We walk back down the hill to the car with the warmth of a mixed kebab and chips boxed in polystyrene and wrapped in plastic at our sides. All the glass glimmers in the golden hour, from the windows of the abandoned mills in their tall redbrick frames, to the shards of broken green bottles in the back of the parking lots and back alleys, to the black windscreens of parked cars, their shiny mirrors and unlit headlights, they refract slivers of the sun back at us like a fine spray of mist caught in a spotlight. The slow rush of traffic grumbles by and is cut away when we close the car doors and are left in the muffled quiet of the world. Our skin softly absorbs the light of the Jurassic sunset, the bands of yellow and red stark and defined against the dark blue clouds that bracket the sinking star above and below. Lights have spawned up like bioluminescent fungi all over the hills below us and betray the presence of the city in the shadowy vale below. The plastic back folds beneath our hands and the grease runs hot on our fingertips. I get the sense that things outside have paused for us. That this strange contrast of nature’s ultimate construction, that watches over these fleeting biomorphs inhabiting their fabricated world with all its minor, complex events, can illuminate such a tiny incident as this and preserve it in amber as if it is of great importance to it, the universe, and everything. But it’s just for us, and I drop a chip on the floor, and the gradual march of entropy goes on.
Paddy Dobson
6th June 2021