Sky to Ourselves (short story)

I am not tired and I am not quite awake. In the distance, the buildings look faint like the remaining traces of an erased drawing. Fabi and Jonte walk silently around the plane, muttering to each other.

The fog lingers, as it always does. Fog is never in a hurry. It hides the beauty of the surrounding mountain peaks, and it doesn’t care.

Fabi stands under a wing and reaches up to unscrew something, I don’t know what. Anyway, it’s limited how long I can stare at Fabi’s plane before it starts resembling a toy, and the leap is short, in my mind, between toy and broken toy. Before I know it, I imagine the airplane tossed aside, like a dead bird with its neck and wings in odd angles.

But there is no way from here to anywhere, except through the air.

“Lilja! Are you keeping warm?”

It’s Jonte calling.

I try to sit up a bit straighter on my suitcase, and I try to smile, because I know I look haggard. The most important thing is that it’s clear that I’ve made up my mind.

“That’s good,” Jonte mutters, but he looks worried.

My body hates the raw, clawing cold. My lungs are crumbled up paper bags filled with rocks. I wrap my arms around my skinny legs. Around us, the fog has lifted ever so slightly. I can see a little further now, and I realize I’ve been absentmindedly looking for birch trees, and the outline of a boathouse, close to the summerhouse.

Inside my stomach, something turns over. No baby – I’m not pregnant, I never will be. But something, nonetheless, almost like another person, another and more sensible me, who wants to let me know I should have never left. I shuffle my feet a little, and dig my chin into my collar. I’m wearing my dad’s old bomber jacket, the one he had when he was a teenager and looked like James Dean. We look nothing alike, he and I, except we’re both blonde and blue-eyed, but that’s Sweden for you. Besides our colouring, we’re very different, not least when it comes to our views on the world. My dad is a small-town guy, not one for adventure. I know I’ve broken his heart.

The bomber jacket doesn’t smell like him anymore, but I’m still glad I stole it. It makes me feel like I have him with me, when the homesickness kicks in with waves of nausea, and I think I’ve made a terrible mistake. Sometimes it’s almost unbearable, how much I miss my family and common everyday things in familiar surroundings, back at our old, whitewashed brick house, in its unkempt garden, or in the summerhouse.

I’ve somehow managed to not give in. I know that when I return, my dad will never take their eyes off me again, or leave me unguarded by an assistant – not for a second.

The brick house where I grew up, back in Sweden, was the only brick house in the street. It always looked slightly weird in amongst all the brightly painted wooden houses. We lived there because my mom was afraid of fire. We had a fireplace, but it was only used if it was so cold there were ice crystals forming on the floorboards – we used gas heating instead.

I remember feeling I’d reached the apex of my teenage rebellion when I snuck a candle into the bathroom and lit it, with my unsteady hands, and then showered without keeping an eye on it. My heart was pounding so hard black dots started floating around in my vision, and I felt the room spinning. But I held out, finished my shower, and then blew out the candle. And I never confessed my crime.

Jonte, or Jonatan, as the non-Swedes call him, was the one who taught me to exchange the word “fear” with the word “respect”. It has taken me a long time, but slowly, I learned no longer to fear fire, but to respect it; to treat it as the wild thing it really is.

I suppose Jonte would be surprised if he heard I learned it from him. He probably doesn’t even recall the conversation. Although he thinks more than anyone I know, he’s not an opinionated person, and he’s notoriously reluctant about giving any kind of advice. When you bring up a topic with him, most often, he’ll give you a broad, rambling, sometimes poetic, sometimes nonsensical reply – and by the time he reaches a conclusion, he’s normally long forgotten what actually started his monologue. But somehow the phrase came up, which has now become my personal anthem that I repeat in my mind when I’m afraid. “Don’t fear the fire – respect it.”

I’ve since started thinking about many other things in the same way. Heights, for example. The ocean. Speed. I prefer when Fabi drives, rather than speed-crazy Jonte. Fabi embodies the same sort of healthy respect for engines and traffic accident statistics and weather forecasts as I do. Well – as I normally do. The fog is an exception. We cannot respectfully go flying on a foggy day such as this, in a rackety little toy plane. The only respectful option was the one that recognized the danger the fog represented, and acted accordingly – by staying on the ground.

