[Archivists foreword: This incomplete diary made its way into my collection recently. In writing the historiography of this transitory period between the last dystopian and the next I can get caught up in grand societal theories. I was alone tucked up here among mildewing books I would get drunk on my own cleverness. This diary -being so raw and personal- reminds me that all these events are made up of countless but real individual people.]

The kid couldn’t sleep again, I heard him tossing and murmuring under the tarp all through the night as we rode to the next little settlement. We drove into the city, skyscrapers stretch cancerously into the sky here. I had to swerve so I didn’t hit a tumor laid out on the road, they’re all over the city here splayed nerves and fingers and lungs wrap around street corners and traffic lights, its mostly leathery and dead but sometimes I think I see them faintly vibrating. I woke him up when I swerved and he screamed, I tried to comfort him but he wouldn’t let me touch him. We had a fight yesterday, he said he wished he had been before, he doesn’t get it. He knows how dangerous and painful today’s world is but he just doesn’t get it. It’s my fault all I’ve told him is about apple pie and tv but kids his age shouldn’t have to  know about grinning people waiting in line to euthanise themselves, about the “end to overpopulation; its fair!” diseases killing one in ten… decimation. He does though now and that’s also my fault. I can’t do it right. He lifted his shirt, he’s normally so careful to hide it, and pointed to it and said fine then he wished he had never been born at all and that actually next time I wasn’t looking he would find the biggest rock he could and smash it into his head, that at least that way he wouldn’t be stuck with me. Kids his age shouldn’t be thinking about any of this, I don’t know how to do this without you.

Driving past a makeshift playground we made it to the little settlement, he’s holding my hand again now. It’s acrid here, and loud and I still don’t like people but there’s food and rest. There’s a little bookshop here, I don’t know who they think is coming to buy books, I think they probably just need some way to pass time. I guess we all do. I have of course the utmost respect for librarians so we went in. I think it was the smell that hit hardest. I finally found an atlas, I never realised at the time how dependant on gps I had become. He found a comic book must be ancient, like older than you or me. The was pacing up and down like a sheet metal lion at a shooting gallery, but frailer, fatigued. She looked as if had her skin had taken even just a moment to breathe it might have slide right off. She asked me where we were going and I told her we were trying to find someone. She asked me something else too about a name but it just sort of rushed past. She lent down and got two dirty glasses and poured me something sickly sweet and purple. She asked me what was my name again. I told her. She said she had a story about a monk called Rysn ‘cept it was his first name not last name she said. He limped over to listen. 

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

It was something like this: There’s this monk and he’s lived his whole life in a lighthouse all by himself and one day he finds a door he has never seen before. He opens it and light enters for the first time and inside he finds an ants nest with a pulsating breathing swarm of ants crawling all over it. He falls back and runs up to the top of the lighthouse except he leaves the door open just a tiny crack. Finally as the sun starts to set and it’s almost time to turn the lighthouse lamp on he peaks back down stairs and sees just the very end of this impossibly long and thick line of ants leaving the lighthouse. He slowly goes down and finds them marching into the see a scattered mass of ants on either side of the line drowned or drowning. He remembers the lamp and rushes up to the top of the lighthouse like he has every night and turns it on except this time, for the first time he sees the billowing sails of a ship in the distance. He smashes the lamp. You would find this stuff fascinating.

Peering from behind my leg the kid asked her what the ants had eaten if he had never opened the door to feed them before. She told him she had never really thought about it and that it was a good question. I asked her to show me where we were on the atlas and we were closer than I had ever realised. She didn’t let me buy it I guess it was more of a collection than anything but she let him keep the comic.

We slept in the car again last night, he was up late reading the comic but I think he slept better. I dreamt I was the monk. Surrounded by my robe I went down the lighthouse stairs and gently opened the door and saw the ants nest. It had spires and arches reaching up to the ceiling and magnificent domes and courtyards but there were no ants it was completely and totally silent. What then is the value of the ants nest? After all the ants have gone and drowned themselves? It is still beautiful though…

He wanted to play in the playground. There were two twins climbing there and I sat in silence next to a man who must have been their father. They all played together, laughing and grinning, for what must have been at least half an hour. But then he fell backwards trying to climb something rusted and metallic and it cut right through into his back. He didn’t cry or stop or anything he just got up grinning as always but then he saw the two kids staring at him and just ran away. We left the settlement.

He didn’t want to talk about it, I don’t know how to talk to him about it I think you might. Driving out there was another tumor on the road this one had the most life in it I’ve seen in a very long time. He looked at me more fatigued than anyone his age should and told me we should kill it. I asked him why and he said it would want to die. I told him it might experience the world completely differently to us and we didn’t know, maybe to it this was a happy tumor life. He told me that he knew and that it just wanted to die. I didn’t know what to say. We didn’t kill it I don’t know how we could have anyway. I’m already forgetting what the atlas looked like but we’re so close now it shouldn’t matter.

We’re so close now.

[Archivists afterword: more than just personally valuable this diary is very valuable to history. As such despite language errors it seems well worth the exacted price of a kiss -head Archivist Agwar Rysn]