Around the Merry Loop

   Along the railway line the buildings whipped passed all the same, save their stages of degradation. They pressed their ugly faces menacingly against the glass. Rising up from the embankment moodily, they each grew towards the sunlight like plants, towering; overbearing. One after another they pressed themselves against one another, constricted by the city that housed them.

   Elliot Gray watched him eagerly from across the PVC table, bolted down between them. He was a man of meager build, an odd looking expression crawling his countenance.  No older than his later twenties, yet his starving eye sockets made him appear considerably older. He sported a wispy beard, interjected by flecks of ginger when a chance chink of sunlight caught it through the glass. It was patchy and clawed and angry red in places as though infested with mites or fleas. Although he appeared evidently unkempt and most certainly unwashed, his overall demeanour gleamed with a sense of pride unbefitting of his clothes. The effect of the war raging overhead clearly hadn't touched him as it had Elliott.

   He didn't notice. Instead the man continued to peer up the passing embankment, the train tunnelling through laboriously as he drank in the devastation that appeared like a film reel. The scene itself looked as though the annihilation had been freshly wrought. Passing a small chaotic town square, dotted with people in varied states of terror. Livelihood's flattened to the ground, family businesses, dust on the stinking wind. Naked now but for the steel rods that once suspended them, twisting like spires in the smoke. The seemed to reach for the heavens in hope of saviour... or something.

   A bolt out from the blue, the papers never did predict it would be their miniature empires that would be dragged back to the earth. Fixed to the paving stones like roots, weeping angels among the rubble as the numb reality of homelessness washed over them in vicious unforgiving waves. Others were not so composed, charging like mad bulls through the desolation, filling the smoky streets with primal screams of terror as their hearts were ripped, root and stem. A sickening pang of sympathy was evoked from somewhere within Elliott as his eyes fell upon something that gripped his attention. In the midst of the chaos sat a girl. She was no older than four or five; wearing a pink nightdress marked grey by the falling ash; limply slumped at her side, was a charred and torn, little brown bear. She towed it hopelessly along the roughened paving stones, no adult left to accompany her. And then the window view returned to the flash of hedge rows and greenery as they plastered over the image of distraught humanity. 

   Between his hands he gently drummed upon the side of an empty cardboard coffee cup in an unpredictable rhythm, driven by the soft fuzz of distress that buzzed around the edges of him.

   "Are you okay?" the strange man opposite shattered the silence. "You look pale."

   "Yes, I'm... it's those that I feel sorry for." He glanced over his shoulder, nodding towards the window as though to capture a final furtive glance.

   "They say the war is due to be over soon." The man smiled, an unconvincing twist of the lips. 

   "Not sure it ever will do though... it seems as though it has been going on for that long I've forgotten who we're exactly meant to be fighting."

   "Maybe then, we can all get a good night's sleep, for sure I haven't been sleeping!"

   "It's difficult under the whistling bombardment, the lead they throw down upon us. But hey, where there are humans there is bound to be war... I mean we invented it!" The pigment of his skin appeared ghostly white under the gentle flickering of the gently melting sunlight, which in the encroaching blackness, grew the colour of weak tea. "But maybe it is all about to change..."