Waist deep in water, nightmare figures prowl offshore. Draped in shrouds like the restless dead, their faces are nothing but obscene suggestion, their hands a shriek of hooks and blades. Once upon a time, our mothers would tell us that they weren’t real, wipe away our sweat and tears, and hum us back to sleep; our fathers would build contraptions of coloured glass and humming wire to sing us through to dawn. But someone or something stole them away, and the Minister points to those circling shapes, with their outlines like nothing but fear itself; and although on closer inspection they resemble nothing so much as our own children who were ripped away in the flood, and their voices sound just like the echoes of our own as we cry in the isolated night, he swears that they are the root of all evil as he palms the coins from our parents’ eyes.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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