Dystopia

It’s like I’m dying of hypothermia she says, even though they’ve both got three fleeces on. Sitting in the dark, covered in blankets that smell of old dog they look at each other.

She throws another principle onto the old hearth they’ve had to open up, recalls the frost fingered windows of her childhood, the darned socks. On the telly a woman with tears in her eyes collects a bag of groceries from the food bank.

The newsreader says there’s food poverty, fuel poverty, pet poverty, child poverty, period poverty. She wonders when poverty got specialisms, if that means it got gentrified.

The politician jumps into a helicopter, flies off to snatch another photo op. Later he’ll swim with his children in his private pool, buy another designer suit, write another speech.

Liz McPherson
Picture Rupert Loydell

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