Friday Flash Fiction 12
Filed under Friday Flash Fiction • 21-09-2007 •
No tags for this post.OMEGA POINT
By Gareth L Powell
We moved into this apartment three years ago, when we first came to the city. From the balcony, we can look out over the rooftops and the park, all the way to where the Post Office Tower pokes up between the brownstone downtown buildings – a comforting reminder of home, of a London now forever lost.
‘What do you miss most?’ Marla says. We’re leaning on the balcony rail, drinking coffee. Out in the hall, I can hear the kids chasing around, yelling and laughing.
‘I miss driving,’ I say.
Marla nods in sympathy. Although we can see plenty of cars in the street below, she knows as well as I do that there’s nowhere to go, that this city sits on an island we can walk the length of in half an hour.
I say, ‘What about you, what do you miss?’
She puffs her cheeks out, still looking down at the unused cars.
‘I miss crowds,’ she says.
There are three or four other families in the city. But like us, they keep themselves to themselves. And who can blame them? Like us, they’ve been resurrected almost a trillion years into the future – to a time so impossibly remote that, like us, their loved ones are the only familiar things they have to left cling to.
Similar in vein to Sunsets & Hamburgers, I thought. As usual you manage to convey the atmosphere very well.
A dry run perhaps for a sequel to Sunsets & Hamburgers?
Enjoyable as always. As for Ack-Ack Macaque – really well crafted. Nice one.
Yes, something like that.
I really like the concept, but it arrives in a bit of a limp twist right at the end and isn’t really fleshed out. It’s presented too flippantly for what it is.
Or perhaps it would work better, for me, if it weren’t for the questions that immediately occur, such as how is London so well preserved? The narrator’s “trillion years” is clearly a figure meant to supplant “I don’t know”, but if London has been abandoned so long that human bodies have entirely vanished and the city is an island, everything else would be crumbling and collapsing as well. Cities are built on a very fragile set of systems that require constant maintenance, after all. And: where did that coffee come from?
There’s the possibility that this is a snapshot of something bigger, that it makes sense in a greater context (I did for a moment think of Dark City’s great floating island), but as a standalone flash piece I struggle with it.
I do like the juxtaposition of the mundane with this unworldly yet familiar environment, and the sentimental and banal responses of the speaking characters to it. People adapt.
My IZ 212 has yet to arrive, but I’m looking forward to Ack-Ack-Macaque, which is a fabulous title.