his stomach churns briefly. He looks at Lenny, hoping he didn’t see him falter. 

‘You a ladies man, Lenny?’ Lenny’s glass is empty and the boy leans across to refill it. Lenny gives a small, grateful smile. ‘I bet you were. Different lady every night, yeah? You sly dog…’ He fills another glass. Warmth swells between his temples. ‘You met anyone else? Guess your not the biggest talker in the world… I’ve met a few guys, weirdos mostly. Seems like only the weirdos survived. And no women. Not a single fucking one!’ In the fire he sees the bubbling flesh, smells the petrol, sees that broken face screaming through the cracked windscreen with its wide and bloodied eyes. 

He stops and pokes at the fire. For a second he thinks he might cry but he drinks deeply and loses himself to the burning sensation. He can feel Lenny’s eyes burning judgement into the back of his skull, but as he turns he sees the familiar, dumb, open gaze. ‘We’ll find one. But I get first dibs, okay?’ Lenny gives a mere nod. ‘You’re alright, Lenny.’

The flames have subsided and there is a rich bloody glow of embers emanating from the hearth. The boy slumps back against one of the chairs. He feels the warmth of his blood, senses every spit and crackle of the fire, feels the presence of the mute stranger by his side. All is at ease and his tiredness drags him down into the soft rug. But he senses something missing, a gap in his being. He remembers the dark presence in the field, that void down which life seemed to drain like water down a plug hole, steadily, ceaselessly consuming, all pleasures orbiting, moving with slow urgency inward toward their doom. He feels it in his stomach, like a chill draught through a home, the cold invisibly creeping. He looks across to Lenny, whose eyes are gradually closing. He feels his solitude and the mansion grows, its angles sharpen, the wood freezes to dead stone. The ceiling climbs upwards until it seems high as the eaves of a cathedral, and vertigo rattles his guts. Gravity seems weak and languid, the buildings foundations warp like jelly. Beyond the distant ceiling the sky gives out to the void going outward forever and his skin like wax paper is all that prevents him flowing out of himself like pink custard to mix with a universe of colliding atoms. He violently convulses and manages to lean his head to one side to throw up the evil within him. The surges wrack his body, and the warm acidic liquid flows out of him. He sees the alien evil within him, biting into his intestines, a million senseless replicating microbial robots, like rats on a sinking ship desperately gnawing at the walls. He shouldn’t have drunk the water.

He writhes and balls himself up but the pain is at his core and cannot be assailed. 

A face appears before him. Lenny’s eyes peruse his anguished face with a calculating concern and then disappear for a time. He can hear movement in the distance. Suddenly a glass of water appears in his vision. It’s purity seems unreal to him, and he struggles to express his gratitude in groans as he shakily raises the liquid to his lips and drinks a small sip. It settles in him uneasily. He is alone again, then a small sound as a plastic washing bowl is placed in front of him. He pulls it close, embraces it, rested his chin on the lip and pants gutturally into it. Ribbons of watery drool pour from him, and the wretches return in waves. He closes his eyes from exhaustion but sleep is now a distant concept. 

He rests there awkwardly balanced on his bucket, and breathing fills his consciousness. 

He feels a soft blanket being pulled up to his shoulders. Out of sight, Lenny retreats a few steps and sits in a quiet, distracted vigil as the boy sweats and holds his form together with mild strain.

Time ticks slowly by, each moment marked by his heavy breathing. He knows Lenny is near, but he doesn't make a sound. He is shivering despite the fire in his veins, and the nausea returns, and his limp muscles can do nothing but lie in their awkward huddle. He wretches again. Lenny moves back in front of him and puts the last of the wood on the fire. He turns his eyes to him and frowns. The boy turns from his gaze to the base of the bowl. He hears footfalls departing and the front door creak open and softly close. He lies and listens to his breathing.

II

‘I can’t believe you’re real.’ They still stand eyeing each other across the cube form of the wire mesh and the groaning of the chickens. He is repeating himself. She is not surprised. This new world is not host to much conversation.

He is shabbily dressed in a green canvas jacket like an old military uniform. His hair is long and tangled into greasy strands. His mouth is open somewhere between awe and terror. He resembles a stray dog, not only in his shabby looks, but that expectant expression at a stranger who may or may not have pockets full of food. She admonishes herself for judging his appearance, and feels suddenly self conscious. She can’t remember the last time she saw her own reflection.

‘Hi.’ The air had been heavy with silence, and she had to break it. They are several metres apart, and the chicken coop sits between them. They step uncomfortably side to side, uncertain as to how the cross the chasm between them.

‘Where did you come from?’ Her mind has been going over how a stranger could end up somewhere so remote.

‘The city.’ He listens a moment to his own unfamiliar voice, and seems to find what he’s said satisfactory. Emboldened, he continues; ‘I had to get out. Too many ghosts.’ His voice is still quaking a little, more like the shaking of fatigued muscles under unfamiliar strain than a quiver of one in fear. The silence again, as taught as a bow string.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ He smiles and suddenly looks close to tears. Even to her, the nostalgia of such a question over fills her chest with joy and sadness. She drops her gaze, gives him privacy to compose himself. ‘Come on.’ She walks into the house and leaves the door ajar for him to follow. She steps over to the kitchen counter and prepares the kerosene stove she made with a paint can and a screwdriver. As she busies herself, the stranger steps through the door, pulling it closed cautiously behind him. She scoops mugs full of water from the bucket to the copper kettle and lights the stove with a match. They look at eachother and the silence rings out.

‘How did you find me here?’ Her tone is accusative, and his weak smile momentarily breaks. ‘I mean, this is the middle of nowhere. What were you doing out here?’

He thinks and puffs a little air as he looks for words. ‘I wanted to get lost, I guess. It’s hard, I’m sure you know. What are we supposed to do with ourselves now?’ He is staring at the floorboards. He looks at her midriff, her pregnant stomach. She turns away a little self consciously.

‘I guess that’s different for you.’

They stand opposite each other in silence. He looks close to tears again, and wipes his nose with the back of his wrist. A first wisp of steam escapes the kettle and disperses in the relentlessly shifting air.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not good at this anymore.’ His sadness overcomes him and he stands in silence looking like an admonished schoolboy, with the same expectation of absolution. She has to look away, turning her attention to the kettle. It is panting out steam in desperate breaths as she lifts it off the flame, extinguishing it with a piece of blackened foil she has for the purpose.

As she pours the cups, she sneaks looks at the man. He is muttering to himself and wincing at the bitterness of his inner monologue. They sit opposite each other and sip delicately at their cups.

She inquires delicately about his past; where he is from, who he has seen on his journey. Every query stirs some unkind memory in him, and sets him whimpering and looking abstractedly at the floor again. She wonders angrily how such a weak soul could have survived the last few months, then she is overcome with guilt at her own callousness and smiles her encouragement at the stranger. Eventually the lengthy silences have become so taxing that she rises to return to the sanctuary of her garden. She tells the man to make himself comfortable, but he doesn’t seem to hear.

Outside, the chickens make throaty groans, expressing their distaste at the appearance of the stranger. ‘I know, ladies,’ she reassures them, but they maintain their looks of disapproval, like wisenned aunts telling her not to make the same mistakes they did. She sighs and looks down at the stream.

‘What to do,’ she tuts to herself distractedly, and repeats it several times like a mantra. She looks back at the windows of the house and wonders what he’s doing inside. She hadn’t realised an hour ago how simple her life had been, how dutiful and loyal her chickens and her ghost had been. ‘What do you think,’ she asks the air. She can see the disapproval of his face in her mind. The details of the face have started to decline, but its unmistakably him, and he evidently doesn’t trust this newcomer. What do you actually know about him? She picks up a cane that leans against the wall and walks to the water's edge.

‘So untrusting,’ she admonishes him, but she knows he’s right. She has the baby to think about. ‘I can’t just forget humanity.’ She stops at the bank and thinks. ‘There’s so little of it left.’