But I have always flown in the fog. Ever since I was born. Ever since my mother realized something about me wasn’t quite right, when I was about three months old. I try not to use medical language; it estranges people from me, and goodness knows I am isolated enough as it is. I have a speech impediment that makes it impossible to pronounce even the simplest thing fully. I was born this way, with a lack control over my voice, my tongue and my mouth. I’ll never talk like a normal person. That’s why I love Jonte so much. He’s one of a very small number of people I’ve met who initially understood that despite the way I talk, my mind is perfectly sound.

I can walk and move almost normally, but sometimes my head will roll over, and I easily loose my balance. And I have to sit still, mostly, like now, to make sure my heart rate doesn’t rise dangerously, which it does all too easily. My heart has always been like a ticking bomb – so I’ve overheard it said. (I’ve overheard a great many incredible things, too, because often people talk very freely around me, thinking I can’t understand what they’re saying.) It was flawed metaphor, “ticking bomb”. My heart will never explode. It will simply stop. Maybe when I’m twenty-three. Maybe when I’m twenty-five. Doctor Lindström didn’t think I’d live past five years of age, initially, so I know I’m living on borrowed time.

Jonte and Fabi’s flight checks are finally done. I get up from the suitcase and wrap my arms around myself, as if my dad is here to comfort me. Jonte comes over, asking if I’m ready, which I am.

“Are you cold?”

“A little,” I reply. “And your nose is pink.”

“Is it?” Jonte mumbles. “Lilja, are you sure you want to do this?”

I’ve thought about it very thoroughly. Firstly, I know we must leave from here, because I want to see more of the world – I am terrified that the harsh winter up in the mountain will be more than my body can handle. Secondly, we all know there are no legal options open to us. We can’t fill in forms and write our names down. I am reported missing, and my parents and the Swedish police are working hard to track me down so that I can be kept safe. I’ll live the rest of my life in a cushioned cage, surrounded by guards twenty-four seven.

But that’s far too much to say right now. I lock eyes with Jonte, hoping he can see some of the things on my mind, regardless of how ill I must look.

“Yes, I’m ready,” I say.

Jonte helps me into the plane, and soon we are ready for take-off. Fabi turns on the engine and starts flicking switches. I am sitting in the back, unable to see his face, but I assume he’s rather worried. Being the way he is, though, right now I think he’s more concerned about breaking rules, than about the chance that we might soon be smashed against a mountainside.

When the tower realizes we’re about to leave the ground, they’ll shout at us. So far, they haven’t noticed that we weren’t just checking out the plane, but actually preparing for take-off. Nobody is allowed to fly in this weather, with a storm so close. But, as I argued to Jonte: If we don’t leave now, we could be stuck here for three months. When the snow has fallen, flight traffic all but ceases.

“We’ll be flying blind!” Fabi protested yesterday, when I told him that I wanted to leave the mountains behind. “You realize we could crash into another plane mid-air?”

“She realizes that,” said Jonte, whom I had already convinced. “But she says no other pilots will be stupid enough to fly now. We’ll have the sky to ourselves.”

“You’re insane!” Fabi exclaimed, stomping off in anger.

But he came back a few hours later, muttering, “So where would you wanna go?”

The engine roars, making the airplane rattle. I imagine Tuscany, wondering if it can possibly be sunny or golden at this time of the year. Through the scratched window, the sky seems to loom over us, enormous and heavy. Soon we will be in the midst of it.

Rats (behind the scenes)

I posted the short story Rats a little while back, and now I’d like to share some of the “behind the scenes” stuff behind it. My motivation for doing this is because I find it interesting, and so maybe you will too, and maybe we can inspire each other.

Rats is a short story responding to the prompt “you are the victim of injustice” on TheProse.com, where I originally posted the story. Not for the first time, I was inspired by the amazing Kazuo Ishiguro, and specifially, by the notion of approaching the concept an alternative world a little bit differently.

So that was the first impulse, or piece of inspiration, if you like.

The second was a video I’ve seen where the experience of a refugee child is portrayed using a white child actress, thereby brilliantly confronting the idea of “us” and “them”, forcing Westerners to take in a) that all humans are alike, and b) that it could so easily have been us. The world could have looked different. Indeed, the world might look different in the future.

This idea fascinated me. It may not surprise you to hear that I support the statement “Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.”

And so I decided to go with the idea that the East grows to become the new super power, whereas the West diminishes and becomes poor, factories now being built in the West just like right now, they are in the East, because that’s where cheap labour is.

