Rebecca Gransden - Sea of Glass

The traction of the air. Three pygmy people swept past Kattar, kicking the stack of cardboard boxes, shredding them into paper dust down the street, away from the flames, so they wouldn’t catch and light everybody up. Tachypneic toy dogs crawled along the gutter, snapping at his heels only to curl away in wait for the next legs. The buildings edificed the sky, a sky in ice-pole raspberry blue somewhere up there. Great sticks of gleaming blocks, outstretched in avenue, made to be bold and dwarf, the kings of the survey, your measly head an abstract under the bitter flashlight.

White Van Man screamed inside. The fire violence was a shitshow. People stopped or hurried faster, there was no in-between. Kattar wanted to go to the man in the van, just to stop his noise, it was drawing out. Barking of the dogs behind meshed with the sunlight and inflating flames. Golden rays rained on the road, indirect always, entrenched in the guidance of the glass, caramel over shoppers, their bodies deathly glowing as they rush through the district to shops elsewhere.

Bellows of the last of life tucked into the flame, the van wavy inside the light. The White Van Man was losing all that he had and there was nothing to be done. Because of the heat.

A policeman, fluorescent, inserted himself into view and instructed with the correct gestures and everyone stepped back. The brightness shone and moved over all the street, the faces illuminated in watch. Kattar wandered, hands in pockets, leg over leg, twisted knee strolling backwards, eye on the van on fire, ears for the screams but they died.

A man, advanced in years, took off his glasses and methodically cleaned the lenses with a handkerchief, staring ahead with grey cataracts.

“Do you know what happened?” Kattar said.

“Well, I was standing over there, just by where the van is.” The elderly man pointed a sharp finger to the burning vehicle. “Can you believe it? I don’t trust my own eyes.” He shook his head. “The uncanniest thing happened. A bright beam of light, exactly like a sophisticated laser from a movie, came down from above and aimed itself right at that van there. I was transfixed but no-one else seemed to notice. I think it’s because I’ve just received a new set of spectacles and I’m seeing through them strangely at the moment.” He blinked and tears ran from squinting. “The sun hit one of the windows high on the building and it magnified the light sending it right onto that poor fellow. Happened really quickly too, must’ve been very intense that beam. One second and the whole van was alight.”

“No time to get out? That doesn’t seem right.”

“I know. But I’ve lived a long time—time enough to understand that there’s not much sense around.” The elderly man reached for his glasses and removed them, holding them before his clouded gaze. “These aren’t doing me much good. I’d like you to have them. You’ve been good to me, talked me through this experience. Doesn’t matter if you can’t see through them, they’re made of gold and glass, nothing more. Sell them if you like, I’m done with them.”

Kattar waved a hand. “No, I couldn’t. Surely you need them.”

“If you don’t take these young man I’ll give them to the gutterdogs for a plaything. Here, give me your palm.”

The elderly man took hold of Kattar’s hand and placed the folded glasses onto the upturned and open palm. “Close up those fingers boy, and hold tight.” Kattar folded his hand around the glasses while his eyes followed the elderly man as he disappeared between milling bodies.

The street turned black. Kattar brushed the concrete hard, down, winded. Feet pushed on him, several sooty hands used his body as a way to clamber forwards and away, soon running people trampled him through descended smoke. Voices, frail and on the move, said “Run! Run!” inside the darkness.

Tart metal smell streaked to his gullet, he gagged and saliva poured in and out of him, meeting fat dust speckling on the whites of his eyes. The smoke was the new atmosphere. People came close in outline—damaged incoherent parody silhouettes—and then went. He struggled against them and their approach, glancing blows under the darkness, and got to his feet not knowing which way his head should tell him up. Obtuse light formed high above and the erect shadow of his building hovered hazy and tantalising. Unmoored, he lunged and reached through the heated choke, to slam a brittle shoulder against slick polished granite. Square light appeared some steps away as someone switched on the lobby inside. The opal eyes were vacant, peeping from blackened and crusted faces slashed with crimson; stunned stragglers caught in the brightness spilling into the street. Only for a second. Kattar headed for the doors to the building, his own eyes seeping, his vision blurred and overwhelmed. Pounding on the glass, he pushed his lips to the meeting place of the edges of the closed automatic doors.

“Kattar Bassis,” he said. He couldn’t hear himself. “I work here. I have access. ID. Open up.”

A shadow moved inside, then froze.

“Really. I’m employed here. I usually come in the back way.”

The shadow moved away and all was white again.

Pain hit him in a tease of what it could do to him, a sharp pang somewhere deep and suggesting the lung. Mouthfuls of stifling funk worked its way in. Fits of coughs ejected bloodied spatter onto the dusted glass doors.

The doors swished slowly open and he stumbled across a ridged rubber mat into the light and up against the closed inner security doors. Manic breathing to gain some control, cold sweating meant his clammy pallor stuck to the glass as he twisted to stay upright. He’d deteriorated quickly. A woman in a dark suit—the shadow he assumed, he could blink her into life now—walked up to the glass and inspected him. She shut the doors behind him, before anyone else could bolt and join him inside the threshold, trapping him in the no-man’s-land between the closed panes, and the wafting grey smoke slowly dissipated, sucked away into the building.

“Get your breath back sir,” she said from the other side of the glass inner door, her voice muffled and only half way understandable, “I have to check you are who you say you are before I let you in. You understand, in today’s climate.”

He looked outside at that day’s weather. He understood. He smirked.

Tongue filled his mouth, swollen by contact with the smoke. He sat agog at the silence outside, fleeting hints of the daylight above soon covered by the wandering blanket of dust. The movement of the black cloud played against the harsh artificial lamp of the building’s lobby light, strange thicknesses weaving. Sunk to the floor, he rolled his sensitive skull against the glass, his back to where the woman had gone, sensing she’d be in no rush to confirm his person and let him in. To her he was safe enough, and safely away from her also. She was doing him a favour, letting this foreign man rest on her threshold. His breathing freely was her gift, anything else at this stage—under siege from whatever spectres were her fear of choice—too much for him to ask and he knew it. He’d kill for something to quench the thirst though.

A tap on the glass above his head. She stood, tall, inquisitive, tablet in her hand. “Put your ID up against the glass so I can see it sir.”

He fumbled in his backpack and took out the pristine laminated card, queerly reflective, and pushed it hard to the glass right in front of her face. “I’ll get you some water, Mr Bassis,” she said, and went to the reception desk to buzz the doors open.