Unsettled Places – Home

London has flooded.

There are thousands of drowned rats scattered across the streets, the remains of something that lived beneath the city now lying exposed in the open air. You are moving above them, almost hovering, barely touching the ground. There is something deliberate about the movement, a strange lightness, as though your feet have forgotten what walking is. You try not to step on anything.

At an intersection, a group of teenagers greet you. For a moment you belong there. Then something changes. Their faces turn and you begin to run.

The city recedes.

Your father is climbing onto a hospital bed. The bed is soiled, though something has been placed over it. He is frail, weakened almost beyond recognition.

“It’s so nice to be home.”

The room is quiet.

The bed.

The covering.

His voice.

Outside, somewhere, the water has gone down.

The rats remain.

You wake.

For a moment there is only the strange sensation of having been somewhere else, somewhere both familiar and impossible.

Home.

Notitia — attending to the places where experience remains unsettled.