Aftermath Shelters
by Michael Upton
Flicking quickly through thousands of archived images, I pick at the threads. Records of hinterland runs, walks, swims swirl and coalesce as a database for the end of the world. Precarious ruins, military and civilian rubble, sun kissed concrete and corrugated metal set against soulless black skies; slim uprights of forgotten purpose fail to prop up huge horizons; the surface of the river puckered pewter in storm cloud shadows; battered doors on littered backstreets, slipways, jetties, ramps and groynes yield to the void; machinery melts in the saltmarshes; dark waves rehearse the dance that will destroy the city.
Editing myself into a type of trance, I recall a vivid recurring dream from my childhood. The bomb has dropped (we knew it would). I am roaming the blasted east Lancashire countryside with my brother and dad, who dispenses boiled sweets from a bag telling us they will stop the sickness coming. We know that it isn’t true, but we do it to please him. From the hills we can see the flattened ruins of towns and a boiling purple sea. We have stopped asking about my mum and sisters. Now and then a flurry of bad snow arrives, and we run for shelter inside or beneath whatever outpost or structure we can find.
I entertain the notion that the dream been unspooling from the reels of some rickety subconscious projector ever since. Or perhaps I have never woken up.
Editing myself into a type of trance, I recall a vivid recurring dream from my childhood. The bomb has dropped (we knew it would). I am roaming the blasted east Lancashire countryside with my brother and dad, who dispenses boiled sweets from a bag telling us they will stop the sickness coming. We know that it isn’t true, but we do it to please him. From the hills we can see the flattened ruins of towns and a boiling purple sea. We have stopped asking about my mum and sisters. Now and then a flurry of bad snow arrives, and we run for shelter inside or beneath whatever outpost or structure we can find.
I entertain the notion that the dream been unspooling from the reels of some rickety subconscious projector ever since. Or perhaps I have never woken up.