There is also a historical reference within Rats, namely the factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh in 2013. I have visited Bangladesh once, and met the people there, and I have Bangla friends. They might as well have been Westerners, in some senses, but they live in a country which is extremely poor, which has an incredibly corrupt government, and which is exploited by international organizations. A large number of people lost their lives or were fatally wounded in that building collapse. But who talks about it now? And though “conscious fashion” is a growing trend I wholeheartedly support, it remains true that most people go shopping without it even crossing their minds who made these clothes, and whether they were exploited, or what we can do to better their working conditions and pay.

I am by no means a very structured writer who has a strict plan and writes from the beginning to the end making no detours. Indeed, I am a very messy writer who constantly shuffles things about and tweaks them, thinking of stories as pieces of clay that I can mould into whatever shape I like. What I’ve been talking about before, then, is not so much the short story itself, but the impulses behind the idea. In summary: they are these three:

• The idea of approaching an alternative world differently
• The refugee child video campaign challenging the “them/us” idea
• The factory collpase in Bangladesh i 2013

Now we get to the short story, about which I don’t have that much to say. I wrote it quickly – those of you who are writers will know that some stories seem to write themselves.

The factory collapse in Rats happen right by the Thames in London, which was my attempt at turning things on their head, enganging with the idea “them” and “us”, by actually swapping the geographical locations and cultures that provided the setting for the factory collapse. But I didn’t want to linger on this for too long. Inspired by Ishiguro, I wanted the world of the story to simply be, and to focus on what was happening with my characters and in their lives – as they experienced it, not as you or I would.

The protagonist is a regular woman, in most ways. A Londoner recognizable in some ways, but whose world is in many aspects strikingly different from the way we know it. When catastrophe happens, she becames the newspaper cover girl, the face of the disaster, who has to deal with exactly the same problems as we do, in the real world, except from an opposite point of view.

She wants and desires change, but history’s message is not encouraging, and she fears that the Westerner’s roles as “rats” will mean that the disaster will soon be forgotten in the East. But in the woman’s own life, the disaster will in all probability cripple the entire family, because the media and the wealthy people of the world, only care for as long as their attention span lasts.

I wonder if some people might accuse me of writing for the sake of a “moral message”. Actually, I don’t, certainly not on purpose. I think my inclination is to attempt to get people to think more, and to step out of their own shoes and into somebody else’s.

Rats (short story)

You might be able to recall the picture of the flabby, middle-aged woman sitting on the ground, wearing nothing but sweatpants and a sweat-stained bra, an agonized look on her face as she holds on to her fatally wounded daughter. If so, even if you don’t know my name, you know my face. You know my tragedy.

I didn’t care who saw me. I didn’t have any vanity left; my grown daughter Lylie was lying next to me, her bleeding head in my lap, her hair a tangled mess of blood and dirt. Without thinking, I pulled my cotton sweatshirt over my head and proceeded to tear it up using my teeth and the strength left in my desperate, trembling hands. Goosebumps spread across my flabby, bare arms and back. Very carefully, I started wrapping the improvised bandages around Lylie’s head.

Thick dust lingered in the air like the morning fog from the Thames, except no amounts of sunshine could make it evaporate. Within minutes, blood was seeping through the improvised head bandage. Lylie’s screams had ceased and become faint mumbling and moans. Everything in me screamed of the danger of the situation. Holding on tight to my daughter, I looked up, hoping against all hope that there would be a doctor, or some sort of Eastern emergency personnel present.

Instead, I stared up into a photographer’s camera lens.

“Help me!” I tried to yell, but the horrendous dust made me choke, and I started coughing in stead.

The photographer lowered his camera, and looked at me. His black eyes shone with compassion. And yet, he did nothing. I knew he was Eastern straight away. His clothes and shoes were regular enough, but the camera, and even more, the way he carried himself, stood out. I’ve always thought privileged people walk differently. I don’t wish to be rude, but you have a distinctive air of self-righteousness about you. It’s like you think good things are yours as a sort of birthright.

Everywhere around my daughter and I, the brown dust from the collapsed factory building hovered. Through this dust, people were disappearing and reappearing like ghosts.

“They didn’t say anything,” Lylie gasped.
“I know, I know, Lyle.”
“Hh… how – agh – could this happen…?”
“Be calm, baby girl. Mummy’s got you.”

Lylie managed to grit her teeth, but not much more.

When I first saw the gigantic, churning pillar of dust rising towards the sky, a few hours before, I didn’t think much of it. I realized some disaster had occurred, but I didn’t have time to mull it over. I was the mother in a family of six, which included my alcoholic husband and a son with some sort of mental disability I couldn’t afford to pay for a doctor to diagnose. I had my hands full.

