And we only have 8 years left.
Maybe this is all down to the fact that I have an unhealthy relationship with the dystopia genre. It’s not very often that I wake up late, in a sweat after a full night of living through the apocalypse, I have three very young children, it’s rare I get sleep at all. So when around two nights ago I had said dream, its safe to say that I was a little disorientated, I tend to have many dreams in one night, and most I can’t recall by the time I wake up — but this was different, it was like those movie scenes when they wake up within a dream thinking it is reality, and then they wake up again and it’s actually real that time, well that was what this was like.
I pulled out my phone, weather warnings flashing up, all I could make out is the bright blazing colours affixed to my screen; vivid oranges, and screaming reds, amongst clusters of what looked like land mass, around me people running, shouting, clutching onto everything, anything, panic rife. The heat had been a constant by product of what we did, but it was never like this, this was different. We thought we could fix it, we failed.
I realised this in a moment, a flashback drearily hitting me with its fluid waves, a memory, a vision from the past; my mother, untouched by time, a woman the same as I know her now, sadness circling her contorted face.
“8 years” she spoke with certainty.
“That is when our time is up, that is when the world ends”.
I turn around in that moment, wailing at the ghost, now a mere fog falling deeper, and deeper back into my subconscious.
“That’s not enough time!” I cry out to no one, “My children were meant to have a life, they were meant to live, and their children after them” the pain started to creep up over my face, confusion. I realised looking up, faces, expressionless, but the eyes confirmed the unexplainable; a kind of silent acceptance read across them, and desolation.
The next thing I see, water.
An endless, emptiness where there once was, now a sea of scavengers, desperation hung in the air, but lucky, lucky to have made it, lucky to be alive. I was alive, in a mass of smudges that soon came to be boats and ships made of whatever could be found, it was different, life felt different — we were now in a newness that cannot be undone, death weighing heavily in air thick with salt tainted water. I look out but I am emotionless to the devastation, a filtered view as if some part of me knew it were a dream all along, sitting, staring, contemplating my survival tactics.
What should I do?
Where will I go?
Suddenly, I lost the boat, I was no longer in a pale blue rowing boat, aching with age, the blue only paled through the warmth that ran along the plywood shell, it read ‘Gwyneth’ across the side, the words tattooed into dry, hard skin, but it was still there in hand painted cursive. Who was Gwyneth? Is she alive?
I had moved onto a ship, more sinister and lifeless than the stretch of water before us, a ship that collected those that weren’t as fortunate, their families snuffed out, and unable to salvage any sort of dwelling of their own. Instead there was a hatch. Down a long, dank, corridor within the belly of the vessel, were rows of small circular doors encrusted with rust and a few barnacles. They were solid metal, heavy and creaking, a wheel that you turn to enter adorned the front, and some elbow grease was needed to get it open. Dripping, the walls wet, slick with moisture, each cavernous hatch supplied little more than a bed and a hole in the ground, a shelf to put some possessions if any. Dark. Lit dimly only by a small amber emergency light that flickered intensely.
The men were scoundrels, untethered from fear, hardened by experience, and food was the only thing on their minds. For some strange reason women were not aboard this particular ship, nor children.
Another room now, transported someway, in a way only a dream knows how. A table, coated in ruby's, and men crowded around like animals, dogs howling at one another in succession, menace hanging in their low, black eyes. The room was brighter somehow, but my vision blurs, heavy dark coats, and desperate laughter filling the room.
Hunger.
I manage to manoeuvre my way around the room unseen, I stop. The ruby's, falling from the table, poured onto the floor, tainting scrappy, handmade shoes, and staining the metal beneath them.
The smell of rust and body odour crept into my nostrils, and as I winced at the stench I saw it for what it was. Blood.
I followed the trail from floor to table, a lifeless hand battered and purple. Veins bulging through translucent porcelain. A man. Hung open, entrails clutched in grubby, greedy fingers, the tissue tough, between teeth.
This was life as we now know it. We were scorned by God, moulded by greed and grief.
The scene shrouded into darkness.
I woke up.
But the chaos remained.
