heatwave // climate // history.
a short story.
Based on a true story (link here). Originally published in free world fiction🌎.
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The first thing I did when they first sent the bombs was stop worrying about sleep.
I have never been much of a good sleeper, anyway. I alternate between shallow dreams of ecstatic irrelevance and fast-paced slide-shows of dystopia, like someone choosing whether or not they would like to give chase or whether they’d like to run. I spend eight or so hours out of my allotted twenty-four trapped in a peculiar, unconscious limbo, and wake up, blurrily, somewhere between fear, submission and disappointment.
As a result, I never really get any rest. Nothing that feels like rest, anyway. Which is strange. Because, on the surface, I am your average person. The neat, white-cut letters of my mobile phone’s alarm app remind me in much the same way as they remind you: there are 7 hours and 13 minutes until the bell rings. It is quite ordinary; it is quite mundane. For most of my life, I have disappeared out of the world into the strange darkness of sleep with the same biological rhythm as the majority of people, and if not the majority, then at least the same number of folk who have reasonably elected to follow the recommendations of a late-night Google search. Seven to nine hours, for healthy adults.
I used to come in to each day feeling tired, anyhow. Whether I’d been lost in my wildest fantasies, or cornered by my most irrational fears, I would wake up with the feeling that I had spent the entire night defending myself.
And so, when they finally sent them, I suppose I was shocked out of it. Europe, finally back at war again. The moment we found out the planes were in the air, it was like a promise had been unstitched. They flew from France — or at least, with French flags, from an airbase in Algeria — and targeted not a country, but boats. Hundreds of boats, carrying almost sixty-thousand people, fleeing the various sub-Saharan countries that had not seen any rain in seventeen years. The sudden exodus had come as a complete surprise to the intelligence agencies of the world, who hadn’t a clue where they’d gotten all those seaborne containers from. An army of displacement. Some were making the trip across the Med in canoes. Most of them, even the children, were carrying guns. The slightly less conscious newspapers called it “a modern-day Dunkirk.”
Dunkirk was an abattoir dressed up as an accomplishment. I wonder if any of ‘the displaced’ felt accomplished, or whether they felt thirsty, when they were finally shattered by the wood-chips and sea-fire.
None of the boats made it to shore. The remaining governments of the EU have committed (at long last, in many peoples’ view) to “defending themselves.”
I am going to stop worrying about sleep.
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My name is Tom btw :) Here’s a link to a little more info.