The water is perfectly clear and running quickly. The bottom is dark, but she thinks she can make out the vague shape of the wire spool. She takes the cane and begins poking at it in an noncommittal way. What are her choices anyway? She’s stuck with him now. How the fuck did he find her? She sighs as she knocks the spool ineffectually, and it rocks lethargically back to its original place. 

It could be worse. He’s more like a baby than a man. 

Great, two babies to look after.

She’s worked the spool onto its side, and is wedging the cane into the hole at its centre. She begins to work it up the side towards the surface.

Something definitely seems off with him. It’s hard to judge a man under these circumstances. What is normal in such strange conditions?

The spool slips back to the bottom. She curses in a long sigh.

She looks back at the house. It is so lovely, so familiar to her now. She doesn’t want to leave it.

She works the cane back into the spool and begins shifting it more delicately, nudging it inch by inch, gritting her teeth in concentration.

He is carrying some kind of demon, some hidden guilt. But who could survive now and not? 

The spool is halfway up the bank, teasingly close. She secures the cane with her knee and reaches a hand underneath the water. It is frigid to chill the flesh of her knuckles to ring like struck iron. She winces and reaches deeper, touching the rim with the tip of an icy finger.

All of a sudden she pitches forward, digging her free fingers into the mud of the bank, pulling up sods, and is instantly enveloped by crippling cold. She surfaces, winded and claws at the grass, panting out through chattering teeth. She pulls herself up to her elbows, rubbing her cheeks across the mud and grass. She pulls her feet out and quickly climbs to her knees. Now free of the water, the wind bites at every inch of her skin. Her jeans and t-shirt cling to her and suck the energy from within, releasing it out into the unceasing wind. She shivers, hugging herself, looking around for shelter, for warmth. By the door, the stranger stands staring at her, blank faced and wide eyed, so wide they must be tearing up and puckering dry in the wind. His mouth is open slightly, and stares at her either in hunger or disbelief, or both. She feels suddenly naked in the wide expanse of the valley and turns herself away from the man, shivering now to shake off a different cold. 

She walks around the perimeter of the garden, averting her eyes from the doorway. She enters an old stone shed by the end on the other side of the chicken coop and pulls out an old dust sheet caked with matted dirt and hair, wrapping it around herself like an old druid. So clothed, she looks timidly back to the doorway, which now stands empty but the darkness makes her uneasy. The plastic coverings of the windows beat in and out like syncopated war drums played by shell shocked soldiers. As she approaches the door the wind subsides a little.

She sticks her head in and scans the darkness, looking like a pilgrim or some creature of Japanese mythology; a pastoral nymph grown out the earth like a puffball. Here dark eyes shine out from the folds in the grubby sheet. 

The room is empty. From behind a door to the side that she rarely opens come the small sobs and curses of the man. She picks her way delicately over the creaking floorboards to her room, pulling the door closed behind her and shivering. She replaces her clothing in the half light.

She doesn’t see him for some hours, and when he returns he won't meet her eyes. He sits in the corner, occasionally wringing his hands and mouthing wordlessly. She ignores him the best she can and punishes him with her silence. Outside the chickens look at her with cold, reptilian eyes and her ghost is silent.

The night passes slowly and she doesn’t sleep. 

The morning is steely grey and every edge glares her tired eyes. A night of rumination has soured her thoughts and when she sees the man with his weak smile, loathing spikes in her and she distracts herself with the kettle. She feels him building up to something. He stands as if to make an announcement.

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbles, pausing before carrying on, ‘about yesterday. I’m not good at this anymore. But we can make this work. I was thinking about things I could do around…’

‘I don’t think you should stay here,’ she interrupts him, looking him down, at first surprised by the coldness of her words, but checking herself, finding the coldness suiting.

He stands stunned, analysing the moment in his head, and putts out a gasp of air in a small ‘ah’ sound and remains mute.

‘I’m sorry,’ she continues, her tired anger subsiding somewhat, ‘I’m just happy here on my own.’

‘But I’ve only just found you.’ He seems to be talking to himself. ‘Please, I can stay, I can help you,’ but he is pleading.

‘I don’t know you. I’m sure your fine, but I just want to be on my own.’

He looks frightened now, and his pleading is becoming desperation. ‘Please, I can’t be alone any more. I can stay. We can be together.’ He is approaching her, like one approaching a suicide perched upon a precipice. She is backing into the corner of the kitchen.

‘Please just go.’ Her voice is shaking now, out of guilt, and of fear. ‘Please.’ She is edging away from him, around the counter, but her exit lies behind him.

‘You can’t send me out there again.’ Tears are running down his cheeks and mucus hangs from one of his nostrils. She moves to dash towards the door, but he grabs her wrist.

‘Just stay.’ He sounds angry now, and she twists and flexes her wrist against his grip. She looks around anxiously. She is twisting away more frantically now. His face has changed from the mask of a baby to the face of a territorial beast and she kicks out at him as he drags her nowhere in particular except closer. She feels a hand at her neck, tightenning around her windpipe. His face is unrecognisable, contorted with rage, his nose inches from hers. She smells his breath like gangrene as he whispers through teeth clenched to the point of breaking.

‘Don’t fight, you little…’ In a moment, his face switches from rage to sudden confusion as he see his hand on her throat, her desperate eyes. In the next, the kettle clunks heavy and metallic against his jaw and his face slackens and falls towards the ground. She drops the kettle and its clanging rattles around the room. Before she can think, he has begun moving again, clambering up, and she dashes past him out into the wild and the house pants and wheezes like a beast at the end of a long slumber.

8

Wind and branches whip past in the darkness and scratch at the windows. He is warm, huddled on black leather, burrowing like a small animal into the corner. He is in a cube. Inside a land rover perhaps. It rumbles beneath him and he continues his anxious burrowing, forcing his head into the corner until it is bent over and continuing, pressing his shoulders into the solid door. If he was to raise his head he’d see he was in the back seat, curled up like a child. He can’t lift his head, he continues pressing himself into the dark corner. The shape of the cabin is there, in his head, and himself within. He can see his form pushing itself, compressing itself into a cube.  He begs it to stop, but his muscles continue their straining. The space continues hurtling through the night. He could open the door, and roll out into the elements, but his muscles are no longer his. They have their pointless purpose, and the outside may as well be another universe. He watches himself squirm like a baby rat, its young purple eyes sealed up and its thin skin pink and grotesque. It disgusts and angers him as it continues and he feels its straining in the muscles across his shoulders. Resisting is pointless and he could weep at his impotence as his body is transported onwards into the dark. The strain becomes monotonous and in the fleeting calm, he realises the missing detail. Someone must be driving. Fear rises within him and he urges himself raise his body, to see who is taking him, to fight. But his pitiful burrowing is all there is. He will twist powerlessly against his will until they reach their terminus. He senses, or imagines he senses, two hands on the wheel, and a silhouette before him. It turns its head.

 All at once, he hears a dull clatter and opens his eyes to the blue plastic bottom of the washing bowl. The bowl has tipped and his head is within it. The rank contents have spilled around his cheek, but the reek and the chill have a comforting realness and he fills with ecstasy as the wretched car begins fading into memory. The bowl is pulled from his face and he realises he has moved in the night to press his head against one of the sofas. Lenny looks at him briefly and disappears again, returning quickly with a tea towel that he drops by the boy’s face.

Lenny returns to his work stoking the fire. In the night he has scavenged a ragged bundle of wood. The first few logs are steaming damply on the embers. The boy lies on his side, his stomach still seizing in fits and his muscles aching and fatigued. He lies motionless, watching Lenny going back to tend the fire and disappearing to an adjacent room intermittently. Slowly the fire gathers its energy and his companion rests a kettle clumsily on the logs and disappears again.

The boy moves to rearrange himself but with every motion his digestive disquiet stirs and he lies paralysed on his side and watches busy animalcules bustle across his retina. In the room the kettle stirs and fills the air with a steady shriek rising to a shrill crescendo. Lenny returns and grabs the kettle with a tea towel and vanishes to the kitchen. Out of the stillness, the man’s hand places a mug before him. Little wisps of steam tumble from the top. He pulls it close. The old smell of tea seems strange. He never prepares tea for himself. He sips it cautiously and thinks of home and the tentative warmth moves in broken spats to gradually fill the hollow of his stomach.

