The Escapist’s Dictionary /Broadcast Radiation
The Escapist’s Dictionary
FEAR: November; complaining; white mornings; hot frothing cream, flickering gas fires; porridge (with honey); begging to be kept close; tree branches; obsessive cleaning; dinner time; begging to be kept close some other way; easy-peel oranges.
HOPE: a hidden gem, like the little brain inside of a nutmeg.
LOVE: trans-atlanticism.
LOSS: wet grass; moonlight; corn flour; white dirt; snail shells; lavender bushes; gasping; murderous intent; charm bracelets; moonlight again.
LUST: the sunlight behind the alleyway.
Broadcast Radiation
The monotonous sounds of the wind hushing in through the car window overpower the foreign radio announcer and the much-too-excited attitude he’s adopted for presenting the late-night news. You don’t mind. He’s hard to listen to without wincing; this place is still foreign to you. Everybody speaks with words that hurt to understand. Everybody speaks with the same misplaced excitement of a radio announcer going over the tragic woodland fires and discount pre-cooked salmon tins the EUROSPIN is now selling. You turn off your floodlights to let another car pass by and turn them back on to see that you’re swerving a little. You’re in the middle of the road, then you’re in the wrong lane, then you’re heading straight into a vaulting black cloud, which on closer inspection turns out to just be the underside of a bridge. This is exhaustion. No wonder they adorn the words ‘TIREDNESS KILLS’ along the motorway. For the sake of the rental car’s integrity you wish you had a stash of cocaine (or at least diet pills) in your car to keep you awake. The air is hot on the back of your neck. The road is black. There are ghosts taunting you in the rear-view mirror. This is delirium. This is almost a habitual occurrence—threatening to fall asleep at the wheel, blinking for longer and longer intervals each time, trying to see how long it takes for the comically-placed redwood tree at a fork in the road to kill you. You’re not even sure if those grow here; you remind yourself to look up the largest types of trees in the Mediterranean later. But for now it’s just the wind in the window, the radio you can’t hear, and the awaiting sleep that you’re driving towards. You turn off your floodlights to let another car pass by and turn them back on just in time to see that you're heading straight for a boar in the middle of the road, you don’t understand in-time that your hands are what’s connected to the steering wheel so you just turn them off again to spare the both of you from seeing what is about to happen. It still happens. No shit. You can’t see it, but you feel the dent in the car beginning to rip you apart. You feel a rough shadow briskly compacting through your abdomen. Then you feel nothing. Before time comes to a complete and inaudible halt, you hear the bleating, and shuffling, and stepping of many little piglets as they wander around and watch as their father’s breathing gently slows down. They scatter through the trees as the engine begins to groan. The last thing you feel before you close your beady eyes forever is a little wet nose nudging desperately against your palm. Curious little thing. Terrible, isn't it? It’s my fault part of your family is dead, yet to you, we are both victims to a loud, hot, metal monster. Only after you realise that fact does it come to a complete and inaudible halt. The nudging goes on for a while after that. Becoming more and more desperate as the moon lifts higher and higher
