The house was still. The roads and skies were still. In the silence of the room her heart was beating steadily.
Everywhere she looked, out of the wide windows, the houses were covered in what looked like brown flowers; a wild ivy without its evergreen bones. Some were small flowers and some were bigger. Yet, they didn’t really behave like flowers. They seemed to ripple, instead, and flutter in strange waves. Only one other house that she could see still had clear windows and clear brickwork.
She had needed glasses for about a year, and the oddities of her life rather than some deep vanity, had stopped her from getting them. So, it was hard for her to make out precisely what the moving brown flowers might be.
Her heartbeat quickened. It began to seem far more eerie than interesting. Everything was too quiet, like waking up to a day of snow but without the soft blankets of it everywhere to carpet the earth. It was as quiet now outside of her house, as it was inside of it.
She spent the day alone, and indoors, as she always did. Anything beyond the front step was a no man’s land where terrible things might happen. She spent the day busy, too. Finding normality in her sweeping. She even put on a pair of rubber gloves and knelt to rub the brasso, in satisfying circles, on the kitchen step trim until it shone bright enough to reflect her face.
The postman didn’t come. Didn’t ring the bell three times and yell “post for you” and then her name, in his friendly way, through the letterbox.
When night sunk in, she made stew and dumplings, and read by the corner lamp until midnight announced itself politely with the mantel shelf clock.
Laying in bed, she worried. She excavated the place in her chest where her feelings seemed to reside, like someone running their tongue relentlessly over a bad tooth, and found that her continued routine all day had been a flimsy shield for an ever-building anxiety. The brown flowers unnerved her. They were new, and odd, and seemed somehow connected to the silence.
She awoke at 3 am, to a scream. A woman was running down the street screaming. Normally, a 3 am scream, in her street, might be accompanied by laughter. It would be a loud noise made by someone half tipsy, half thrilled, as they made their way home. Or, it would be the sound of foxes mating nearby, making a noise like murder that was really unfettered lust.
This was different. This scream had terror etched into it. She had never heard a noise like it but it froze her in place. It went on and on and on and on. The pitch increased until it hit a high note and trailed off, abruptly.
Fingers of panic ran themselves over her heart. Squeezed it cruelly. She felt sick. She couldn’t go out there, she couldn’t face the kind of man who’d caused a scream like that. She picked up the old phone and called the police but no one at the other end picked up. She let it ring and ring and ring until she was certain they weren’t going to answer.
She didn’t have a mobile phone. She wasn’t really mobile enough to need one, given the house was her constant tether, and she distrusted even the idea of smart phones. There was nothing clever about anything that made people become so apparently stupid.
She forced herself to get up, to put on the old dressing gown with the quilted blue diamonds on it, and the matching slippers, and she went to the window. Only one street lamp was on. The new type of bulb they used for it was harsh but ineffective. It cast only a modest circle of stark light and no one was in it.
She went to fetch the emergency torch and wound it up for half a minute.
“There is no one else to go and find that woman but me” she told herself.
So she stood at the threshold of her front door like a woman about to climb Everest, and prepared to take a step. It had been years since she had let herself step across the threshold. The street was quiet now, except no, there was a strange whispering. A half heard rustling. Not of leaves but of something else.
She took one more lungful of cool, night air, at the open door, and then stepped outside as fearfully as a tightrope walker, with only courage as a balance. She walked out into the road, swinging her torch in small beams. Ahead, fifty feet ahead, was a dark lump in the middle of the street. She moved slowly forwards until she reached the lump. It was not a woman. It was a man. He was laying on the cold tarmacadam, bunched up as though he’d tried to curl into a ball and failed. He was utterly unmoving. She shined the torch up the length of him until she reached his face. It was a strong face, handsome, and now it stared at nothing and looked horrified.
He had something on his cheek. It looked like one small brown flower. She bent forward and the brown flower opened its wings. Drab, ugly wings and then flew out of the torch light. Where it had been resting, the man had a fresh wound.
She checked his pulse gingerly. Nothing. She shook his shoulder just in case. Nothing. She had no idea what to do. The brown flower with wings came back. It landed in exactly the same place on his cheek. She swallowed hard, and closed her eyes for what could have only been one half second to try and shake the awfulness of this. When she opened them, again, the man was gone. He was underneath a mass of moving, brown flowers. Hundreds of them, many hundreds, covering him, crawling over him like a dark sea. She stepped back, recoiling and she felt, she was sure she felt, one larger brown flower running over her foot as she did so.
She wanted to scream as loudly as he had but, instead, she ran back home, slamming the door and leaning against it to cry.
She didn’t think she could sleep, that she would ever sleep again, but at some point she drifted off on the floor with her back still pressed against the door to keep the horrors out.
When she woke there was a moment of half sleep when she forgot where she was and what was happening. One blissful moment where she was looking forward to a day of reading, of cooking, and of listening out for the postman to call her name. Then she remembered. She sprung up and went straight to the window. Twitching the curtains open in one fluid movement.
The other house that had been free of brown flowers was now covered. The road itself was empty; of the flowers and of the man.
Not flowers, she corrected herself, creatures.
She made tea. She took up a kind of vigil at the window. Waiting for what, expecting what, she didn’t know. She had some feeling that if she watched them she was safe. They rippled on the houses, rippled beneath the eaves, rested against the walls.
Once, at about 4 o'clock, a whole house’s covering of creatures flew away. Some mad part of her thought of going out there, going down to that house and ringing the bell. Would anyone answer? Were they cowering in there or were they as vanished as the man?
After only a few minutes the colony from the house flew back. Resettled onto it as though it had never left. She wondered if they had gone to swarm over someone else. Some unknowing passerby.