III

Leaves and bracken lick in quick whips and smart blood across thin skin. Footfalls and pants in quickened and inconsistent beats as whites of eyes turn to scan the receding landscape. The beat stops as she pauses, pricks ears and steadies her noisy breathing. Each twig crack could be her doom rushing in booted feet to meet her. Silence, but for the slow breeze, echoes between the bloody pumping in her ears, just as ominous. Time runs her to oblivion, its passage her foe, its stasis no better. If she could reverse the arrow... A sharp sound nearby twists the muscles of her neck in unconscious spasm. Eyes twitch to and fro in sockets. The bare claws and knuckles of bloodless vegetation are all she senses. She shivers as the stillness invites the cold through the barrier of her skin. She moves onwards, steadily, quietly as possible, praying to the godless air for a clearing.

Occasionally, the solid dirt gives way to swallow her feet, her shoes lost to the mud, her feet soaked in icy water.

Through branches she presses out to the open air, a wide field, the sinking sun over the tops of trees. Cover of dark or the biting maw of the cold night. She can’t decipher. A barn in the distance. Respite or ambush. Her brain ticks over, always desperately working over the cacophony of muted sounds to discern the approach of her predator. She stands and absently caresses her swollen belly, her skin stretched thin over like an overfilled balloon, the promise of life within. Or death. The sun sinks out of sight and she breathes and yearns for clarity.

9

The boy stirs. He has not slept, but the day has passed in flicking frames; the bustling of the stranger, the wax and wane of the fire’s glow, and now the night has drawn the light from the room and there is only the low light of the fire.

Strength has returned to him, his body no longer the victim of that savage alien nature that wracked him to a brittle infant. It must have been an age since his last meal, but hunger and fatigue seem like vague concepts only of concern to philosophers.

Feeling the strength in his limbs, he looks around the room. Behind him, Lenny sleeps quietly on a sofa, looking more like he is meditating with gently closed eyes than in deep slumber. The boy stands delicately, careful not to make any noise. He gently places more fuel on the glowing embers and lights a candle on the fresh licks of flame.

He purposefully makes for the kitchen, casting an orange glow as he goes. He pulls out the drawers in order and angles the candle to illuminate their contents. In each, any sense of organisation has been lost to time and the boy rummages through a chaotic tangle of human detritus. Amongst the clutter, he draws out a torch and clicks it on, shining a clinical blue light on the ceiling. He turns it off and makes for the front door. He pauses as he passes the stranger, and pulls a loose throw over his torso. The stranger continues his meditative slumber in silence. The boy makes out into the still night; a black mantis chasing an electric blue halo.

Down, past the fishbowl circus of grand terraces, down the slope to the basin of the city. The city use to glow with a thousand streetlights and lit porches. It’s not so much worse now, the moist air is still and silent, the night sky glows above. He flicks off his torch and waits for his eyes to adjust. From horizon to horizon, the great expanse of nameless stars burn above him. Their lifeless glow and imperceptible tumbling about their gravity fade from his mind and they seem as a cave of glow worms, all conspiring about their menial concerns, wriggling in a disjointed community, part of his family; the order of light in the infinite well of darkness. He breathes and smiles. His feet continue their work.

Down through the sleeping streets, the maze of quiet frontages that he knows so intimately, his feet plod on and his mind is still. He remembers walking these streets on his way home from school, the worn road markings speaking a secret language only he knows. He follows their strange lines and chapters to their last sentence. He looks up, at the overgrown park in the centre, at his old home. He opens the worn gate and picks a path to the swings. His tin box sits there, undisturbed. He picks it up and sits, playing his hands over its familiar contours.          

IV

The barn gawps open mouthed at her approach. Bare feet pad about the pricks and blades of sparring grasses. The chill plays about her sodden skin as she glances back at the darkening woods. No sound, no telling of hidden threat, the trees stand immortal, unphased by the coming night. Eyes turn to the sallow slats and beams of the abandoned barn. The door, ajar, gives in easily to her touch. Pressing softly with her back, it closes with a small sigh and her eyes strain in the dark. Rusted metal forks and picks and mechanical blades litter the walls and the floor. Implements of torture, she sees them cutting the fertile earth and drowning its inaudible cry. Stacked hay rots in the back, like putrefied lichen, sagging to the ground, returning home. By her side, the glass of an oil lamp catches the last of the light. She places it by her feet, to chime and clatter at the opening of the door, to signal any breach. Stepping to the hay, she presses it with open palms, feels the damp and the warmth, breathes the smell of primitive life. Her body has become incongruous, the tight dome of her stomach and her swollen breasts make her movement cumbersome, and with difficulty she lifts herself into the dank mass of hay. She rocks and scoops rotten handfuls over her form, nestles into the belly of this great breathing mass. Hidden, suspended, cradled, she stills her breath and penetrates into the coming dawn, the following day, her tenuous future. The nameless fields stretch out around her. The moon chases the sun across the sky as the rot and the grasses and the vines consume all that is familiar. New days grow and die before her eyes and the moon relentlessly chases the sun into oblivion. The blooming plants will consume their fathers and amongst this turmoil her life will pass and end unseen. She prays for a map, but what map can there be. But out of the dark comes a face; round, peaceful, featureless. Strange and familiar, it could be any face, the face of her child. A half smile and closed eyes, she sees it amongst the weeds, in its own space, its own time, carrying that senseless wonder through a world lost to its game of gluttonous decay.

The tinkle of knocked glass deadens her thoughts and her breathing.

‘Hello?’

She is aware of the sound of blood moving through her arteries.

‘I know you’re here. I just want to tell you I’m sorry. It’s been so long.’

The voice is feeble, anxious.

‘Would you just let me explain? I’ve been so alone. Just come out and we can just talk.’

Through the gap in her canopy of hay, orange light plays across the beams. He has ignited the lamp, and the shadows lumber across the roof as he searches to and fro.

‘I would never hurt a woman. Especially one who’s…’

She hears him grunt his anger and feels the hay move as he digs around in it, searching. The pulsing in her ears seems loud enough to echo through the barn. Despite herself she moves slowly like an eel through the mass.

‘I shouldn’t have grabbed you. I can’t be alone anymore… I can hear you.’

She freezes, and the man's hectic groping stops. They both listen to the silence, try to place each other in the room, in their minds. The silence is interminable. 

It breaks as she feels him plunge his arms into the pile by her feet. She scrambles frantically, digging through the mass. Fingers at her ankle struggle to grip. Kicking again and again, she suddenly makes purchase, feels crunching flesh against bone. The predator whimpers slightly as glass shatters and she plunges deeper into the warm recesses of her sheltering heap. The voice continues, more desperate now.

‘Look what you’ve done! You did this!’

The sound of his scrambling and scratching is different in rhythm.

‘You broke the lamp. You need to get out of here. Let me help you.’

His scratching noises give way to the crackling of fresh flame. Hot smoke cuts through the friendly musk of the rotting hay. She scrambles in deeper until she meets the wall and balls herself up like a trapped mouse.

The crackling is growing louder and the smoke noxious. She claws at the wooden slats, dislodging moist clumps of dead wood with her nails.

‘Stupid fucking cunt. You deserve to burn.’

Over the pandemonium of expanding gases and energetic crackles, she hears him pound the door closed as he retreats.

She turns her body and places her heel against the soft wood. She strikes it with all her force, but with little leverage from her soft cocoon. She strikes out, over and over, the ball of her heel throbbing and softening like an overripe peach. The smoke is beginning to fill her lungs as she feels the slat give. She strikes again, and dislodges another section. She turns her body and rips at the wood with her hands. She can see the starlit field outside and breathes the clean icy air. Heat is growing at her feet as she forces an elbow through and pushes her arms against the opposite side of her small gap. The wood gives way and she tumbles out into the still night.

Behind her, she hears the door bang open again.

‘Please stop this! Come out. You’re going to die in here!’

She turns her back to the inferno and runs in a straight line into the welcoming arms of the night.

