Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
When the bombs fell and the world ended, Wales survived. Not because we were ready—just because we’d been left off the maps. And besides… Wales is in the habit of surviving things. Welcome to Y Ffallout.
This episode of Alau is called Roadkill
an when felt the cold of the early
evening as she stepped out of her parents'
house and turned around to wave goodbye.
You'll be careful now, won't.
Her mother said from the doorstep,
of course, you know, we don't like
you driving home so late by yourself.
Mom, it's 5:00 PM It's hardly
the witching hour, is it?
Yes, yes.
But it's dark these days and bubble bark.
Isn't that sunset gorgeous tonight they
looked up at the west side of the valley.
It would still be light in the
next valley for another 30 minutes,
but in their valley it was dusk.
The Earth's rotation had been unaffected
by the end of the world, but as if God had
truly blessed the nation of whales once
more, the sunsets had become on account of
the nuclear devastation around the world.
Punishingly beautiful.
The Welsh word for punishingly,
beautiful, devastating is.
Anne, when's husband used
to call her that too, as he
brushed the hair behind her ear.
In the early years of their relationship
on that same Western Valley side where
they often lay together at this same
time of day, avoiding home, embracing the
sunsets, which would then fall out free.
But in her mind nonetheless, EY adds
on on account of breath that the first
flushes of love had ripped from her body.
She turned her head away and looked
from her parents' driveway to the
valley below and to the A four
70, which she would drive home
on to that same man this evening.
She got into her car and pulled
the seatbelt across herself.
She wanted to call briefly to let her
husband know that she'd be leaving
soon, but her mother was still standing
on the doorstep and would do so
until she had pulled down the street.
The radio mumbled in the
background and the petrol light
lit up orange but not red.
And so she turned on the engine and moved
the car just enough out of sight that
her mom would go inside, but not so far
that pulling over to call her husband
would feel like a deliberate stop.
The phone rang several times.
All right, love.
How's it going?
Just leaving your mom's.
Are you?
Hi.
Yeah.
Shouldn't be more than
an hour and a half now.
How is she doing today?
Her husband asked of her mother.
Not too bad.
She's still saying we
though like he's still here.
Well, that'll pass in time.
An when looked in the mirror and
caught her own eyes, it's not that
she didn't recognize herself, but
that she recognized her own mother.
She wasn't sure that she wanted
her mother to stop referring to
herself as a unit with her father.
She asked herself what it might feel
like to know her mother as a singular.
She never corrected her when she did this.
She had seen her mother's eyes before on
her own children when they were young.
Sometimes she would look down
at them while holding them
in the night to feed them.
And in the profound fog of the night, she
would see her mother staring back at her.
Sometimes she cried.
She foresaw the absence
of her mother's voice.
Reassurance, calm in the
eyes of her newborn child.
Wild.
Okay, babe.
Well, I'll see you when I get home.
Hey, I love you.
She said.
I'm so tired.
Just get home safe.
We'll spend some time
together when you get back.
Her husband replied, was togetherness what
she wanted as she drove into the evening.
She wound her way up the spine of Wales
as the South Wales valleys come to a
head, there's a change in the scenery
from post-industrial to post civilization,
pre civilization, just expanse and
the occasional pockmark of mankind, a
house through the trees, a road sign.
She had driven the same journey
so many times in her life.
She felt the road as if it were her own
backbone connecting the limbs of her life.
She had cried on this road, cried
because of some small dig that her mother
had made well-meaning, but ultimately
misplaced, cried because she was saying
goodbye to her father, wept because
of a crushing sense of the weightiness
and flightiness of her existence.
She had sung until her
lungs felt they could.
Burst.
She had screamed outta the window
of the car when her husband would
not let some small issue go.
She had laughed when she realized how
much she loved him, loved her life, loved
the music, and as a child, and when had
visited the beach at Barry or Poko, often
on the bus with the conservative club
or the liberal club, and she would stand
in the shoreline, amazed at the noise.
