Into Another World

It was hesitant at first, tentative like some small creature nosing out into a dangerous world. It felt as though we were out there, exposed to all the predators, weak and defenceless after hiding for so long. We opened the door to the shelter, not really knowing what to expect.

While we’d been in there, I’d remembered various media stories about a post-nuclear war world: the devastation, a destroyed world and the dangers for those who survived of a long slow death by radiation poisoning. A world where the lucky ones were those vaporised before they knew what was happening and the survivors were the unlucky ones.

This, though, was not like that, or, at least, that was what we hoped. There was always the danger that someone with the power; in government or the military, could see that all was lost for them and with the self-obsessed arrogance of all those who crave such powers they could have decided to take the rest of us with them.

It was a relief to step out there, though, into a quiet world. A world of birdsong and a noise it took me some time to make sense of - never having heard it before – the sound of the breeze in the leaves of the trees.

We looked at each other, unwilling to speak, to speculate, about this new world we found ourselves in. We could be a new Adam and Eve in what – from the safety of the shelter doorway – looked like a new Garden of Eden now free from the cruel tyranny of all the old gods we'd made and that had failed us.