‘Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean this. Please come out. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’

His cries fill the air as she runs through the blackness, the whistling wind the only reference to her speed as she goes. A loud crash comes to her ears as something in the barn gives to the flame. Just breaking above the wind in her ears are the small and useless sobs of her assailant, like a child lost in a world it doesn’t understand. Her fear turns to pity then disgust as she runs, pleading with her feet to not give in.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

10

The boy’s old home sits before him. He contemplates its stone face, unspectacular, indiscernible from almost any other. He remembers it was his, and he always will. The fleeting pleasures and conflicts he and his sister shared in this place will never be unmade, but the grazed skin and fallen tears they left ingrained in the concrete have long since washed away. She is probably still within, or rather the sorry, rotting shell of her form, suspended in its intermittent phase between information and entropy, waiting to be washed away also.

That day, one of the many, her smiling face from the swings, her laughter ringing out. It rings out still, echoing off the sullen stone of the city, diminishing down to the infinitesimal. He can hear it, a high pitched chiming just above the breath of the wind. He smiles, as small tears fill his eyes, and her bright face leaves him alone again beneath the sympathetic stars. This was his home, but is no longer. He is grateful for the warmth of his sorrow. He takes his feet and walks from the park, turning to bid farewell to his sister, but promising to return, in time.

The air is still and the city seems innocent and sleeping. He tries to find the old gods sketched between the stars, but he never learned them. Perhaps he will make new ones. Heinz, the god of stasis; who stole mana from the fallen, and concealed it in cylinders for the new order; who provided ring-pulls for those deemed worthy. He sees generations of naive humans packing their dead into oil cans to be preserved for the rapture. He laughs, and the buildings by his side give wry smiles at his joke. He tries to trace a bean can between the shining points above him. Perhaps there shall be no dogma. Perhaps the dark and the stars shall be mother and father, and humanity the offspring of the two. This dead world is his. He looks at his hands in the starlight and feels a universal energy flowing within them.

He climbs the rising hill with vigour and a quick pace. He longs to return to his comrade, to share his stories, to cook, to clean, to build.

He trots past the circus of buildings along to the top of the hill and sees the smoke billowing steadily from the chimney. The smell of fire reaches him out of old winters, years past, and he hurries down the path and into the door.

In the living room, Lenny sits contemplating the flames, and turns at the sound of the boys arrival, giving a small smile. A pile of almond shells litters the hearth, and chewing contentedly he signals his friend to join him. 

Placing his tin by his side, the boy takes his place and they sit together in the warmth, watching the dance of the flames.

The boy cracks into several of the pilfered almonds, chewing them greedily.

‘I’ve been thinking, Lenny. This could work out here.’

The reflected embers play across the man’s irises and he does not look up, but the boy can tell he is listening.

‘It’s a nice spot. Nice fireplace. We need to sort out water, and a toilet, but we could do it. With two of us to share the work. Think of it, we could share the responsibilities, keep it nice, take turns cooking. I’m sure we could each have a king sized bed in this place. And perhaps we'll find more out there. More people, we could start a little community.’

The stranger gives a fleeting glance across at him. The boy senses that hidden truth; that these words are constructs, that sanity lies only in the chaos, that the boy lost this dream the moment he spoke it. The stranger’s face returns placidly to the flames.

‘It could work, Lenny. It’s worth a try.’

The boy senses his reluctant consent.

‘We’ll take it slowly. We can think about it in the morning.’ He looks at his tin box reflecting the firelight, and feels it glance off an old yearning in his being. ‘But tonight, we should have some fun.’

The boy picks up the tin and starts to rummage through its dwindling resources. Various crystals and powders in worn packages. He settles on a particularly acrid looking powder that seems to glint neon green in the light. ‘I tried this one before. I don’t know what it is, but it’ll make you see Jesus.’

The stranger’s eyes take in the moving flames. Perhaps he sees sorrow, perhaps disapproval, but the boy has come to question any assumptions he makes about this silent figure’s thoughts. He stands and makes for the kitchen, picking up two tumblers and a bottle of Scotch from a cabinet. He returns to the fireside.

The boy smiles at the stranger, who stares defiantly into the embers.  His lack of gratitude angers the boy a little, and he hurries to open the plastic packet which slips between his fingers. Opening it, he pours a little into each glass. There is a little left, so he throws the remainder equally into their glasses, before returning the packet delicately to his tin, closing it and placing it carefully by the wall.

He fills the glasses with a few fingers of the amber spirit and rolls the liquid around the base, checking to see that the powder has dissolved. Once satisfied, he hands a glass to his companion.

‘Cheers!’ The boy raises his glass, but the stranger remains motionless. 

‘Come on, Lenny. Let me be a good host. This stuff is hard to come by these days.’

Lenny turns his eyes to scrutinise his face, or perhaps there is no scrutiny, but for a moment the boy feels naked and cold. But as he turns his thoughts inward at his folly, his addiction, the crushing repetition of his absurd actions, he feels the glass lift out of his hand and looks up as the stranger drains his glass, and looks to the boy with his unassuming gaze once again. The boy smiles and drains his glass.

‘Cheers, Lenny.’

V

The night encloses her far from the diminished glow of the barn. The smoke and the sobs dwindled to nothing long ago, but the light too was an enemy. Perhaps he saw her as she fled, an orange figure vanishing to a bright point in the night, disappearing into the wild. She cannot stop. She will keep her pace through into the new day, and keep on pressing into the future. Whatever lies before must be better.

Brambles entwine her in the dark, her pace tarries, spears of broken sticks tear at the bare soles of her feet. With every spine cutting at the taut skin over her womb, she worries that the tear will creep across the equator of her belly, spilling her life fluid and undeveloped child out out onto the grass, bested. But her body is stronger than her fears and she does not relent in her desperate scrabble through the branches.

Suddenly, the cutting of the branches fails, the ground evens out and she finds herself enclosed and sheltered. Three trees stand around her protectively, and the ground is smooth and firm. She stops in their midst and tries to steady her breathing. As she begins to calm her pulse, her attention again turns to the sounds of the night. The air is peaceful, there is no sound of footfalls or cracking branches, only the gentle sound of familiar music; ancient and discordant. She rests her back against the nearest tree, and is sure she can feel it breathing steadily against her back.

She turns her attention to the bloodied soles of her feet. Beyond the leaves, the first light of dawn has started to work upon the deep darkness of the night. She sits pulling long thorns from her flesh, wincing at the pain, but grateful.

She remembers this place from her dream. The sitting figure with its nameless face and eternal smile, defiant amongst the weeds. She smiles and thinks of her child, and knows it will be safe here.

She wonders if she should stay. There is so much to do. She must feed, she must drink, but the air is so still and music so sweet, and she feels herself being pulled into flesh of the tree, suffocating in the peace of the night. It is nearly dawn, she made out the night.

The stillness is intoxicating and she feels her muscles giving in, when something brings her back. A dull tension in her core rising to sharp agony, twisting at her spine and drawing breath from her lungs. Something is not right. Her thoughts spiral around her child as she puts a hand on her belly and is wracked, bent double by the swelling pain once more. She rests her weight against the tree and drags herself to her feet, panting.

Running out of the shelter of the trees and into the new dawn, she comes to a river and scans the horizon. A worn track leads off left and right. In the distance, a small thread of smoke climbs, barely visible, into the clear sky. She stands frozen as another wave of pain buckles her down to her knees.

11

The boy lies back as the warmth of the whiskey climbs up behind his eyes. Lenny has stopped staring at the flames and now looks distractedly about the room, at the entwined vines printed up the wallpaper. The boy looks too and sees them move slightly, more like a procession of ants winding about their diverting purposes.

Things are moving faster now and reality seems to strobe before his eyes as anxiety fills his chest and a mechanical churning fills his head with an infernal clanging like hammer on anvil. Archetypal geometry flashes across his retina in quick succession, as he rises to his feet and stumbles to the door. Out in the hallway, serpents climbs the walls and the bannisters grin maniacally down on him like a mouth full of broken teeth. He falls into the bathroom door, vomiting explosively across the wall and floor, and watching it slither like tadpoles towards the drain.