When the screaming from the floor below started, after someone had received a telephone call and I discerned the words “Ashford and Tate” and “disaster”, I got worried. Force of habit made me glance at Rhys, the father to most of my children, but he didn’t notice. His eyes were open, but something about them reminded me of a dead fish left in a fishmonger’s chest after all the ice has melted. Rhys was somewhere else, mentally. He just lay there on his dirty mattress, too sick to walk or to care.

Looking at Rhys always made a horrendous anger swell inside me, but it also reminded me why I could not rest, or give in. It was too shameful a thing that my eldest daughter was the only one in the family with work, and I couldn’t allow myself to become an even heavier burden to her. My brave, strong Lylie, she was the light of my world. If it weren’t for her, our entire family would have been ruined. We had always been like rats swimming from a sunken ship, but Lylie was the one who found the piece of wood we clung on to. She kept us afloat.

But there by the factory ruins, hours later, hope was bleeding out, even before my eyes. It bled out through my fingers as I pressed my hands against the sides of Lylie’s head on top of the soaked bandage. Panic rising in me, I realized I was loosing her.

When the emergency personnel arrived – too few and too ill equipped to have even the slightest hope of being able to meet the overwhelming need. By then, corpses and soon-to-be corpses were lining the pavements, and there was a growing crowd of sobbing and screaming relatives and friends. By some miracle, Lylie was among the first twenty who were rushed to the makeshift hospital inside St. Paul’s Cathedral. There, her head was patched up; she received blood and – despite my screams of protest – lost her legs. There was no avoiding it, I had known that ever since I saw my daughter being half carried, half pulled out from the collapsed building, her legs dragging after her in a funny angle. After the operation, a doctor with an Indian accent told me Lylie had been lucky.

I was awake almost until dawn, curled up on the rug on the floor next to my daughter’s hospital bed. Lylie was still unconscious, machines beeping around her. The sound of screaming, mainly from victims’ loved ones and not the victims themselves, echoed off the cathedral walls. Now again there were flashes of light; Eastern journalists and photographers present to document the disaster.

For a time, I sat with my fingers in my ears, trying to block it all out, while staring at the ceiling, which seemed higher than the sky where it soared above me. The magnificence of the cathedral took my breath away. It was utterly unfathomable that there were once people in this land capable of constructing buildings like this.

It wasn’t something I thought about often, but the notion always became more intrusive when I was surrounded by awe-inspiring architecture, and that horrendous night was no different. I recalled what I had learned during my few years of school: that our ancestors became lazy, resting on their former victories and choosing to live wasteful and unsustainable lives, caring nothing for further innovation and development, or for the fact that society and market forces was developing and changing. And develop and change, they did. The East developed with lightning speed.

It strikes me as bizarre to think that the world once looked like a mirror opposite of what it does now. The poor and suffering whom the rich wished to think as little as possible about mostly used to live in the East. The West was once a glorious empire. In some distant past, our lives used to matter.

At some point before dawn, Pip showed up. The terror and fear I was feeling burst out of me like an attack from a mistreated street dog someone tried to pet.

“You’ve left Rhys and Ridley alone, you stupid girl?!” I hissed at her, though my concern for Lylie had actually made me forget all about Rhys and the other children. “Philippa Jane Clarke, are you positively mad?!”

“They’re not alone,” answered Pip, with the sort of mature calm one wouldn’t expect to find in an eleven-year-old. “Mrs Eavesbrook’s there.” Pip looked at me, eyes grave. I could tell from the dark rings around them that she hadn’t slept. “Will Lylie be okay?” she asked.
“They took her legs,” I said.
“What?”
“They amputated her legs. Sawed them clean off.”
Pip went pale. Suddenly I saw a glimmer of the child she actually was, or should have been. I wanted to hug her, but my arms were too heavy to move.
“They had to,” I added, trying to sound more comforting. “They couldn’t fix them. A piece of a wall fell on them. They looked … it was …”
Tears ran down Pip’s face.
“I know,” she whispered. “The newspaper said so.”

She opened her shoulder bag and took out a crumbled copy of The Guardian. The title read: “Ashford Factory Collapse: Hundreds killed.” I let out a gasp of disgust as I realized I was on the cover. In a flash, I remembered the black-eyed Eastern man with the camera. The sight of the picture horrified me. I looked as ugly as a haggard old witch, and absolutely devastated. Lylie’s head bandage was bleeding through my hands.

