And Then I Woke Up

by Malcolm Devlin

If you’re the sort of person who sees blood and monsters rather than somebody real? What does that say about us, I wonder? What does that say about me? Does it take a certain sort of mindset to succumb to that sort of narrative? A certain sort of vulnerability to look at someone, a group of people and think: monster, zombie, Other.

Did the same narrative infect everyone around the world, or was it localised? Are other countries, other cultures, in thrall to the same delusions we faced? Did our . . . I don’t know . . . cultural dominance force the same stories on them at the expense of their own? Or is everyone caught up in their own fictions, born of their own histories, their own conversations, their own media?

Or maybe we’re each trapped in our own narratives and blind to the experience of everyone else? What if right now, I’m sitting alone in an abandoned building, talking to a circle of empty chairs?