The walls are flashing out their rhythm and take on alien faces. They seem to be dancing some twisting, universal dance, sharing some innate joke, to which he is not privy. He looks to them, tells them he is ready, but they continue twisting and giving him dismissive looks from across a great chasm of understanding that he will never cross.

The atoms in the air seem to bristle with energy and he fears he will be torn apart in their excitement. He barrels down the hall and into the living room. Lenny sits before him in the centre, wailing like a wounded animal. Above him, a towering form drags him with great arms upwards by his hair. A tall man, hairless, with sallow white skin, screams down into Lenny's terrified eyes and open mouth. A question comes to his ears as if from a great distance. 

Which one of you did it?

The man’s malicious eyes glow with the hot light of the flames as the fire like an open mouth widens to swallow them and the boy collapses, overwhelmed by confusion and remorse. The air crackles and the walls warp out into darkness.

He is looking down at his old kitchen, though the wood seems to be impersonating, like painted formica. He sees himself within, walking with rigid limbs, clumsy like mayfly. He bumbles awkward and grotesque about the room in tightening circles. He steps to the table and, without thought or purpose, arches his back and brings his head crashing down on the wood. He feels his face crush like putty on the hard surface. He screams at his form to stop, but it raises itself again and again, bringing its head down like an executioner's axe, desperate to crush its skull to splinters. With every strike he feels his form weaken, and feels his limbs fold up and into themselves. Before him, his body folds and folds with every fresh strike on its fracturing skull. His legs and arms fold into nothing, and his torso halves and halves again, and he feels himself shrinking down to nothing, until just a small dark shape remains like a postage stamp on the plastic wood of the table. The postage stamps grows to fill his vision with darkness and he opens his eyes to the warping shapes of the living room.

The room is empty. The walls are still crawling frantically. The boy’s mind turns over what he witnessed; Lenny screaming, the demonic figure of the man with the glowing eyes. Lenny and the man have gone, and the boy tries in vain to straighten his mind. He calls feebly out to his friend. The alien walls deride his foolish concept of friendship and carry on in their endless twisting.

The house is silent and he goes back out into the hall, whispering his friends name to the pitiless emptiness. He turns down towards the kitchen, his stomach, like the floor, writhing and morphing like jelly. 

Dawn has turned the black sky grey and a dim light filters through the many windows. The back door stands ajar, and he moves irresolutely towards it. He can hear sobbing from without.

Around the garden tall roses bushes climb over head, flowerless, and in the throws of strangler vines which climb desperately into the sky. Their greens strike a vibrance far beyond the little grey light trickling from the hazy sky. They seem to sway and chatter before him. In the centre of the garden, weeds, nettles and grasses grapple high above the ground. They have been flattened by a struggle and in their centre, Lenny lies foetal, pawing at his broken face. His eyes are red and swollen shut, dark blood is smeared beneath his nose, his mouth is a dark void, the teeth either shattered or masked by his bleeding lips. His expression is of confusion and loss, like the moment of realisation that a solemn vow has been broken between old friends. Behind him, the large figure of the man squats with his back to the boy. He has his hands drawn up about his ears, his fingers digging into the skin around the crown of his bald head. The veins pulse about his muscular arms as he presses his hands into his temples. His khaki shirt is tattered and browning from streaks of mud. His torso rocks as he lets out irregular anguished sobs. By his feet, a hammer lies abandoned in the grass. The boy can hear the man whisper between his sobs.

Why did you have to do it?

The boy freezes, the reality of his peril becoming apparent out of the confusion in his mind. He grapples for understanding, and cannot justify this scene, Lenny weeping meekly into the grass. The strange, motiveless villain continues to rock and squeeze his head with his palms.

Why?

The boy moves slowly towards Lenny, picking footsteps delicately on the stone paving, making no noise. Lenny’s eyes do not see him.

It was perfect and you destroyed it.

He steps onto the grass, his eyes fixed on the back of the man. Lenny’s eyes are on him now, and his face is no longer lost and desperate. The boy reaches a hand out to his friend.

Why did you have to take her from me.

The boy freezes, his friend’s fingers outstretched an inch from his. He sees the car, the charred corpse. Behind the tortured cries of the man, the burnt out remains of the face still screams through the windscreen. The boy feels all energy drain from his body as the universal laughter rings from the trees and sky all around him, their mirth growing as his despair deepens like a well beneath him.

Lenny’s fingers tighten around his and his mind focuses once more. He pulls his friend quietly to his feet and supports him with his shoulder. Together they move towards the back door.

Why did you do it?

The boy can sense a break in the calm, and looks over to see the man facing them, rising to his feet. His middle aged face is worn and contorted with rage. He moves to run at them as the boy breaches the door back into the house and slams it shut, sliding across the bolt. Grabbing his friend, he runs down the hall to the front. Behind them, a window smashes and an arm reaches through to unlock the door. Into the atrium and out into the street, the boy grabs the front door key from the lock and seals it fast behind them. He pulls the large old key from the lock and throws it aside, running out through the gate and left down the street. They pound away at full tilt, the repetitive sound of their panting breaths and footfalls following them as they go. The sound of crashing glass again, then the thud of hammer on wood, the wood splintering, the door crashing open. They turn a corner as the man reaches the curb and turns to follow them, his eyes glinting with tireless rage.

Preface

News of the apocalypse reached them slowly at first and then all at once. Out in their remote eden, the sky gave no sign to the ending of society, save for one. The planes that used to criss cross the sky ceased one day, and their absence only became noticed gradually. Then it took a further a few days to become a talking point, as each became convinced that they were not just imagining their ceasing. Their short conversation ended on postulating that perhaps a new military base had been established nearby, or perhaps something more sinister, but no less part of that conspiratorial mantel of governance they had left behind some years before. And their minds and talk returned to the petty happenings of the day, their relationship, their small slice of paradise, of the balances of their food and fuel stocks, and the weather of the coming months. And for the following weeks it was bliss to look into the sky and see no trace of the angular white scars that had become so familiar.

It was early summer and the days were long and warm. Heavy air would roll up the steep hills to the north and gather into pregnant clouds above their green valley. The two cohabited in a yurt they had constructed from cob a few years before. Together, they would tend the ordered rows of vegetables and feed the chickens, maintain the solar pumps from the stream, and gather wood for the stove. In the evenings, they would cook together, and retire to the bubbles of their creative pursuits, and come together again to share their music, and their poetry, and whatever projects they had hatched in their brief time alone. 

She always tended to miss her connection to society more than him, so it was of no surprise when she announced she was going to return to the nearby town. Her main intention was to call and wish her sister a happy birthday, but he knew she loved to lose herself to the bustle of a busy town for a time, however brief. In their old excursions, he would join her, and see her sweet adoration of the comings of goings of the drones about their hive. The hubbub made him dizzy, but he found her infatuation charming and knew it was a precious part of her. These days he left her to make the journeys alone, and they were both happier with the new arrangement.

She left him amongst the flowering vegetables and walked the long path to their worn and weathered truck. The journey back was unspectacular, the roads desolately empty. Out from the tight country lanes with their high, constricting hedges, the road widened and crowned a hill, revealing the buildings of the town below. All seemed still and quiet, like a particularly lazy Sunday, although at the time she had been convinced it was a Wednesday. She pulled up by the usual phone booth, across from the small store amongst the scattered houses at the extremities of the town limits. In the valley below, the small town shone in the sunlight, looking like a painted backdrop from the set of a children’s show; uncannily quaint and unchanging. Across from her, she looked suspiciously at the stores dark windows. Her brain ticked over the absence of the store owner from her usual post leering out at the world from across the buttress of her counter. The sound of her feet dislodging pebbles from the dusty ground seemed deafeningly loud in the peculiar silence. She raised the receiver to her ear and contemplated the resounding quiet. The world around seemed to be mocking her behind its vapid facade and she suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to run to the safety of her truck and lock the doors. She forced her analytic mind back to the fore and moved to the front of the shop, craning through the glass and down the dark aisles. The empty front gave no clues, and she turned to scrutinise the street. The houses looked preserved in lacquer and frozen in time. She strained her ears, unsure if she could hear distant laughter chiming just out of earshot. Feeling as if she may have been going insane, she raised her voice to bark a herald to anyone. The silence snapped shut behind her sharp call instantly and remained unbroken. She returned to the truck confused. 

