Jezz’s Daily Story

He approached the city from the west, through a blackened field of charred corn stumps, holding a square paper bag. The peaks of the three church spires guided him, even from this distance, like fingers thrust into the smokey sky. There was no light coming from the city, not even the orange backlight of low flames which had smouldered under the buildings for so many days.
    He passed an upturned tractor; it was as black as the corn and as slain as the driver, whose half-crushed bones were pinned under the cab. Where the field bordered the road he slipped under a wire fence and walked alongside the old spines of blackberry bushes. Before the fields had given way to flattened homes the silent traffic began – long rows of halted cars, their curved hoods and flat roofs thick with fine grey ash.
    Where the old Punt Bridge had joined the motorway to the city he climbed a wall to follow the river, carefully balancing along the top of the concrete embankment. The tide was low and the sulphur-stench of exposed silt lingered with the smoke in the air like gunfire, like fresh explosions.
    His little wooden boat waited for him, tied to a metal ladder which rose up from the mud on the outer bank. He descended and balanced with one foot on the boat’s rim and another on the ladder, to untie the rope – he held a corner of the paper bag firmly between his teeth. He had to step down to push the boat out to the brown water. He sank up to his knees and struggled to haul himself back in. When he rowed he left an ugly clump of bearded mussels on the outer bank and was welcomed on the other side by a prone silver fish, infrequently spasming in its last gasps for water.
    A boy watched him from a pier, as he navigated the rocky bank between the boat and the next ladder; the child sat with his twig-thin legs dangling like lures over the mud. When he passed underneath he thought he heard a song, not loud but spoken slowly and deliberately. He didn’t stop. He went on over the loose and crusty rocks until he reached the ladder, which he climbed with the paper bag again clenched in his teeth.
    He followed the road again, between empty houses with cracked windows and exposed upper bedrooms. As he progressed along the cobbled roads and came closer to the first of the high church spires, there were bodies on the road; mostly face down and blackened by fire, but some in positions of uncanny animation. A woman scalped of her hair had fallen backwards, with her calves underneath her. A man slumped against a picket fence with no black marks or wounds, a perfect wax-work soldier but for the red spot of a bullethole in the corner of his forehead. 
    The bodies became denser in the commercial district; he had to step carefully and slowly between their fallen limbs. Some barred up shopfronts were intact but many gaped open like gutted beasts, the litter of their stocks a pool around their smashed frontages. Outside restaurants the chairs were upturned and the pubs’ signs had collapsed under the rubble of their detonated dorways.
    The church that he walked through was without a roof – it lay in shattered tiles on the floor of the hall, between pews which seated no bodies, living or otherwise. The hollow place didn’t echo with his footsteps, the noise just dissolved into the low grey clouds overhead. At the alter he passed the unscorched bible without stopping and did not look up at the painted sculpture of Jesus Christ nailed to its crucifix.
    On the other side of the city, in one more suburb of broken town-houses, he entered a decapitated home through its swinging doorway and crept quietly into the basement. He saw his mother propped in the corner, dead, and the fly which buzzed about her belly. His wife was lying on a bench still, saying nothing but staring at him with wide eyes. She breathed heavily and sharply. Her right arm was bandaged from the collarbone to the palm, with thin red fingers which dangled from the wrapped fabric like severed tendons. Her eyes followed him still as he opened the paper bag, lifted her good hand and gave her the heart-shaped chain of daisies.