1.

We never speak about it. The reason for the dust and the rubble and the emptiness. Out there. Or why things are not as they were but are now only the shadows of things.

Always this dust. It gets in your nostrils. Behind your eyes. On some days, warmer days, it rolls onto the estate in great billowing clouds and then from our high terrace only the rooftops are visible below. Broken rooftops with rafters bare and splayed like the ribs of the dead man down there in the street.

The crows in passing always drop to inspect. Hop between the pink and white branches of his pillaged limbs. And always they fly away again.

If I lean from the roof terrace wall and use Griffin’s binocs I can, dust allowing, see the carcass quite clearly.

The packs left no meat for the carrion.