terror, even when overcast

You see, I was there. All you know, you saw on television, through the internet, blurred with commentary and idiotic rambling by people who knew nothing about what was happening. Filling others’ ignorance with their own base desires and cravings. I didn’t see any journalists, just the suffering. I can only think that the journalists stayed away, reporting by looking inwards from their hotels and the fly-over footage provided by the UAVs while they stayed safe in the knowledge that no-one could possibly contradict them.
I was going to work. It had already started and none of us standing on the platforms knew. I had seen it and not understood.
The sky is always open, even when patterned with the flowing underside of clouds piled over each other, sliced by the arcing paths of darkly silhouetted birds. It is the sky of a flat land, not hemmed in with hills or mountains, stretching and filling the mind of those willing to look upwards. The shapes above tear and fight leaving wounded pictures of emptiness. Only when the tram arrived did I look down, back at the earth.
I was jammed against the doors once they closed, as usual. Trying to avoid the press of strangers bodies, find enough space to be able to place my feet in balance against the jagged movement of the tram. I turned myself around to look through the window, through the condensation forming on the glass, at the speeding scenery; The blank spaces between people melt. The tram passed under the twin concrete flyovers of the M62. The gap between them a grey shaft of light punctuated by the upward flight of a startled pigeon and the illumination of an inane and brilliantly coloured graffiti. Beyond it the industrial estates, the tarmac retail park, the endless lines of garages selling cars hidden behind industrial scrubland.

It was as the tram descended into Manchester that I realised the colour had gone. Then the tram stopped, shaking to a sudden halt with the application of the emergency brake. The carriage mood split into annoyance and the usual expectation of shoddy service. Then the doors opened. I almost fell out. After checking that there was nothing coming that might injure me, and irritated at the way I had almost fallen from the tram, I jumped down already composing the letter to the company in my head.
It is not so simple a thing to describe. What happened next, I mean. A few on the tram had followed me down. The rest were stoic, watching me from the window with impassive faces. Looking down the road towards Piccadilly I caught sight of its head, rising and falling above the buildings. A shade of non-colour, almost the same as the sky but of a different light, a feeling of reality broken and ground under foot. A daikaiju imagined by Escher. Then it screamed, crying with a scent of destruction, dust billowing around it even as the scream began to try and infiltrate my own mind. It feels now like it was a reflexive, animal instinct that caused it to destroy the city. It was not a judgement, or a warning. It was not summoned by some ancient Mayan treasure brought to the museum, or physical experiment at the university. It wasn’t some super-dimensional rift caused by City’s win in the derby. Watching it I knew that it had always been there. We had just never seen it before.
I turned and ran.

The motion of the train feels strange to him, evoking the feeling of memories he cannot translate to more than a blur. Looking through the window at the rushing countryside, with its hedges and green hills, he feels that his mind should be like this view, the parallax motion of the past should be slow and solid while the present rushes by without an indication of what will yet be remembered. His perspective seems somehow reversed, with only the present offering a sense of reality while internally there is nothing. The past slips by without any chance to examine or hold on to it, like eating peas with a knife.

He reaches down to the floor, picking up the rough canvas bag he has been carrying and opens its buckles with narrow, pale fingers. Inside there is little. A bottle of water with the seal still intact and a sandwich wrapped in plastic. He draws the sandwich out, again. He cannot quite being himself to eat it. He examines it. There is something wrong with it, something not real that he feels is at the edge of his vision. He tilts his head away from it to see if a different view offers any light. It still appears to him as two slices of foamy, tasteless bread enclosing slowly hardening cheese and ham. A girl is sat watching him from the seats on the other side of the carriage. Her mother, who is travelling with her, has momentarily disappeared.

-Is this really a sandwich? He asks her, holding it up.

She looks at him with a mixture of suspicion and precociousness. -Sort of, she says and then she smiles and looks away.

The man continues to stare at it for a short time and then twists himself in his seat to look for a bin. There is one tucked behind his chair. He pushes the sandwich inside. He doesn't want to take the risk.

jay

Plastic bags and empty cans hover just below the water's surface, caught between sinking and floating in the dark, opaque water that reflects a sky the colour of dead televisions. It is always worse after a heavy rain washes the worst of the crap into the canals. Jay stands inside the yellow tape, oblivious to the activity of the officers around him and the small crowd, a mixture of the homeless and the going home, as he watches the body floating, upside down while caught in a slow invisible spin of current. Except that the man is dead he cannot tell anything now. He turns himself slowly, the ball and heel of opposite feet keeping a measured friction while he examines the abbreviated landscape around him, removing everyone else from the scene. He sees the movement before he sees the thing itself. His focus pins it to the wall. A black scrawl against the brick, a symbol that forms a gateway. Jay shivers. He ducks under the tape and walks to the foot of the bridge where it was trying to escape. His fingers reach out to touch it. There is the smell of rotting plum and the movement of flies. The image still does not move but it begins to fade, falling through purple and blues like an old man's tattoo. The smell of tobacco tells him that that the DCI is standing behind him.

“What you looking at?” The DCI asks.

“Just thought I saw something.” Jay replies. “But there's nothing here now.”

The DCI lets out a slow stream of smoke.

“The recovery boys are here, they're going to get the body out for us now. Better go pay our respects, eh?”

Jay nods and follows the DCI back through the cordon.

Ripped off William Gibson for the first line.