Tales of Disturbance

Cassie

She thinks she hears a noise. 

It is a very slight noise, like the whirr of very distant traffic. Yet traffic no longer exists in this world, and it feels closer, this noise. She gets up heavily. Takes an uncertain step or two towards the fuse box, and gives up. She doesn't have the energy to properly investigate. It's probably just an electrical fault. 

She picks up the TV remote, a charred tube, plastic missing in several places. She presses half a red switch at the top and settles on the foamy vomit. In a few seconds the TV, a relic of the old world, sizzles to life. The state symbol dominates the screen: three stylised yellow corn plants inside a yellow diamond. Five high bleeps: the beginning of the programme.

The news.

A newsreader announces a morning road raid, our glorious leader be praised. This woman's eyes are too glarey, too blue. A pill hat perches on a block of blonde hair. She looks like a strange air hostess from the last century, who boarded a plane long ago.

A man has been arrested. 36 years old. Innumerable crimes against the state. They have followed this traitor, this monster, for two years. Bugged his house and workplace. His car. Drone technology. Clarity highly satisfactory. Footage even from this morning. Chasing a second suspect. A second arrest is imminent. Glory to the Leader. Glory to the Party.

Her voice is dead and songless. As her drugged eyes glare at Cassie some sleeping creature shifts in her stomach.

Cassie hears the whirring noise, louder this time. She half turns her head - what is that noise?

She looks back at the screen. The camera pans over the familiar grey Ash Lands and a mega machine. That extinct dinosaur of rusted hydraulic machinery, sunken and sleeping. It looks so similar to the one she can see through the kitchen window its gargantuan limb raised high, as if appealing to the sky for rescue, or some benevolent spirit.

But there are so many of these rusted and sunken into similar dead, unvarying landscapes in similar bleak spots. They are probably on the other side of the country.

The camera cuts. There is a yellowing white rock with a faded arrow that marks an empty ash road. They have a road marker exactly like this here. A signal for Luke to turn the old truck around the hairpin bend, coming home in the dark.

The camera turns. It travels on up an empty ash road. All the time the shrill dogmatic voice drones on.

But Cassie has stopped listening.

She sits up straighter.

The camera stops at a dirty picket fence, zooms in on a rotten vegetable patch, a stagnant pond, a sunken lawn of ash mud.

Finally, a house comes into view.

It is their house, unreachable, unfindable.

Outside, the rain beats a dead drum on the sky light. Uncertainly, Cassie stands up. Her breaths bursts out in starts like a woman in labour. Panic will suffocate her.

Luke arrested?

It isn't happening.

There has been some terrible mistake.

Worms burrow deeper in her gut.

The thin white fingers clutching the coffee weaken.

A drip of hot liquid spills over. Scourges her white wrist. The scald turns immediately red. She barely registers the pain.

Her kitchen window is on the screen. A figure in grey dawn light stands looking out the window at the early morning landscape. The face looks at the camera. It is too white, too thin. Sunken cheeks. Haunted black smudges for eyes. Leaking out of hopelessness behind the face.

The shrill, sing song voice of the reporter carries on.

'This is footage from this morning. Here she is, the wife of the traitor of our Party. A woman condemned. Even now our assassins are inside her house. Even at this moment. We will broadcast the execution as it happens. Our great leader be praised!'

The first foreboding notes of the national anthem strike up, low and minor.

There is a crackle then a hiss, and the TV screen cuts out.

And as her legs give, the only noise is the drum roll of the chipped coffee cup as it swivels on the hard floor. Underneath it, the dark liquid spreads and sinks into the rough wood, like arterial blood. The camera moves in for a close up.