The bridge just broke, but everything seems to contradict it. My eyes shift uneasily, and even begin to shake, before being summoned back to the spot where the young mother still stands, curtains draped around her shoulders. ‘Alison,’ she cries, ‘Alison, Alison, it was purer than sound, really. No serious damage done. Tell me where you are, honey, come on, please tell me where you are.'
One of the rescuing troops still hovering around, unsure of what to do next, speaks of the 'absolute devastation,' before he turns up his sleeves and sits straight back down on the scorched ground for a while, staring into space.
The others first who are first upon the scene are the surveyors who ably partition the unsullied soil into patches for all suitable suitors. Behind a boundary marker, a disembodied voice says: ‘I watched the remains and hoped I would soon wake up with something like cramp, or pins and needles. Just something to remind me of the extremity of the situation, but nothing like this. Something I could later use as a reference point, instead of these blunt details which somehow insist upon their own separate existence.’
Another voice says: ‘Raging at my stupidity, I saw, with horrible clarity, the angel deliberately till the earth and the sea until they seemed as one, especially when the train jerked upwards.’
A young girl swings from a railing while posing for photographs for one of the witnesses, her skin stained with blood, not all of it her own. A voice then inquires of her: ‘Are you an acrobat? Are you a gymnast? Please tell me who you are.’
Another passenger recalls standing in one of the groups squeezed together on the diminishing islets of unstained ground, secure in the knowledge, it was assumed, that they were indeed good at the game of life, at least a bit better than those others who perished so suddenly, so simply. And these survivors can now be seen consulting silverlined maps in the hope of securing some sort of destination far from where they're currently found, but all they end up doing is just rowing around in circles.
A tremendous rattling and shaking keeps going on in one of the nearby carriages, now solely situated inside my head. Blue lightning brings along more mass electrocutions. A burnt black piece of corrugated iron flips over in the wind and lodges itself at the bottom of the embankment.
The shuffling, hooded man passes my way again and says: ‘My legs are firmly set on the side of the road and yet I’m still able to hitchhike over chimneys. Here, take my orange pencil and catch a fish before the engine derails and piles into others. Bark to comprehend balance. And pay no attention to my frazzled features.’
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