I Dreamt Of A-Bombs

I’m sitting in a restaurant, atop a steep hill, eating and looking down on the town when the quality of the light changes and the diners gasp. I look up to see a mushroom cloud rising up over the hills, obscuring the sunset, spreading above the horizon. I/we feel horror and a quiet confused terror, not knowing if this, a backwater town, is likely to be targeted. As we all watch, still, gaping, more mushrooms spread out, stalks shooting up behind the hill-line in perfect synchronicity, at too regular intervals, designed for our viewing pleasure, until the sky is a series of rising columns supporting the godly cloud, like a banyan, or Yggdrasil displaced to Jormungand’s circling place and we snakes at the world’s centre, biting our own tails in astonishment at the world’s end (having seen its beginning in Eden).

We pour out of the glass diner in a panic, some yelling, most spreading out to tell the news in the ruddy light. My dining companions and I run to an elegant red brick hotel at the bottom of the road. Going in, all is quiet and the bar staff are oblivious to our questions about the bombs; they know nothing. We sit down at a table. Whether we are tired, intending to enjoy the last peace of our lives, or simply about to order the last good meal we will ever have, I don’t know.

(A dream…I think I may be worried about Bird Flu…)