She rumbled down the road slowly, peering out at the innocent looking houses. After several streets she began blasting her horn, waiting to hear it echo out to nothing, stirring no one. She approached a nameless door, desperate to knock, but feeling completely absurd, knowing that some confused face would appear and ask what reason she could have for disturbing a complete stranger. She struck the door and waited and waited, before returning alone to the truck.

She sped home without stopping and ran desperately to her partner, fearing for a time that he too had evaporated, leaving her to wander forever alone in this strange limbo. She ran straight to him and threw her arms around him. She stood holding the solid anchor of his form for several minutes before explaining what little she could.

He heard her story with concern but a pragmatic scepticism, and they agreed to return together the following day to investigate further. She slept uneasily, listening to the man’s deep and contented snores until the first light of dawn. 

They rose early and returned to the town. The quiet streets still wore their sinister vacuous smiles. In the town centre, the stores all stood empty. By the roadside, a homeless man lay slumped against a building, blood caked around his hands and beard, staring open mouthed up into the sun. Flies crawled about his eyes, humming their satisfaction. They stared at his form incredulously for a long time, looking around for an ambulance, for someone to notify. Before long the reek of death in the air made them nauseous and they moved impotently away from the scene.

The newspapers gave little information. It seemed as though the swarming masses had disappeared into the air like winged ants. Finally surrendering to their desperate curiosity, they smashed the glass of a nameless house on an empty street, climbing in and calling apologetically out. The smell of death surrounded them instantly. A woman lay on the sofa, a duvet drawn around her shoulders, black blood pooling about her chin. Halfway up the staircase, a boy lay in a similar state, looking as though he had been struck dead mid stride by the hand of some reckless and spiteful god. 

Out on the street, the houses gave their sarcastic stares, as if incredulous at the couple’s lack of comprehension, as if the obvious truth was being screamed at them from every surface, but in some foreign language they couldn’t comprehend.

They stole a wind up radio from a supermarket and scanned the channels desperately in the dark of the store. The same looping voice read the emergency broadcast script, emitted several beeps, and told more information was to follow. They listened to it together in silence as they returned to their vehicle and made their way home, defeated. The voice rang out over and over, repeating its empty promise of clarity. It followed them to their yurt sheltered in their tranquil valley, and continued it’s circular chatter well into the night, when eventually they both could bare it no more.

Over the coming days, they discussed what they had seen, and how they need respond. The radio gave no further clues, the newspapers they had taken had reports of a strange epidemic in America and across Europe, but with scant details and, like the radio, promising more news to follow. They thought of the bodies they had seen, how they seemed to have been struck down instantaneously, their blood rejecting their bodies and exploding frantically out by the nearest available avenue. Most peculiarly, there was no sign of calamity on the streets. No mad rush to the hospitals, no cars stacked with supplies for a quick retreat to greener pastures. The vistas lacked all the telltale signs of imminent doom as foretold in the movies. It was as though whatever ailment had taken the world had first driven everyone to their beds, and then stolen their life essence all at once. And yet the two of them had been left unaffected. Was it some sacred mark upon them, some sign like lambs blood smeared above their door? Had their virtue saved them? He had always foreseen the doom awaiting humanity, and had retreated to this isolated haven to escape being tethered to the terrible fate the world was forever sealing with its own hubris. But now that he had been vindicated, he was more confused than ever. He had not expected it to fall so quick. The only explanation was sabotage, but how and from where, he could not discern.

Over the coming weeks, they talked over the matter until it became monotonous. They went on regular reconnaissance excursions, to search for friends, and family, but the inescapable bleakness of each journey quickly did away with their curiosity. Their sorrow was profound and they mourned for a long time but they had each other. By some miracle they had been spared and their small life in their quiet valley seemed blessed. Whatever had saved them must have been somehow attached to their simple life and their small pleasures, and so they continued. Every day seemed like a gift now and they would look to their pink, blistered hands in evenings and be filled with humble gratitude. They had been saved by their labour and by their labour they would be saved again. And when they embraced, they would be reminded that they were alone. The last lovers of the old world, and the first lovers of the new world. Sometimes, one would think over how life would have been without the other, and they would shudder at the thought and run to their lover's arms, just to touch them and make sure they were real, that they wouldn’t evaporate like all the others.

That strange summer was beautiful. But the rains came and the days shortened, and the cold skulked around their closed door. Their growing garden had reminded them daily of rebirth and vitality. These new grey days seemed filled with stories of death and decay. The nights were long, but they had each other. 

There was less to do in the winter months, but they kept busy. Occasionally, she would seem to phase into some abstracted revery, staring at nothing, or nothing he could see. And he would play her a song, or ask her advice on some practical problem they could tackle together. And she would come back to him and smile, but still with that abstracted glaze on her eyes. But they had each other and at night he would hold onto her, thanking whatever twist of fate had given them this time together.

She began to take to making her old excursions to the town. He had not understood so much before, but understood less now. When he asked her why, she would say, ‘just to remember.’ She had loved the old world, and it was no surprise that she would go to mourn it by its graveside. And their time apart was hard on him, but she would always return and he would feel that same gratitude rush back, as though the hours had passed like years in solitude.

She had become less creative these days, and instead spent the nights staring into old photographs and diaries. He saw her crying at a photograph of her and her sister, and moved over to embrace her. He had lost his family long ago, and could not share her sadness, but felt touched by the purity of her sorrow. She mocked herself, drying her eyes, and explained that her sister would have turned twenty five this week if things had been different. He reflected for a moment, and was sure that she had gone to call her sister for her birthday all those months before, but he must have misremembered. They had each other, and if her mourning lasted forever, he would gratefully stay by her side until the end.

The winter had taken its toll, but the days were growing longer now. They began preparing the garden for the coming spring. Their conversations were shorter these days. Less needed to be said, they were like two parts of the same entity. The last man and woman, united by the humanity they were carrying into the unknown. They talked less, but they had each other, and he knew her mind, and she knew his, and each knew that they lived together, and died together.

He dug into the damp earth and turned it with his shovel. Before him, she stooped in the greenhouse, filling vast pots with buckets of earth. He paused to admire the love he had been blessed with, as he usually did. She stood with her dirt covered hand outstretched, staring wide eyed into the half filled pot, unmoving. She seemed inert, frozen in a moment, lost in reverie. Looking at her unblinking eyes, his quickly began to water. He called her name to stir her from this eery stasis. She remained frozen, her arm outstretched over the earth. Again, he called, slightly louder. Her eyes looked up from the ground and fixed him with a cold stare, and her mouth grimaced at him in fleeting disgust. In another instant, she broke into her old smile, and apologised for daydreaming, returning to her work distractedly about the pots. He looked at her for a long time, pondering the look she had given him, wondering from what depths such loathing could come from. But she bumbled about her work contentedly and he became aware that he had work to do also. He returned to his digging. Perhaps he imagined it. Perhaps it was the echo of an old memory, revealing itself to the world for a moment. After all, they had each other, and neither could want for anything more.

It was that evening she went out into the wilderness. It was nearly nightfall, and the grey sky was low and ominous. He could see no reason to go out. She said she needed to clear her head. He had protested, asked her not to go out in the dark, asked to go with her. He still feared she’d disappear like the rest and was racked with anxiety whenever they were apart. But she smiled and said she wouldn’t be long, and walked off into the trees in the twilight. He sat alone by the stove, watching the flames, counting the hours.

The sky was starless and quiet. She seemed to be taking too long and he wondered desperately who would go out into such a cold and lifeless night. He shouldn’t have let her go. He couldn’t wait powerless by the fire, but the dark wilderness showed no sign as to her direction. He agonised for a time, before picking up the torch and heading off into the night after her.