She even ate at the window that night. Spaghetti hoops and toast, as though the day had been sane. She slept in a chair beside the window, fretfully and lightly, almost feverishly. When she woke up it was still dark.
The clock on the mantle struck ten. She started and sat bolt upright. In the top right corner of the window was a tiny chink of light. Pure daylight was trying to stream in but was being stopped by the mass of creatures covering the rest of the glass.
She shut the curtains. She retreated from the room. She went round the others and every window was the same. She remembered the advice she’d heard, in case of a nuclear event. Seal the windows with tape. Get away from them. Find a safe place to stay for 24-48 hours. She ran to fetch the tape and went window to window to window frantically. Her hands shook but she was methodical, not missing a gap.
She shut every door as she left each room, taking water and food out with her as she left the kitchen. Then it was just her in the hallway.
Her in the hallway, looking at the front door. She had taped around that, too.
She didn’t cry, again. She was suddenly determined to be brave. It felt like death on drab wings had come to find her and so she would face it as though she was Bodicea and this was a battle.
She waited for it. For whatever happened next.
After an hour the letterbox started to move. She jumped up and moved towards it, urgently, tape in hand. How could she have forgotten to tape that, too?
As she got to it one larger brown creature fell onto the doormat. It moved fast and she stamped on it ruthlessly with her slipper while holding the letterbox down to tape the whole thing shut. As she did she started to feel more of them trying to press against it but their wings were too soft and ineffectual to force it open now.
She remembered the keyhole and sealed that as well.
Time passed and in it she discovered that the only way to survive her terror was to measure in moments. She was so afraid, and her fear towered over her. There were no days anymore. Weeks and months and years were blessings that were only happening to other people. It was just her, alive, in each moment. A terrible moment could be endured because the task had been made small enough by its brevity. She could live in moments just as long as each one gave her enough cover to get to the next.
The letter box moved slightly.
The tape held.
The moving stopped.
She took a deep breath.
At some point night fell, again, and it started to rain.
Fierce rain, good rain. The kind that sings in the gutters even though this was a bad time for a joyful song. The kind that runs down the street and gurgles in the drains. The kind that dances on the outhouse roof like it’s trying to get in and waltz you merrily away.
It rained all night.
She listened to it and kept going from moment, to moment, to moment, of her own life. She was still so afraid that the fear felt almost alive. It was a desperate, scrabbling companion that filled her muscles and raced her heart. It held her in its grasp but she held right back to the small sliver of something that felt like hope. Every breath was hope. Every moment when nothing worse happened was a moment in which all possibilities still existed.
The rain kept falling and she remembered dancing in the rain as a child, especially one particular summer when they had waited for long, hot weeks for the sky to break into water. She remembered running straight out into it with her brothers, and then her father had brought her protesting mother outside, as well. He had serenaded her with “pennies from heaven” and her mother had laughed, and looked at him, and let him dance her around the garden while the children squawked.
In that look was every important thing she had ever learned about love.
The rain seemed to stop and she became aware that light shone under the living room door. It recalled her to the impossible present.
She opened that door and went to the window, where the light was dim, but it was there, behind the curtains. She opened them cautiously.
The world looked exactly as it had before. Before the brown flowers.
There was nothing covering the houses. There was no sign of anything crawling, or rippling. She stayed at the window again, all day.
Nothing moved until mid-afternoon when a few people came out of their houses. She wrote down the door colours of the houses that no one came out of. Cataloguing them by details she was able to see. Red door, old ficus. Green door, beautiful gate. She hoped the people in them were just staying inside, like her, because they were scared and they were waiting.
She waited for three days, only moving from the chair when she had to. The creatures didn’t come back. And then she got dressed, scrubbing days of worry off of herself first in a bath filled with bubbles.
She still felt anxious but danger had come so suddenly and she had held herself together. It made her fear of the more familiar dangers more bearable.
So, she wound a scarf around her throat and put a coat on.
She went door to door to door. Knocking for all those who hadn’t come out yet. But it seemed that they hadn’t come out yet because the creatures had got in. Looking through windows, squinting through the front door glass, she saw scenes of chaos. Objects apparently thrown, or barricades made; the signs of battles waged and lost. Of the people, there was no sign.
She met some of her remaining neighbours in the street and they spoke to her. She found it almost painful to be looked at after so long, with no one to meet her eyes. It made her real again in a way she didn’t know how to cope with. It was the kind of pain she wanted more of, though, because it felt like it could heal something in her, if only she could get enough of it.
She was sure that if anyone tried to actually touch her she would break into pieces with longing. She would cry, and cling to them tightly, and never let them go, no matter who it was, but then one woman squeezed her arm and said something soothing, something like “it’s good to finally meet you, even like this, and it does seem to be over now”. And she found herself simply smiling and reaching out for the woman’s hand.
When she went back home, she regretted not having a television, or any other way to see how the rest of the world was responding to this. It had to be news. Most of all, she wanted to listen to some thoughtful scientist with flyaway hair and a stern expression explaining it all, and hear some reassuringly clever reasons why it would never happen again.
She thought she might be able to walk to the next street over the following day and see what had happened there. Had the creatures come to them as well? Or was it just her own street they had visited?
The next day, before she had got her shoes on, the doorbell rang. She decided to open it.
The postman stood, without post, on her front step “I thought I’d come and check how you are” he said, hesitantly, but with his kind eyes seeking out hers
“I wasn’t sure you’d really answer, after all this time, though”
“I’m alright,” she said softly “Arthur”
Then she lent against the doorframe and looked at him.