The Revelation at the Rampart
This is not a post-apocalyptic tale, a tale of what happens after the end of the world. The theorist in Bronson understood this, about the story he was in, understood that the end of the world was really a reactionary fantasy, the dream of thin-blooded tyrants, spun into popular narrative by writers and artists and movie makers. The landscape around him–the broken roads and disfigured buildings and polluted rivers–was not some dystopian fantasy of the slate-wiped-clean, but something far more dangerous: things as they are.
The second instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.
Three dogs
Later, the boy seals the sorry gap between door and floor with a towel, and covers the windows of his five-star Japanese hotel room with the tinfoil he had packed amongst unsorted socks and childish white vests.
At home, his mother will push pastry with her fingertips, pricking it occasionally for the sake of tradition. She will drive all over town searching for white eggs (they take the Easter dye better than the brown ones). She will call him daily and slowly her eyes will turn into shiny red spheres.
By Mira Mattar.