This is what it's like

Ray Hollingsworth
ISSUE 2006-1
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This is what it's like Their muffled footsteps distorted voices drifting away through the rubber doors leading to the Sizewell plains the place that I had been telling them about for 4 hours where I saw them moonbathers fifty metres apart listening to static interference through re-conditioned government headsets in 3D glasses watching the cloud formation which is a black and white photograph taken in 1954 their white gloved hands connected to blue wires plugged into giant speakers in the compound where I saw her the waitress on the escalator the day before the aeroplane crashed with the loss of 134 lifesize dummies watching a silent film about a reflection of a submissive reactor and the crackle of audience participation the clapper board mayhem of 180 hand picked idiots all of them seated in neat rows but rotating faster and faster in electric swivel chairs scar tissue faced lipstick shine urbanites from the empire of streetlights recruited 24 hours earlier via voice recognition fibre optic calling cards and picked up in coaches from Gala bingo halls and leisure centres now just turning to liquid and hosed away forever by the same personnel that I caught on camera from behind the fence last October in those disposable white body suits latter day spacemen with an insurmountable debt to society and out on the horizon we can see the shimmer of the silver coach and the smile of the driver the glint in their eyes highlighted on our screens in a trillion colours maybe more looking radiant....