Ellis Fox is a UK-based writer and musician. His fiction often explores the themes of relationships, suicide, mental health, and politics. His written work has been adapted for sung vocals and narration by UK and US composers. His nonfiction includes political articles and book chapters on radical topics.
This Road Was Made by Men
By Ellis Fox
Sunrise over the rubble. Dirt. Filth. A new day.
People had scrambled around all night in the dark. Bad dreams and worse awakenings. Hunger made the night long. Coats stuffed with paper scraps. Raggedy blankets. The screams of your stomach. The moans of your brothers. No one wants to admit that the smell of burnt flesh makes the hunger worse.
A father wakes up and decides that today he must find something to eat. My children cannot keep eating straw.
He silently crawls out of the unroofed frame of what was once a house. Now just four columns; the corners of a broken square. He walks the charred and broken road. Faint outlines of what were road markings. Cars used to drive along these streets, but that was a lifetime ago. The air is not yet warm; the sun has not yet emerged fully. The father hopes that he can be back before his family wakes up, so that the first thing they do that morning is eat. But he will stay out for as long as it takes. My children will not keep eating straw.
He emerges through the crumbled streets and into the town square. All around him, ruined shops. Perhaps there will be something salvageable. Buildings once blocked out the sky, but now, just cold and sooty air. The father looks at those sides of the sky not yet lit by the sun. On his left: wildfires. Wildfires of trees not native to this land.
The first shop is empty. Nothing but dust. He goes into the back office. The desk has nothing on it but a paperweight, a large ball of glass. I could kill my children with this, if it comes to it, he thinks. The desk drawer is locked. Unopened, then. He looks around for a key but finds nothing. Something to jimmy the drawer, perhaps? He sees a short metal ruler. It snaps as he tries to open the drawer and he is left with a sharpened edge. He thinks for a second about using it to end his life, but that is forbidden. And besides, my children need me. And anyway, this drawer looks promising. The first promising thing he has seen in weeks. He tries to flip the desk but he’s too weak. I need a crowbar of some sort. I will come back.
The second shop somehow has even less in it than the first. All of the shelves are bare. As he walks across the shop floor he slips on concrete dust and falls forwards onto the ground. He puts out his hands to break his fall and impales his palm on a shard of broken glass. It almost pokes through the other side of his hand. Delicately, slowly, he pulls the glass out. It cannot break into pieces. It cannot. His palm bleeds slowly, as if even his blood is lacking energy. If the wound gets infected, I will probably die.
I used to have dreams. I had wants. My friends and I used to tell the most outrageous jokes. I’d cringe with laughter. We used to listen to music, too. God, to listen to music.
The two shops in the square are the only intact buildings. He thought there may have been more, but there are none. Where to find a crowbar? The next building’s front and back walls had been blown off, and half of the roof was caved in. Dangerous. He ignores the risk and walks amongst the rubble. He looks for stones, fragments of wall, bricks. Something that might be big enough to break the wood of that desk drawer.
Across the now empty window frame of the right wall lays a dead child. She is slumped over; her legs hanging out of the building, her body laying inside. She has no head. Her spine hangs out. The man vomits but has nothing in his stomach so acid burns the insides of his throat and mouth. He doesn’t stop gagging for quite some time.
When he recovers he closes his eyes and prays with all his might that the child makes a safe passage to the afterlife. This is a child of God, he thinks. A beautiful child of God. He sits down on the broken, uneven ground and weeps dry tears from dry eyes.
#
Atop a hill a few miles away, people sit on picnic blankets and watch as the bombs drop. They pass around cigarettes and leave beer bottle tops on the long grass. A building falls down on the horizon and a cloud of smoke mushrooms out of the rubble. Before the sound wave can even reach them, they cheer and raise a toast.
How can hell be empty?