“You were on the news, too,” Pip said. “The picture is everywhere.”
For several minutes, I could barely breathe. I fixed my eyes on Lylie’s head where it rested in a crisp white pillow. Her head was wrapped in actual bandages now.
“Why did they let them work there?” Pip asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The article says the building had been deemed unfit as a factory. And yet it kept going; new floors and yet more new floors being built. The rules and the regulations were ignored entirely.”
“Deemed unfit?” I said, opening the newspaper. “Where does it say that?”

Pip pointed it out to me. My eyes skimmed over the sentences, and I realized she was right.

“’Cause we’re rats,” I muttered, cold anger flooding my veins.
“Sorry, mum?”
“To the people of the East, we’re like rats. If we die in a disaster like this, they don’t care. They’ll feel sorry about it for a while – my goodness, I hope my ugly crying face haunts their dreams! – but they won’t actually do anything about it. They love their precious, wealthy lifestyle too much, and their cheap things from foreign factories. The rich business owners, they know that even if a factory collapses, they’ll find new workers. Oh they’ll plead and apologize after this one, but just you wait. There will be no change, because there are always more rats. We have nowhere else to go.”

“The Easterners could help us,” Pip said.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to smile, and not protest. Pip still had an ember of childish innocence burning in her, and I didn’t want it to die.
“Yes, Pippa,” I answered. “If they wanted to, they could.”

Rip

A sideways glance
Was enough to see
Something to rip the heart
Right out of me

Even though this is normal
The new everyday
So common newspapers
Rather focus on who might be gay
The hard truth is
By now, it’s barely even news anymore
It’s all happened too many times before

And yet it is always different
When it happens close to home

Today there are people dying
Dying in cobbled streets I’ve walked
And there are people crying
People with whom I might’ve talked

My instinct is to scream:
“You’re not welcome here
This is my neighbourhood
I will have no war here!”

But then, that doesn’t help
And nor is it true
Because the whole world is my neighbourhood
We’re all in this mess together
Whether it is Sweden or Syria
Whether they’re bleeding – or you

Here’s what I want to convey,
What’s on my heart to say,
And I don’t bloody care if it rhymes anymore:

I have no faith in complicated procedures
In military campaigns and angry speeches
In pointing fingers and declarations of hatred

I have faith in forgiveness and in grace

                           in inclusion
                           and tolerance
                           and equality

Let’s take responsibility for how we meet

e v e r y    s i n g l e    o n e

Let’s stop inadvertently creating humans so desperate
They think that in order to be heard
They must rip peaceful places and people apart

They do not know what they are doing
And I don’t think they are more to blame than we

Sands of Time (short story)

This is a shortstory I wrote as a response to a challenge on TheProse.com, along the lines of “write the most original apocalypse story you can think of”. I didn’t notice it had a maximum wordcount at first, which I exceeded, but I liked the result, so I decided not to participate in the challenge, but post the shortstory as it turned out, here.

*

When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she tried to abort me with a coat hanger.

She told me this herself, without flinching. She is the strongest, hardest woman I know, with eyes that always gleam with anger and bitterness. And yet, I know that she loves me. Indeed, it was exactly because she loves me, that she didn’t want me to be born. She didn’t want me to have to come into this world.

My mother’s mother – my grandmother – was a naïve woman. I’d like to say she was uneducated, but “disinterested” would be closer to the mark. That woman believed it was a sort of law of nature that the things that are, will remain. So she believed that her parents’ reality would be her own, and that whatever the news proclaimed would not and could not ever change her dreamlike world of blue skies and green grass.

When the naïve woman had a daughter – my mother – she surrounded her with a blissful mirage of denial and wishful thinking. The daughter was taught that the world was beautiful and fruitful, that she could be whatever she wanted to be, that good food and sunshine were the lasting hallmarks of a good life. She even learned how to drive. But though she would eventually come into ownership of a car, it was only because cars, by the time my mother was eighteen, were dirt-cheap. Even I could by a car now, even in reasonably good condition, because what’s a car worth when you can’t drive it?

Besides, even if there was still petrol to be bought, the roads are now in too horrendous state for it to be any use. The asphalt is all broken up by cold and heat, smouldered so badly that some places even cyclists struggle to find a way – some places, you even have to climb, or make your way carefully around the open gullies. Cars are still everywhere, though. They’re as ever-present – and maybe as tragic – as the ancient ruins of Athens. That’s another thing my grandmother had a strangely romanticized view of. She even named my mother after the goddess Athena. My mother hates it, of course; she’s named after a symbol of a lost world. When she had me, my mother decided to call me Kate. I think she felt it was more neutral.