The truck had not moved. He retrod the path, looking around, calling her name, sometimes feeling ridiculous, knowing she was somewhere close, just out of earshot. As the sky began to lighten, his anguish deepened and his searching became desperate. Many times, he would sense a moving figure through the branches, burst through frantically, only to find himself alone again.

The sun rose and she was nowhere. He returned again to their yurt to find it quiet and empty. There was no clue as to her direction to be found. She had evaporated too. How could he have ever let her go off alone? He sat before his door looking at the wilderness around him. She must be there, somewhere close. The horizon expanded endlessly around him and gave no hint as to her whereabouts. Except… He suddenly froze, seeing thick black smoke billowing from beyond the nearby summit of the valley. Without pause he took to his feet and ran the straightest course he could. From the summit, he could see the fields stretch out for miles below. A road ran across the vista, slicing it like cheese wire. The source of the smoke was obscured by trees, but evidently coming from the road. He made his way quickly down through the undergrowth, snagging and catching on barbs and branches as he went, coming out sweaty and bloodied. He followed the road around to his right, his feet pounding a fast rhythm as he made his way quickly down the lazily winding course of the tarmac.

He had found the car, the burnt corpse left defiled and exposed to the wild. The body, the hair, the face, were burnt beyond recognition. The only thing to identify his lover was the mud caked boot around her foot that had largely escaped the heat of the flames. Dumbfounded, stunned out of emotion, he watched the bubbling of her remains; her body melting like a toy soldier at the mercy of a bored child. The burnt out car was too hot to touch, so he waited by the roadside, watching his love rise into the sky in fine wisps of smoke that would hastily tumble out to lose themselves in the wind. As he watched, he saw his future summers unwind before him, an endless repetition of isolation and despair. As he sat and watched, his aspirations and joys all decayed to ash and drifted away with the breeze. There was no god, no future, no beauty; just his purposeless march into dust. As he watched and the reality of his loss pressed upon him, he felt the aspects of his humanity fall away like dead leaves in autumn. Love and decency, his whole ethical compass, seemed suddenly incongruous and absurd, like the contradictory rules barked across noisey playgrounds by selfish school children. He had lost the better half of his whole, and this loss could never be redeemed or atoned for.

He dug a hole by the roadside and cradled the frail remains of his love over to it. He buried her without a word said and stood over the grave for a long time, knowing that a large part of himself lay buried alongside her. There was nothing for him at home, his desolate prison in the wilderness. There was only one course, to find whoever stranded him here, and see that they share his desolation.

He turned to follow the road that stretched out behind the shell of the car, following whatever signs he could, across the fields, down by the river to the limits of the city. The endless terraces were barren shells, the whole expanse dead and hollow, but for a thin strand of smoke climbing into the grey air someway in the distance.

12

The boy desperately pulls Lenny down a nameless street. The strange man is not far behind, and Lenny seems to be slowing. He is either giving into exhaustion, or something more sinister, something ruptured below the skin. He pants and crumples to his knees with every few steps and cannot escape their pursuer much longer. They disappear down a lane between two buildings and appear out in an empty street, the boy pausing to listen for the approach of their assailant. It all seems quiet, but he doesn’t trust the sudden innocence of his surroundings. Careful to remain silent, he half carries his friend to the door of one of the many identical houses and tests the handle. It is locked and the glass seems impenetrable, and regardless, any loud noise will bring their assailant to them in an instant. Nearby, scuffling feet can be heard pacing desperately about the street, accompanied by loud, anguished panting. Lenny sits in the doorway, overcome by gravity and exhaustion. The boy lowers himself slowly with his back against the wall. The footsteps have slowed, but are approaching, becoming louder as they both freeze and hold their breath. A thought comes to the boy, and he quickly lifts the doormat, groping underneath, praying desperately for a key. He paws uselessly at the dirt beneath the mat. Before him are some plant pots, and he quickly lifts them, scouring the ground with his eyes. To his disbelief, a key sits before him. He snatches it up and quickly opens the door as quietly as he can manage, pulling his friend through, and sealing it behind them. The death stench is everywhere, staining their skin and their lungs. They remain by the door, straining to listen to the street outside. Their pursuer gives no sign as to his whereabouts.

As he listens, Lenny slumps to the floor, immobile. The boy grabs him by the shoulders, shaking him, whispering his name urgently, pleading with him to wake up. He can’t be roused, and the boy quickly grabs his wrist, feeling for a pulse. He sits for a long time, groping at his friend's still flesh, holding his breath, trying to feel a pulse over the pounding of his own heart that fills his head. He tries to calm himself. He feels it, the small sound of his friends heartbeat, like a mouse huddled in the corner of a vast, empty room. He stands, and searches for an avenue. 

He must act. He moves to the back of the house, searching every surface for assistance. A first aid kit, perhaps in the bathroom. He goes out to the kitchen, and through to the bathroom, and scours the mirrored cabinets for something, anything. A vast crash of glass jolts him from his searching. Fragments chime on a hard surface, and another crash sounds as the door explodes open. The boy freezes, and moves slowly towards the kitchen.

The man shouts over the din, his voice shaking with rage. ‘Wake up! Wake up! Tell me which one of you did it!’ 

The boy peers around the door. To his right, the silhouette of the man stands over his friends limp form, pulling him up by his neck. To his left, a door leads out to the back garden.

‘Which one of you killed her?’ His booming voice echoes off the walls.

The boy stands hidden, mouthing a silent confession, sounding the words out; ‘I did it. I did it;’ but the words move heavily around his mouth like marbles, and seem hollow and strange. To his left, the outside world teases him through the window of the door. The man strikes Lenny on the face again, and a terrible defeated whining fills the air. The boy must act, but that is all he knows. The seconds stutter along as his impotence screams at him from every angle.

He moves, dashing out to his left, through the door and out into the grey light of the garden. The door bounces shut behind him, and he runs to the tall wooden fence bordering the garden, reaching through the thick ivy and pulling his weight to the top of the barrier. He checks over his shoulder to be sure the man is following. The man’s imposing form explodes through the door and makes for him with relentless rage. The boy has a long head start, but is only over the wall moments before the man’s hands grab at him. Shaken, he runs across this new garden, to the fence opposite. The man’s hands grasp the top of the fence as he makes to pursue the boy. There is a splintering crunch as the fence collapses under the man’s weight and the boy scrambles over the new fence away from him. He jumps two more fences, his small size and nimbleness giving him a small lead on the man. Finally he jumps over into an alleyway and makes back for the street he left minutes before. He has no plan, his mind is filled with Lenny’s bloodied face, he only knows he cannot leave his friend. 

His feet scrape at the tarmac as he turns quickly onto the street, down the repeating terraces to the mangled door of the house, but Lenny has gone. The boy's heart sinks as he runs into the atrium, scanning and calling out for his friend, his voice cracking. 

Through the door, he sees his friend’s form, slumped over the top of the staircase that leads up before him. Blood is trailed down the steps, and Lenny’s legs kick meekly at the carpet. 

The man is close behind. There is no course of action, every avenue dwindles to darkness within moments. Without premeditation, he runs up the stairs and grabs his friend underneath his shoulders, pulling him up onto the landing. The man turns up the path, his same stare of unextinguishable rage. The boy drags the limp body of his friend through the nearest door, kicking it closed behind him as the man reaches the top of the stairs and turns to them. This is the end of their path, the realisation dawns on him. Lenny slumped by the wall, the boy on his back on the floor, desperately pushing the door handle up with the sole of his shoe. He knows death is upon them. His mind goes back to that black form by the roadside, the lifeless void that pursued him that day, and pursued him every moment since, forgotten, just out of his vision. He can’t believe he was too blind to see it all this time, that he thought it would ever leave his side. 

