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They drove home the importance of spending at least fifteen hours cleaning, and sent us to our work. They monitored us, quizzed us on the cleaning products we were using, their chemical make up and proper purpose. Insufficient knowledge in these areas was enough to see an entire day of cleaning repeated. The ruins of dogcrafts were kept in our facilities 'museum'. A sort of history of our struggle against the world beyond. A reminder of what could be approaching. There was frequent alarms for potential dogcrafts approaching from the horizon, way across the breadth. For as long as I have been alive and under the rule of the facility, there has never been an attempt to reach us by dogcraft. I wondered what the passengers upon those dogcrafts from alleged centuries ago looked like. Feral...free. The ghostly moonlight and sky full of stars, the fear of approaching the unknown and terror as the waves overpowered their flimsy vessel. The excruciating cold of that black expanse. Perhaps the wind blew so hard and fast the rain felt like shards of glass dashing against their skin. I looked at the ceiling from my top bunk. A siren blared, everybody around me waking and struggling into their uniforms for the day in semi darkness. I'd have to move soon, I had a few more minutes until anybody would notice me missing. I wasn't tired, I was always tired so it sort of becomes ordinary. Something else keeps me in be bed, a heavy apathy and indifference. And in that apathy I daydream. It's always the same, the same fantasy. I could be anywhere, it could be anytime, but I'm on the verge of death. Looking it in the face. A rifle inches from my head, laughing, excited for the unknown that will follow. The eternal sleep. Sometimes it's an explosion. Something immediate and painless. Never falling from a tall building, or being consumed by fire. They never feature in my fantasies. The bombed out ruins of a city, smouldering rubble, death at every turn. I become one with it and separate from here and now. I don't know why, it keeps coming back to me, usually at night. Nothing especially appeals to me here and now. But there, wandering the collapsed civilisation, for a while at least, until my violent end, Im free for a little while. Nobody wants to hear it, but sometimes the dogscape seems preferable. Despite the sheer horror of it all, the hideousness of it, its residents are at least free. We're not allowed to say that, to express any kind of sympathy for the scape, but I'm sure I'm not alone in how I feel. |