Cloudcast. A short story.
Once upon a time, in a concrete dump called Chaville lived a boy with his family, with whom he had not much in common. The previous night he was in Leeds, having gone out with some old friends. He met a totally hot, totally unattainable second year girl called Becky. He returned to his car, scraped the frost off and drove home in the middle of the night.
For three hours, he was entranced by the various shades and nuances of light on the road. Amber, red, blue, and green reflected off the wet tarmac and made pixellated superimpositions onto his windscreen. With the motorway empty and the fog so thickly spread, it might as well have been just him in the world, lost in a high-speed shuttle.
He returned home exhausted and went to bed, yet he could not sleep. He hunched his knees under his chin and stared out his bedroom window at the remaining fog encapsulating the entire street, and thought it was one of the most amazing things he'd ever seen. Is this what a nuclear dust cloud is like, enveloping everything in its path? Will it arrive one day in our sleep? Will we ever control everything we want to?
You can't get hurt if you don't care. But he always cared.
Once upon a time, in a concrete dump called Chaville lived a boy with his family, with whom he had not much in common. The previous night he was in Leeds, having gone out with some old friends. He met a totally hot, totally unattainable second year girl called Becky. He returned to his car, scraped the frost off and drove home in the middle of the night.
For three hours, he was entranced by the various shades and nuances of light on the road. Amber, red, blue, and green reflected off the wet tarmac and made pixellated superimpositions onto his windscreen. With the motorway empty and the fog so thickly spread, it might as well have been just him in the world, lost in a high-speed shuttle.
He returned home exhausted and went to bed, yet he could not sleep. He hunched his knees under his chin and stared out his bedroom window at the remaining fog encapsulating the entire street, and thought it was one of the most amazing things he'd ever seen. Is this what a nuclear dust cloud is like, enveloping everything in its path? Will it arrive one day in our sleep? Will we ever control everything we want to?
You can't get hurt if you don't care. But he always cared.
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