The twenty-seventh story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, is ‘Only Me’ – another tale of escaping from solitude! Waking to discover normality, the very stuff of everyday life had vanished would be unnerving enough but with the grey fog hiding every vestige of outside life, the author is plunged into an Orwellian nightmare world – or into a post-apocalyptic world such as that of Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague or better, perhaps, Vaughan’s Under the Dome.
I had gone to bed late. The weather over the weekend had been poor, damp and misty, I had not been out much, I had avoided the jobs that needed my attention, had not even dusted or swept the floors, and I stayed up late reading; overall I was dissatisfied with my weekend that had achieved so very little yet left me feeling tired. Added to that general malaise was the fact that I had heard from no one—no one had telephoned or texted, the only emails had been sales pitches and spam and all had been dispatched into the waste bin unread. It seemed that my Covid isolation had become complete! It reminded me of being officer of the watch at sea when an engine failure left us adrift in dense fog mournfully sounding our fog horn as prescribed to announce our presence to shipping while our radar assured us that we were completely alone in the vast ocean! So when, eventually, I turned off the little reading lamp by my bed, it was with some satisfaction that the weekend was fading behind me, the new week had started, I was probably already in the future.
When I woke up there seemed an eerie silence…
‘Only Me’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.
