This Was Alive Once

We stood among the death and ash, and the world stretched away and between us. The fire had torn through the trees and farms and left nothing behind. My feet were anchored to the ground, but she moved freely, shifting and floating, unable to stay still. Somewhere, a house had stood. 

In Memory of The Journey

We switch trains at a single-platform station, moving from one empty carriage to another. Both trains were clean and quiet and clinical, marvels of modern transport but far removed from the rattling cages that I remember from the homeland. The tracks are wider and newer here, so we lounge on comfortable seats in diode light and slide across the landscape with barely a sound. The passing freight trains hiss by the windows in near silence.

A View from the Roof

The tyres gripped and spun in the dirt and stones that lay on the side of the road as we pulled the van off the tarmac. We didn’t indicate; the road was empty bar us. We had been driving for hours and hadn’t passed another person since an empty bus had overtaken us on a corner and sped away. She turned the radio down, and I clicked the engine off. She opened her door and pulled herself onto the boiling steel of the van’s roof while I climbed up over the bonnet and windshield.