#jv.

THE YOUNG GODS SCREAM LOUDER THAN USUAL;  they split the idyllic hills of Llandudno like a well-swung mallet would a skull.  Brian hasn’t looked over at her since they made the turn onto Victoria Road.  He’s been glaring at the greenery and cursing the sunlight under his breath.  Strangely gaunt,  his usually tanned face is pale enough to make him appear just like the corpses he’d dug out of shallow graves on the mountain side.

He can’t feel Jane’s lips on his bruised knuckles,  and he can’t hear the sea wind whipping over the bonnet of the Mercedes.  They’ve stopped on Hargrave Avenue,  a slim,  paved road hidden between rocks and bushes.  No one walks further than the viewing point on the corner,  just how his parents always seemed to like it.  On their far left peeks a wall painted a dirty ivory through the foliage.  Barbed wire and electric fencing coils around thin air on top of it,  just looking for something to strangle  -  and a weather vane in the near-distance stabs the sky.  The electronic gate will slide to the right when they pull up.  He has wanted to sling the flowers balanced on Jane’s knees out the window more than once.

THEIR NEW NEIGHBOURS WILL COMPLAIN;  SAWDUST IN THE AIR  and the rattle of an electric saw.  The clock they’ve left for the time-being on the bar in the kitchen would read 01:34.  Brian doesn’t care.  He has lined three of his empty beer bottles alongside the patio doors,  a forth hangs between his fingers,  empty too.  He’s crouched,  hovering like carrion over a corpse,  with a shadow stretched strangely thanks to the patio light.  He’s surrounded by a mess of plywood;  one flat plane and five small trunks,  all dark oak.  He knows she’s watching,  the bones in his neck clack at he swivels his attention.

IT’S NOT THE FIRST TIME HE’S PEELED OPEN THIS BOX.  It’s not even the second.  Brian’s been ambling long enough to have picked through its contents four times since the children upstairs fell quiet.  The city has less than ten percent of its water left for nearly four million residents,  within three months everyone will queue for daily rations  —  it isn’t absurd for a growing family to feel the need to leave.  They’ll join countless others on this gradual exodus.