Overcast Sky
The otherworld-gate loomed high, bright-hider cloaked in his heavy shroud, keeping the warmth-lugger distant. With a slow creak, he let fall the key-mirrors, their glint weak in the dim light, unlocking the sky-splashers. They burst forth, drumming on the earth, wiper-targets chasing their frantic paths across glare-dribblers’ fields.
Below, crackle-makers hummed with the storm's murmur, timpani-coders tapping their secret rhythms against window-sprinklers. The sun-muffler thickened the air, leaf-gleaners scurried through the undergrowth, stealing whispers from each falling drop.
Comfort-glowers dimmed, and the day-greyers cast their pallor over image-parchers who waited beneath the clouds, gathering nothing but stillness. Musty-garners pulled damp scents from the earth, while kerb-dashers raced down lonely streets, dodging canopy-rakers and seeking shelter beneath tile-shiners.
Time stretched in this hush until, with a sudden flare, the glint-plougher emerged, cutting through the thick veil. The stainglass-burner followed, chasing the grey-breaker from the sky. The warmth-lugger, finally unburdened, wrapped the earth in its long-lost heat.
The Fish Gasp
Coffee cups abandoned kerbside, white lips open for last breath out of water, collecting the dribblesome spit from greyscreen skies. The morning air is wet with fatigue, as if the city itself has exhaled too deeply, weary and sagging under its own weight. Hooded prams face forward, little oxygen tents coddling dummysuckers inside, while their mothers trudge along, eyes half-lidded, drifting in and out of some distant thought. The pavements stretch beneath them like an endless reel of concrete, slick with the rain that never quite falls, but hovers in the air like an unspoken threat.
Flat-capped evangelists stand like statues at corners, their eyes empty yet burning with something too faint to be conviction. They dampen the many voices around them into a dull hum, their presence reducing conversations to murmurs, like shirt-and-tie tombstones with hands in their pockets. They stand silent, waiting for someone to notice, but no one ever does. The city is too distracted by its own slow suffocation.
Vaped mist clouds the air where people gather, thick as fog, bright pumpkins stacked beside stalls as unworn dresses hang limp from rails. The dresses flutter half-heartedly in the wind, waiting for bodies that will never come. Halloween looms on the horizon, but even that, once a source of excitement, now feels distant—just another date circled on the calendar, another excuse to mark time. The pumpkins will rot before they're ever carved, the dresses will go unsold, and the candles meant to flicker behind hand-carved grins will never be lit.
Near the cemetery, mobility scooters hum like insects, their riders cloaked in the constant veil of tabsmoke, each exhale a small surrender to time. Their faces are masked, not by choice but by necessity, the pandemic still an invisible wall between them and the air they long to breathe. Inhaler breath rattles with every movement. It’s here, where the living and the dead coexist, that the city seems to shiver most violently. A late cock crow echoes in the distance, a sound that feels more like a warning than a beginning.
Red notices plaster the garden walls, an angry shout from those who have tried and failed to make the land their own. The weeds, defiant, stretch toward the sky with begging leaves, waiting for some sky gift that will never come. Their roots are tangled in memories, holding on tight to moments long since passed, to names once etched in gravestones now weathered smooth by the elements. Even the walls seem tired, crumbling at the edges, yet still standing, stubborn and silent.
In the midst of it all, the city remains oceaned under an overcast sky, like a great body submerged, moving only because it has to. Its streets are veins, carrying its inhabitants in a rhythm too slow to be called life, but too fast to be death. The fish gasp on the kerbside, their mouths open wide, waiting for a rain that will never come, for a tide that will never wash them home.
And in the air, cold will signs itself, whispering through the rustle of dying leaves, scribbling invisible signatures on every gust of wind. The city is caught in autumnal stasis, a liminal space where nothing can grow, and nothing can truly die. Only the small reminders of what was once alive remain: the empty coffee cups, the dampened voices, the forgotten candles waiting to be lit. Memento mori—momentum in mori—solicits every step forward, asking not whether you will fall, but when.
A shiver runs through the streets, and for a moment, it feels as if the whole city has gasped with the fish. Then the mist closes in again, and everything moves as it always does, slow and submerged, as if waiting for the final breath.
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