Burntcoat by Sarah Hall

Author:Sarah Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Now. We are no longer human. Now. We fight unambiguously, to save, to survive.

Ambulances parked in a tight row across the entrance of the hospital, dark-screened, ready to be deployed, or unmanned and shouldered close like bulls, like soldiers. Military vehicles on the streets, a single pedestrian passing an armed unit, not looking up, no longer surprised by the deadly presence of guns.

We closed our eyes but our minds still made images. There were lurid quarantine dreams. Yours were immigrant’s anxiety, the guilt of separation written up in the long reel of night. Your family, one by one, were executed. The civil war, so long feared by everyone, was declared by your subconscious, and you were drafted. Your mother was always sick, bleeding internally, her skin tallow as a candle, or your father was missing: he’d been taken back across the border, shot in the Crazy Forest. I heard you mumbling in your sleep, your fists clenched over your chest, the blood seeping back in your arms. In the morning your fingers would be numb – it would take half an hour for sensation to return. Sometimes you ticked like a clock in your sleep, tiny jerks, your breath apnoeic. I pressed your shoulder, tried to turn you without waking. You spoke in the half-state, moving up through languages as you woke.

Ne. Sağol, sorry. There was a bus collecting us …

The close heat of our bodies was a hothouse for nightmares.

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