A Wee Nanostory

At his shoulder tugged a hand, gently at first, then gaining in toughness until it roughly grabbed him away from his squatted stance. The soldering iron clattered clumsily to the floor. He turned a shade, gave a glimpse half-behind him. Reaching into infinity, a solid arm bulging with vein and muscle tugged him further round until his neck was wrung to the point of pain. He rose to his feet, joints snapping, the squat unravelling to a stoop and then to a full stand, and he walked slowly forward, following the pulling hand, following the arm as it receded into the sky. He looked left and right. Others about him were following the same, a medusa’s head of arms coaxing them forwards, their origin unknown, masked in the industrial fog above. None of them felt fear, only an underhand obedience, unqualified but binding.

He didn’t look back at the cranes with their seemingly unguided mechanics, lowering and tugging at the metallic forms strewn across the ground. They were behind him now. Slowly, the hand released him but his slow momentum carried him terrifically forward. The hands parted with a final beckoning gesture. He continued through the wrought-iron gate as the suffocating fog gathered the hands up into an unseen bundle. Into the cobblestone street now, but the cobbles seemed to lose firmness. Under his soles they appeared to crumble until they resembled foam. His boots glided slowly through this unsure footing. He looked up for something of security, but the buildings seemed to lose their form also. The blackened brick melted, caramel-like, until it snaked in viscous flows about him, melding with the foamed cobbles, pooling about his feet.

The fog descended lower, it had lost its blackness now. A grey infusion whirled inside the fog, whipped up by thrusting winds into vortex formations around, obscuring all solidity. Then he was grabbed by a sudden urgency to hold on. He fed his fingers quickly through a gap in the rails. They encased him but for the deathly gap. His feet had at last found a solid platform, but beyond this platform lay a thirty-storey drop through still air and stranded mist. The ground lay beneath him but he chanced only a glance below before levelling his eyes at the rectangular forms ahead. They loomed, monster-like, never revealing themselves as if they must remain as silhouettes. He squinted and strained, keeping his firm grip on the rails preventing his fall. The monsters remained shrouded in their secure cloak.

Dejected, he turned away, walking off the balcony and into the room behind. He drew his hand down over his cheeks. The skin felt gaunt now. His arms were speckled and grey, aged, starved. He pinched at the skin and drew it away from the bone, dragging it with ease before releasing it and watching it shrink back to enwrap loosely again. The room had a damp nature, the wallpaper peeled away from the ceiling corners while dark, rusty stains cried downwards in streaks, narrowing as they reached downwards. Aimless, he eyed the photographs aligned along the mantelpiece, combing them idly with his hand. The people looked familiar, children with his features, himself in various states of age, surrounded by strangers.

A sense of unease gripped at his throat and he lunged for the door, into the cold corridor, running into clouds of his own breath’s freezing steam. Finally he reached the lift. An apparition of a gangly boy stood in the corner with dead eyes. He did not regard the boy as human. Instead he became a mere fixture pinned to a wall, inanimate. He was present only momentarily and then gone, replaced with rusting tools locked with impossible density. He climbed in among the tools as the doors noisily closed. With the clatter of ageing cogs and chains and the whine of belts he presently reached the foot of the block. The doors thrust half-open, and with a grunt he shouldered them aside.

Staggering into the field, his breathlessness drew sharp pains into his torso, into his left arm. He had aged once more. From his scalp he pulled a clump of whitened hair. The mist thickened around him, soup-like, and he outstretched his arms, listening to the grim overture of his ever-growing wheeze as the mist constricted still tighter. As he crimped his eyebrows to gain sight of the distance, he saw again the monsters looming upwards, standing stock-still. Other, more dinosaur-like beasts rolled slowly about them, picking at their sides. Their heavy presence sent tremors through the ground, quivering the blades of grass and climbing the bones of his legs, clamouring at his eardrums. A low, mournful wailing of scant-oiled metal against metal. Then, with awful suddenness, and with a staggering silence that was betrayed only by the sounds of his lungs, the monsters disappeared.

The city was gone. The pain in his arm soared, inducing a tunnelling of his vision. Around the dimming periphery of his sight lay only the white fog, the approaching night stealthily stealing its brilliance shade by shade. He collapsed onto the ground and let the dewy, wet grass brush against his cheek. He tried to grieve for his dead city. He hoped he would make it to the morning. Perhaps it would brighten up.