Tales of Disturbance

Cassie

Cassie leans on the kitchen sink, her slender limbs, lead-heavy. Her dark head down. 

It is almost dawn. Weak light falls over her skeletal shoulders and arms - too thin; the cold light  falls over the cold stone floor. It patterns out in clean squares over a kitchen bench, a broken cup, exposed brick wall.

She lifts her head to peer through the ghosted window to a ghosted world. The garden is shrouded in darkness: a dead garden. She can just make out the spindly branches; stagnant pond; broken fence.  

A green glow on the horizon illuminates the lands beyond. Everything ash. The trees that remain are reduced to charred sticks; blind men's poles. The counting of the calendar would tell her that this is Autumn. But Autumn can no longer be seen in colour; it can only be felt on the fabric of the skin, the rattle of the bones. 

Cassie rubs the thin membrane of her eyelids; feels for lashes. Still there. Her tiredness, bone-deep, gut heavy. With effort she stands up taller, peers out further. A small sun, struggles under a final granite sky. Clouds clot darkly; threaten to extinguish lack- lustre light. Soon the rains will come; thicken the ash to gloop. 

From here, in this odd light, she can also discern the distant shadowy outline of the 'mega-machine' a relic from another time. At least a mile away, its gargantuan lattice is visible in the pre dawn light. It used to frighten her as a child. Now it brings miserable comfort.  A focal point on a tedious horizon. Symbol of survival. 

Like most people she is white and thin. Like some creature trapped in a skeleton peering out of bones. Her hair is limp, lifeless like a doll's. In the absence of old-world shampoo, she has been using carbolic soap that makes her think of surgery. But she has long given up caring about appearances. Six years have passed since she last saw the truth. In water and glass her face is a distortion, her eyes, small caves; black, like she is leaking darkness.

The silence around her this morning feels different. It is true, they do not speak much anymore, she and Luke, for what is there to say? Her thoughts used to line up like soldiers attentive for the battle. For this is war; this struggle they are forced to engage in to survive everyday. It made sense to her then. Now her thoughts are darting insects, difficult to capture, too fleeting to translate into something as certain as language. But silence is its own language; their wordless love is still a clear, true sound. They have become fluent in silence. 

So he has not communicated his plans. Perhaps he left early. Perhaps late last night. She is suddenly eager to speak to him. Understanding comes, a light switched on. And even through her ephemeral thought life now, she is suddenly aware of dark possibilities. Without warning there it is: worry, in all its ugliness, there, taking its seat at the table of her heart. 

No. She must pull herself back from the edge. She thinks of breakfast. Coffee. Something to take her mind off the hopelessness, thick as the moon, dawning in her consciousness. 

She and Luke live on the edge of everything, the waiting room of all existence. They are unreachable, unfindable here. It is fifteen miles to the Eastern border where Luke works. It is more than 300 miles to anywhere else. Her husband's employment is a charade. No one ever comes across the border and no one ever leaves. It is impossible to do either. The party see to that. 

And who would come to a place like this? Journalists and reporters became disillusioned long ago. Even missionaries. The situation, unchanging as the flat burnt landscape, is too mundane for the demands of changeful drama of free world news.

Yes. Their nation is a by-word. One paper years ago described it as a 'officially uninhabitable', 'a ghost region'. Even the spies have given up. There is no chance of escape. The outside world is simply waiting for them, and the rest of the straggling population, to die.

Who is left? They ask each other, Who is left but them?