She would cup her hands over her ears
and open them slightly to hear the
sound of the sea and the noise of the
people on the beach change for ages.
She would close her eyes and do this
over and over to create a sort of
Wawa effect with the space around her.
And then sometimes an when would enter
the water and swim out 15 or 20 meters.
The beach was too crowded for her mother
and father to really notice or keep track
even if they stood on the water's edge.
As she swung further out, she would
listen for the sound change, trying
to keep her head above the water.
Soon she reached a point where the sound
from the beach disappeared entirely
and there was no noise, but she was
never far away from other people.
The salt on her face pulling lightly at
the skin as she floated the sky so blue
that at its highest point, it looked navy.
She was adrift then and the outline
of her family on the beach waving
from a distance but not worried.
Said, hello, we are here.
You are there.
This is okay.
You are okay.
She looked down at her mobile phone.
No signal, no demands at all for one hour.
And when lowered the car window, then
raised it again, and then lowered it,
and then raised it and lowered it.
And out here in the li look of early
evenings of whales beneath the poison
sky, she felt completely adrift to.
She was driving the bends with the ease
of a person who has not only driven this
road a hundred times before, but with the
ease of a person who knows that she is
here, that she's there, that she is okay,
and as she rounded a bend at the very top
of a hill that she had driven for years
onto a strait of several hundred yards.
She saw in the middle of the road in the
headlamps of her early evening car, a
sheep, one of many sheep who dot the sides
of the road up in that part of Wales.
And rather than beeping her horn to
get it out of the road or slowing
or bending around the animal, she
pressed her foot to the accelerator.
The engine growled and
the sheep stayed still.
The five seconds that it took for
Anne when to round the bend and to
speed towards the stray felt to her
like life was wah w her own self.
And when the bump came and then a fraction
of a second of silence before the sound
of the animal being crushed beneath
the chassis of the car, felt like it
ripped her throat right out of her neck.
She felt a twinge in her pelvic
floor, a slight tremble of excitement.
And once the brakes had been slammed on
and the car had come to a stop, Anne, when
sat in complete and absolute silence while
the lights on her dashboard all flickered.
How might a person who is knowingly
killed an animal feel, what should
the refractory period on that be like?
Annen didn't think about it.
She felt a giggle rise for a moment
and then she vomited its sound
out of her mouth and let her head
fall forward onto the steering
wheel and rest there for a moment.
An when's beautiful hair draped over the
wheel and positioned the way that she was.
Anyone arriving on the scene might have
suspected that it was an when who would
be in the casualty of the collision.
And yet no one was around to inquire.
And so her breath fell heavy and
the sound returned to her ears,
which grew suddenly flushed and hot.
She knew even without looking,
as the reverb of her shock disappeared.
She lifted her head and for the
first time heard that the car
had continued to rev its engine.
She lifted her foot from the pedal.
Looking into the mirror, she saw the
sky and the road and the bend behind her
and lying in the foreground, the sheep's
body positioned at an implausible angle.
The blood pounded in her head as she
looked at the obviously dead animal.
She took a breath in and composed
herself, wiping a small speck
of saliva from the edge of her
mouth, and then opened the door.
The sky was darker.
Now.
There was a strong metallic
smell in the air hotness from
the revving of the engine.
Her father's voice somewhere over
the horizon said to her, make
sure you check the car first.
Make it safe.
The number plate was hanging off and the
bumper still in place looked precarious.
Some of the sheep's wool had been
caught in the grill of the car.
Had the body rolled over the
car, the game would be up.
Her windscreen would be cracked.
Blood streaked on the roof
and body of her vehicle.
But the sheep's last moments were
probably far less exciting than a
spin through the air and a quick
catastrophic bump to the head.
Ann Wayne got on her knees
to look under the car.
It was obvious that the bottom
of the car had been damaged.
The sound of the sheep beneath
it still reverberated off the
surrounding hills, Hanen felt,
and as she inspected the chassis
of the car, her focus shifted to
the animal still lying on the road.