The pounding of the hammer rings up his legs. The wood splinters, as the man strikes over and over. The hole is growing, and the man’s gritted teeth flit about before the gap. The pounding continues as the door is reduced to splinters and the boy presses his feet uselessly against the wood. The man reaches through and tears at the remains of the door and falls through onto the boy. He looks into the bloodshot and tear-filled eyes of the man above him. Time seems to slow as he takes in the face filled with senseless hate, the hammer raised ready to sink into his naive brain, to end his fruitless being. Out of his mouth, two small words escape, barely audible; ‘I’m sorry,’ and he is filled with an immense sadness. He thinks of his friend, lying broken by his side. He sees the girl, bloodied, gracelessly strewn across the bonnet. He sees all those countless lives, all gone to dust, rotting in vile heaps in every city around the world. He sees all the misery, all that painful and stupid animation, people buzzing like mayflies, being born and dying so quickly, screaming their love and poetry out into a cold and uncaring universe. And for a moment he understands that universal joke that was ringing out of the walls at him earlier, and realises he was the punch line, and can’t believe he never saw it before. He looks at the man, intoxicated by hatred. He feels the nearness of his own death, and the inescapable absurdity of all that has led him here. It fills him with a great mirth and sadness that makes him want to laugh and weep. He lies there with open eyes, awaiting his undoing.

The hammer is still raised, but it is not time that is stretching now. The man tarries, as a sound reaches them faint and familiar. The man’s eyes turn from the boy’s face for a moment, scanning the room around him. He eyes the hammer in his hand and seems suddenly shocked by the situation, trying to understand how he got here. The sound from the street is growing. A small voice, crying out. 

Help!

The man pulls himself to his feet, distant and disconnected, and walks out into the hall. The pained voice comes again across the air.

Please help me.

The voice is calling out, pleading, desperate. A pained scream fills the air, louder.

Out in the hall, the man drops the hammer and moves down the stairs. The boy forgets himself and rises to his feet, following the man outside.

The man is out on the street, gazing open mouthed at something unseen. The boy walks out into the light. 

A young woman totters down the empty street, stumbling from exhaustion, clutching her pregnant belly, calling out desperately. Her arms are bloodied, her clothes muddied and torn. She stumbles atop feet blackened and chewed. She has not seen them yet.

The man stares at the figure, the twitching of his eyes showing a cascade of processing, an urgent meditation to reconcile what he is in this moment with what he was before. The boy can see that within he is still standing by the burnt remains of the car, desperately seeking some kind of absolution. The boy is there too, and will remain there. 

The man turns; from the woman, from the house, from his rage, and runs out into the lifeless city. The boy looks after his retreat and for a moment wants to follow him, to atone somehow.

The girl sees him, and they stare at each other for a long time. They each wear an expression of open mouthed disbelief, reticent to show any emotion, each suspending their elation to have finally been found. Their gaze is broken as she doubles over again, collapsing under the pains of the contractions, and letting out a long moan of distress. The boy hurries to her side, and supports her through the mangled doorway into the shelter of the house. He has no plan, no understanding, only a single truth; that isolation is dust and unity can be so much more.

13

That day passed in confused and anxious frenzy. The boy watching the woman, isolated and impotent as she struggled through the wrenching pain. He sat and watched, and helped where he could, holding her hand, trying to share her suffering. Lenny was breathing, immobile in an upstairs bedroom. The boy was sure he would recover in time.

They counted the hours like pulled teeth, the girl breathing, surrendering her fears of this stranger, feeling the sweetness of company. She watched this clueless boy as he waited defiantly by her side without even asking her name. Evening sank in, and her pained cries were becoming more hoarse and animal, and across the chasm of understanding, the boy watched and begged to take some of the pain from this stranger. In the night, after many terrible hours, the boy could see Lenny’s bruised face peer in from the hallway, remaining there, outside, but close at hand. To know he sat there brought the boy great comfort, as he sat with this strange woman, waiting in anguish.

Just passed the darkest hour, as blue light was just becoming discernable over the horizon, the cries of the baby sounded shrill and strange over the still air of the desert city. The sound of painful awakening, the raw misery of existence echoing out in a long note. Lenny came into the room finally. All three sat silent, humbled, listening to the sweetness of that terrible cry.

As the girl slept in short spats, cradling her new child, the boy made preparations for their departure. He took the keys of a car, and scoured the city for a house to call home. He found a grand place, not far away, overlooking the city. Perhaps it was the warmer light from the approach of spring, but the expanse of empty shells looked beautiful that day. He checked the two stories of the old building. The walls were thick and the windows insulated. There were fireplaces in two rooms and an old stove. The garden was walled and expansive, overflowing with the same battling grasses, like all the grassland in the country, retiring back to their ancient rituals with such ease. He saw it overflowing with fruit and vegetables at the height of summer. He saw the three of them… the four of them, eating together in the warm evening light. He shivered, cautious of this tantalising future, knowing that to think it was to unmake it. 

He returned to the gored house, and the exhausted and wounded within.

14

The first rays of the sun reach over the peak opposite. The gentle fingers of light feel warm on his cheeks. The boy breathes the air, slowly and deliberately, relishing every moment. The buildings resolve themselves, as they always do, all harbouring their dark secrets. They can keep their secrets.

The image of that face still haunts him. He sees the bloodied body across the bonnet, he sees the strange man standing beside the wreck. He can see his face in the moment that he grasped the completeness of his desolation. Every time he thinks it, he forces the man to relive his undoing, like some insect in his head, repeating its fruitless actions endlessly over. He needs to let go, and free this man of his torment. But the real man is out there somewhere, walking around this barren world. That moment exists, unreachable in the recesses of time. He will never forget. He will have to live with it the best he can, do what he can to atone everyday, but the pain will never leave him.

The familiar cry comes across the air, and he turns back to see the small orange glow of light from the windows. He thinks of the warmth within, and the outside world suddenly seems so cold. He shivers and pulls his jacket around him, turning his back to the dead city, returning home.

Epilogue

He asked her why anyone would want to go out into such a night. The epic bleakness of the rolling clouds beckoned her out into the chaos; their yurt squatted somewhere behind, stifling and dank, like a crowded hive, echoing their buzzing and sickly with honey. She forced a smile and looked him in the eyes. Just to clear her head - she explained, but the real question was: why did she need permission? When did his existence become dependent on her presence, like some tumour, some parasitic conjoined twin? He pleaded with her to stay, and the quiet anger began filling her again. She turned to face the growing dark.

She walked quickly and thoughtlessly, moving as straight as she could, away from that yurt, from their small life within. Her mind went over what she had seen in the greenhouse, and she tried in vain to wipe it from her mind. The days spewing out like unfurled toilet paper, each one melting like wet bread; endless, bland subsistence. If she had to hear one more of his poems…

Her anger was thoughtless and callous. It gouged sharply into her throat as she tried to swallow it, and she was ashamed of herself for a moment.

What she had seen in the dirt came back. That selfish and senseless rebirth, those ignorant seeds yearning mindlessly for the sun, and dying barely a metre from the dank earth, condemning their young to live just the same, and die just the same. She looked at her belly, overwhelmed by her nauseating and loathsome fertility. She knew the day would come soon. She could sense it even in the words they did not share. Like some penned cow, her value was measured in her ability to pump out offspring to be fed into some infernal machine. She would not be complicit, but there was no escaping the biological imperative implanted in her stomach by some power drunk god.

The night air was thick as tar and she felt herself being smothered by it. She couldn’t go back, and the world beyond was better off without her. She walked away from any familiar path, desperate to lose herself and maybe therein find something else, something better. The stars were invisible, and her solitude complete. There was no hope, no standing aside from this absurd universal game. All about her, the lifeforms gluttonously chewed their own tails. She ran hastily out into the night, disgusted by it all.

In the distance, a lost sound came unexpectedly through the air. She froze, stilled herself, and the sudden familiarity of it left her winded. The unmistakable rumbling of a car engine. There were others, maybe many others. The realisation was of no comfort, and her despair deepened as she realised the vastness of the conspiracy of absurd existence.

The lights split the darkness, the car emerging from around the corner, cutting the night like a razor. The vehicle moved at a swift pace. A thought came to her.

The earth continued its pacing across the cosmos without flinching. On a nameless road, a woman closed her eyes and stepped forward into the light. A loud crunching of flesh on metal, of cracking glass, a machine wheezing its last, useless breathes. The night embraced her and carried her out into serene silence as the dawn peered knowingly over at the unconscious form of the boy; awaiting his awakening and laughing quietly to itself.