In a powerless landscape of wet fields and dead cables, a community turns obsolete infrastructure into ceremony and punishment.

But huge and mighty Forms that do not live

Like living men mov’d slowly through my mind

By day and were the trouble of my dreams.

• William Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’

When Bobby Jackson died, we took him out to the pylons in a wheelbarrow covered over with an old sheet all paint stains. There were eight of us, not counting Bobby and the boy and the minister.

After we left the road a haar blew in off the firth. We couldn’t see a hundred yards ahead of us and the moisture clung like a second skin. The old fences between the fields were still intact. Two men stepped forward and pulled apart the wires so the minister could pass through, then the rest of us. The man pushing Bobby waited until everyone was through, then the three lifted him out, still wrapped in the sheet, and passed him over. Then they passed the barrow over and climbed over themselves and put Bobby back in it and we all carried on.

We followed a path cut in the knee-high grass across the field. The ground sucked at our feet. The boy tried to kick the head off a dandelion but the wet pistils only plastered themselves over the toe of his boot. We couldn’t see the pylons until we were almost underneath them.

When we got there, the minister turned around and raised his arms. The man pushing Bobby set him down in front of him and we all made a semicircle around them both. The ground in that place was trodden flat and there were scraps of rope and fabric littered about.

The minister looked at us all, then at Bobby, then at the cables up above us. There is no power here, he said. Perhaps it is the cost of our many sins that deprives us. He had a stern face, still a Presbyterian at heart, despite everything. Would that not be a relief?

Our attention was elsewhere. We had heard the words before, many times. The boy was scuffing the tip of his boot on the grass. One woman dug at the dead skin on her thumb with her nails. The men looked bored.

Bobby Jackson, the minister was saying, died in vain. As he said this, the man who had pushed the barrow stepped forward. He reached into the barrow underneath Bobby and pulled out a spool of rope with a long, heavy hook tied to the end. He pulled a length off it and looped it several times around his shoulder. Then he stepped to the foot of the pylon and started to climb it. Another man took the spool and stood at the bottom to feed it out as he climbed.

The minister kept talking while we watched. When the man reached the first line of cables he stepped out onto a crossbeam, wobbling against the wind. He slipped the rope from his shoulder and used the hook to toss it out over one of the cables. Other pieces of rope dangled there, lank and sodden.

He started to climb back down. The man with the spool turned it in his hands to lower the hook towards the ground. He set the spool down and he and the other man stepped into the semicircle and pulled the sheet away from Bobby.

His eyes were still open and he was naked. There was an ugly wound on the top of his head and blood had crusted in rivulets down over his brow, between his eyes and around his nose, into his open mouth. His skull was an odd shape. The flesh of his face, neck and arms was scudded with bruises and sores. One of the men took his ankles, where neat holes had been cut just behind the tendons, and passed the hook through them.

The minister was reaching his crescendo now. If only we were kinder, he said. If only pity could save us.

Three men took the other end of the rope and started to pull it over the cable until it was taut, and Bobby’s legs began to rise. They hoisted him upside down through the wet air, pulling slowly on the rope, his arms forked stiffly around his head and his mouth hanging open in a dead scream. They heaved until he swung like a pendulum far above us. The minister ended his sermon with a quiet Amen which no one repeated.

One of the men took the spool and looped it around the foot of the pylon and tied it in a knot. Then he pulled a Stanley knife from his pocket and slashed at the rope until the spool came away. He put it back in the barrow.

The semicircle dissolved while the minister made some signs with his hands up at Bobby. One of the other men tested the strength of the knot. There were other knots there, their ends frayed and unravelled. The boy lifted one of the loose pieces of rope and examined the fibres at one end. One of the women slapped it from his hand. His fingers had come away reddish brown and he wiped them on his trousers in disgust.

The minister led us in silence back across the fields, the boy trailing behind. One of the women kept having to turn and beckon to him. Behind him, in the distance, Bobby dangled in the grey air between the pylons, still now, barely visible in the swallowing haar. Before long we couldn’t see him at all.

By Nathan Breakenridge

Litro Magazine

dystopia flash fiction Future Floods Infrastructure Litro rural gothic Systems Failure