And it dawned on her that if she didn't
move the body, it would lay there until
it rotted into the concrete beneath it.
Or until the next car drove across
the top of the hill and round the bend
and would have to make a choice about
whether it too should run straight
over the sheep or swerve around it.
And what if when they inevitably
swerved around it, because who
really would ever willingly run down
an animal, they lost control and
plummeted down the mountainside?
Would it be manslaughter murder?
How could she describe
this story to her family?
When killing an animal in this
way is an action that exists
outside linguistic definition.
This was not murder because
murder requires malice.
The sheep might just as well
have been a fox, a child.
Even Ann when had not once experienced
malice towards this sheep or really
any sheep, but it wasn't slaughter.
There was intention of course, but
there was no purpose for this death.
Nobody would use this sheep for food
nor felt, and how could she possibly
explain when the question of her arousal
after this act felt so confusing?
But as she looked at the carcass
from her knees beneath the car, she
projected into the future and asked
herself, could she live with this?
And if she could, would
she forgive herself?
If the sheep's body caused a crash at a
human to be killed, that's when she knew
that she would have to move the body.
She stood up from the road, brushed
off her hands of the little stones,
and walked towards the sheep.
The evening was progressing and
the temperature dropping, and
now when she breathed, her breath
was visible in front of her face.
From where she stood above the body,
the sheep's limbs looked as if it
was running at full speed, except
looking behind it and buying silently.
Its neck had been completely twisted
around and its mouth was open,
and when thought for a moment and
then reached down to grab the sheep
by the ankles and began to pull.
It was heavier than she expected, and the
slight give of the animal's joints when
she pulled hard on its dead limbs made
her feel queasy as she heaved the corpse.
She remembered the feeling of
giving birth for the first time.
She had once been a wife.
She had once been a daughter, but with one
tired, fierce push after hours of labor.
Through the violence of that
moment, a new identity had emerged.
She pulled so hard that
the sheep's corpse moved.
All of a sudden that as her balance
tipped and losing her grip on
the ankles, she fell backwards.
The animal was now on the side of the
road and she in the ditch beside it.
She looked up and laughed some of the
animal's, blood streaked on her face.
Life is violence, she thought.
But isn't that wonderful?
She was completely exhausted.
The noise, the collision, the blood
pumping, the physical effort of moving
a creature, the will all taking a toll.
She felt an urge to sleep then and
there, but again, her father's voice
implausibly, telling her not to sleep
with the corpse of a farm animal in a
ditch by the side of the road at night.
An one pulled her phone from the
pocket of her jeans, no bars.
No way to call home.
The freedom she normally enjoyed felt like
an inconvenience to her in this moment.
As she turned to look at the dauntingly
large hill beside her, exhausted
already she exhaled and began to climb.
She walked up at first, but as the
climb progressed, she started to
use her hands as well as her feet.
Her body was covered in mud
and the smell of grass reminded
her of being young again.
The night was becoming cold
and the sun had disappeared.
There was no sound here.
When she reached halfway up the hill.
She checked her phone again, held
it high and turned it around to see
whether she may be able to attract
some bars of reception from the cosmos.
Nothing looking down.
She saw her car by the roadside
headlights still on, and the
sheep's body in the ditch.
It felt perverse as if she were
looking over God's own shoulder as he
painted a masterpiece called roadkill.
On on up, she climbed until she reached
the top of the hill where her phone rang
of its own accord on one bar of signal.
It was her husband.
Babe, are you okay?
You're longer than normal.
She thought for a moment and
answered, darling, I may be.
Sometime I have just obliterated a sheep.
What?
Say again.
I didn't hear a sheep.
The line crackled.
The one bar of reception disappeared.
Dead.
She laid back on the top of the hill.
Her face still caked in sheep's blood.
Her hands, her shins, her knees covered
in mud from crawling up a mountain.
The stars were impossibly clear in
the atomic night, and as she looked up
at the sky, a knot in her throat, the
terror of her own cosmic infinitude,
she smiled at the punchline of a joke
no one had told as she mouthed the word.