Chris's entry:
babies call in deep-safe-dark need mother
no-sun time return to babies through grass and scuttly things
edge of Two-Legs’ black-hard-smooth river
cross hard river back to babies
hop
hop
stop
look
hop
SUN SUN SUN ROARING BRIGHT SUN SUN
( THIS CANNOT BE, in no-sun time )
EYES LOOK AWAY
eyes cannot move
FOOT THUMP WARNING
foot cannot move
NO NO NO NO NO NO
my babies my babies
END-TIME END-TIME BLACK DARK NO-TIME
my poor babies no mother
foxes will eat babies babies with no food no safe no mother
CANNOT MOVE
END-TIME SUN ROARING OUT OF NO-SUN TIME
must return to babies babies need mother
( poor babies poor babies no mother blood-black-hard-river end-time no-time dark dark dark cannot move cannot run cannot reach babies )
* * * * * * *
“George darling, DO slow down when driving at night - you nearly ran over that rabbit.”
Sue's entry:
I can’t stay here but it feels like the safest place. Tucked in my corner, safe, quiet but, if I move I will be heard. Paralysed with fear, from no stimulus – no noise, no smoke, just deathly quiet. Outside the window no traffic moves, no birds singing, nothing - the city is quiet. Waiting. Crouched, stiff, I feel myself needing to shift. Slowly from my safe corner I unfold my aching body. I stretch my body, legs getting pins and needles. My spine cracks as it straightens, my eyes shifting in the gloom. My ears are straining, listening for something, anything. Sharp in the dark. There, what was that? Just a disturbance in the air. It’s coming. My body gets ready to go. I can hear my breath rasping through my nose, my chest heaving from the effort of my respiration. I can feel my heart pounding in my chest as if it’s trying to escape my body. The roar of the blood in my ears as it races around my body.
Shaking from the effort of being still I begin to move. Adrenaline coursing now through my body as the time has come to flee. I grope through the dark I have to get into the light now, outside in the air, from this dark building. Panting with fear I am disoriented my body is covered in sweat. My head turns frantically – which way. Panic is trying to set in I must fight it. There, a light is it the right way? Here goes.
Maya's entry:
There was a precise and sharply defined point that morning when I knew that I was going to die. It was followed by another, equally precise, equally sharply defined point, when I knew that I wasn’t. The passage of time between the two was perhaps ten seconds. Tenuous, tick tock seconds that threatened to catapult me into eternity at their passing.
Tortuous, terror-soaked units of time that flung open a door through which I saw that time is indeed subjective, as the quantum physicists tell us it is. There was a sickeningly brief snatch where I understood that this was the end of my life before those ten short, shape-shifting seconds stretched out like a piece of elastic and I saw my life flash past me, as I had heard happened in such situations. Hearsay though, had not prepared me for how surreal and insane would be the colours and words branded on the convoluted canvas of my mind. It had not prepared me for the savage soul search to be executed during those seconds, and it certainly had not prepared me for the jolt of knowledge that I could change nothing.
My mind registered other things during this period of time, another plane of knowing that maybe ran parallel with the other knowings, maybe not. I cannot tell. I felt the dryness of my mouth, the pounding of my heart, and the sea critters crabbing and clawing through my gut. I felt the sweat on my forehead.
When that second precise and sharply defined point of time was reached and the last of those ten seconds had snaked on into eternity without me, I was exhausted, stunned, spent, but not dead.
| 
