The Pole Shift

Sean surveys the damage

The ice that had formed outside had vanished, leaving a sodden garden torn and littered with strange rubbish. Branches and trees were stacked where water had dragged them, but there was a pram, a body, and a dozen  wheelie bins. He went to the corpse, Tom's. The man was beginning to rot and Sean grimaced, turning his face , how long had he been in his booze stupor, he thought for perhaps a week. He remembered very little, might he have saved Tom? Would he have? He felt no emotion. Where were the others?

             Below where the dirt road use to be was a house high wall of flotsam - cars, power cables, smashed boats, fridges, washing machines, corrugated iron and barbeques. He went to the detritus. Bodies were wedged amongst the wash, he expected to see his ex wife and Tom's fat brother in some sort of embrace but the bodies in the wall were strangers, battered and torn. There were body parts too, and pets, farm animals and all manner of bird and fish. The smell was cloying, he gagged and moved away.

            In contrast to the wall the sky was blue and pure,  the sun was high but in an unusual position. Sean looked up and closed his eyes, letting the sun warm his blotched face. The wall was a nightmare, he would avoid it at all cost.

             He quickly looked up to the top of his property, the remaining Mountain Ash swayed in a soft breeze, stripped of leaf. He raced up there keen to see the other side of the hill. Half way through the trees, where a month ago Lett had been spying on him, the hill had been sheared off and a hundred meter drop formed a cliff of black rock, like a rotted tooth. Below rumbled dark water, hurling the remains of a city at his fluke island. The distant view was dramatically changed, for Melbourne was under five hundred meters of water and all that could be seen to the North West was the distant Mt Macedon, an island too. The cliff doubled back like a horseshoe where his neighbour's houses should be, then it joined the wall of rubbish at the bottom. He looked at the wall where bodies sat like mannequins and he groaned, it seemed like he was on a stage and they his audience. He traipsed through his ruined vegetable garden, passed the chicken coop that had collapsed then inside and down to the cellar where he pulled a bottle of vodka from two feet of filthy water. As he drank he counted his cans, dumbed, feeling like enormous work needed to be done but not wanting to.