Outside of our house, my dad’s old car is standing, beneath a crooked old oak tree. I don’t know what happened to my mother’s first car, but my dad’s old one, that we still have, even though he himself is long gone.

It’s a 1968 Corvette Stingray. I remember my dad saying, on several occasions, that if you’re going to own a vehicle that you can’t drive, it ought to be a piece of art. He’d be upset if he knew that my mother and I have painted it azure blue. It’s not a brilliant paintjob, I’ll be honest, but I’ve seen much worse. My mother chose the colour, reminiscent of the skies of her youth.

I’ve never seen blue sky in real life. In this city, that just isn’t possible anymore. The pollution covered the sun and sky up long before I was born. You have to travel far out on the country, or to one of the many abandoned cities, to even get a glimpse of that brilliant blue, not to mention – stars at night. The world I know has no sun, no moon and no stars.

These days, there is the dust as well, and the sand, which finds its way everywhere, getting in through the tiniest cracks. In the mornings, I wake up with sand in my eyes and nostrils, and a throat that’s absolutely parched from breathing in the dry air. I can barely even make a sound before I’ve had a sip of water. Thankfully there is no shortage of water yet, though I expect I will live to see wells dry up and water pipes run dry. Horror-struck by her own harsh meeting with reality, my mother certainly hasn’t raised me to be an optimist – I truly am my boyfriend’s exact opposite.

My boyfriend remains relentlessly hopeful. Sometimes it annoys me so much that I can hardly keep myself from punching him, but it’s also what attracted me to him. And somehow he can stand being in my presence even on my gloomiest, most depressed days, when I feel like the dry air and lack of sunshine is sucking the very life out of me.

I must have complained about this one too many times, because now my boyfriend has decided we are going to find it. We are going to find the blue sky.

“That’s what they used to do, you know,” he told me. “With sick people. They’d send them to someplace warm and sunny. And then they got better.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Well, it would do you good anyway.”

“Blue sky. How will blue sky do me any good?”

“Come on, Kate, you know what I’m talking about. It’s like when you see a flower, you know, that’s so bright and fresh, and the sight of the colours makes you feel … just, better.”

“I’m not sure I know that feeling.”

“Flowers in spring don’t make you happy?”

“No, the opposite. They look so lost, and they’re always covered in dust, and I just keep thinking, ‘born to die’ … you know?”

My boyfriend looked at me for one long moment, and announced: “That’s settled, then. We’re going.” And before I could argue, he rushed to add: “How about this: We’re doing it for our grand children. We owe it to them. Because they might never get the chance.”

That night, my mother and I both woke up at the sound of a loud crash. The winds had already been howling when I went to bed, another sandstorm brewing, gathering strength. On the emergency weather forecast – by now a regular occurrence – the weatherman looked clearly unsettled, as he had to admit that it was “unclear” where the sand storm came from. There were, after all, no deserts in this country. But then, the sand storms didn’t just occur here. They were happening everywhere, across the globe. Winds of sand seemed to be blowing from some unknown source.

Moments after the crash ripped me out of my sleep, my mother stormed into my room, flashlight in hand. I was already sitting upright in my bed, and automatically closed my eyes against the piercing light.

“You okay, babes?” she said, shifting the beam of the light so that I could look at her.

I nodded, as I got up. Beneath my bare feet I could feel the rough sand on the floorboards.

“I think maybe –” I began, my voice a weak whisper. I reached for the water bottle on my bedside table and made myself swallow a few mouthfuls. It tasted like rust. “I think maybe the tree on fell – on the car. I thought it sounded a lot like metal … metal and glass.”

Sticking close together, we made our way to the hall, where sand had gathered in the corners and the air was thick with dust. The front door was shaking and rattling on its hinges, the wind screeching.

“I don’t think we should open it,” my mother and I called in unison.

My mother’s eyes were sad, but her face was stern and strong, as always. She crouched down and picked up a handful of sand from the floor. Holding it in her fist, she slowly released her grip a little, letting the sand trickle towards the floor. It caught the light from flashlight, shining like gold dust. The sight reminded me of something, though I didn’t know what, and for some reason, I felt melancholic.

“It means something, doesn’t it?” Though we were only a few feet apart, I had to yell so that she would hear me.

My mother looked at me.

“Yes, my darling. It means time is almost up.”