My father talks about camels because they’re not the approaching fires. He tells me about dogs he owned as a boy, because they’re not the abandoned pets we’ve seen begging at the gate. We listen to Bruce Springsteen to drown out the sirens of the emergency services who are pretending they can do anything about this. We drink the good whiskey because we can’t take it with us should the winds change. And we talk. What I don’t say is that I am happy here, and wish the fires had come sooner, to give us this time to talk together.

Background

This is one of the pieces from my most recent collection, Memetic Infection Hazards. The book contains 25 stories, which I arranged in reverse size order from longest to shortest. This one is a drabble, a piece that’s exactly 100 words long.

For a long time I romanticised post-apocalyptic stories. For a start, nobody had office jobs after the end of the world. I wanted the peace and calm that these empty worlds portrayed between the dangers. In the end, I discovered that I just needed to move to the countryside.

Recommendations

The new Indelicates single Cold War Bop was recently released. It’s the first single from the forthcoming album Avenue QAnon. The video is fantastic.

I see a lot of people rejecting AI art wholesale, but I think this is a great use of it. I know it took Simon Indelicate a lot of work to make and it’s something that could not realistically be made in another way. There’s also a rough charm to the AI aesthetic that may disappear as the models get better. I like that this video has a certain look that will probably date it to 2023/4.