The ballerina

The blade glints in the light that breaks through the shutters.

Dust motes lazily dance in the illumination, like galaxies spiralling away from The Big Bang, sending her mind to thoughts of fractal patterns, never-ending repetitions of mathematical formulae that are mesmerising in their complexity and beauty.

She can see everything now, the enhanced vision they gave her at sixteen just one of the many upgrades that apparently make her better, faster, stronger. She’s supposed to be more than human but, somehow, feels lesser, as if this isn’t meant to be.

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Lloyd x 2

Driving from Cardiff to Swansea, Lloyd found a passenger in his car.

            ‘Who are you?’ he said, slowing.

            ‘Your inner self,’ came the reply.

            The guy certainly looked like him: older, more haggard, greyer. It could be him.

            ‘You’re on the wrong road, Jim,’ the passenger said, ‘every day commuting a ton of miles to that vehicle licensing hole.’

            ‘It’s a job.’

            ‘So’s being a galley slave. How about jumping ship?’

            Port Talbot steelworks skittered by, its Meccano limbs tangled against the grey sky as if in agony. The other Jim had vanished, gone in a spurt of yellow steelworks gas.

            Work went badly. Workmates faces resembled those of ghouls. The phone calls, a hundred ways of asking the same thing about car tax, lapped in his brain with a disturbing echo. He felt outside everything.

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Closed

           

They closed the bridge on the Welsh side. Drivers already on the bridge going westwards beat furiously on the dashboards of their halted vehicles in the hot midday sun, then tuned-in to Radio Wales to discover that ‘the virus’ was the reason. ‘It’s coming from the east,’ a politician said, too diplomatic to blame ‘England’. ‘We’re not letting it into Wales.’ The three lanes east were now empty; all traffic from Wales had ceased.

            At the far end of the bridge traffic police made vehicles reverse into England, the outside lane first. After a long boiling hour, the middle lane began to go backwards and then stopped. Each driver tuned into English radio stations to hear a politician with a plummy voice say that due to the ‘prevalence’ of the virus in Wales, the Prime Minister had closed the bridge in ‘both directions’.

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