“That dust, that cursed dust of the artful monster is warring against me still;
that pest which I destroyed is now destroying Thebes.”
–Seneca, Oedipus

 

It meant no school except online assignments so it was really fine by me. It was like a thin layer of red on everything. Up close, like with microscopes or by squinting, you could see it was shaped like question marks. I watched the trees disappear into it and looked up synonyms for red on my battery-powered clamshell dictionary. Crimson, vermillion, garnet, coral, wine. At its worst the visibility was a fifth of the normal, myopia aerially enforced. People wore masks, and birds stopped singing. They blamed people from far away. We closed all the windows and the heat was so bad we used the aircon every day. It was like the world had stopped at a broken traffic light. My dad kept praying for rain, stamping around the house like that would shake water loose from the scarlet sky. “Why is it,” Eddie asked over the phone, “that nobody just takes a day off to fix all the world’s problems at once, and then restart it? It feels like nothing gets fixed because we’re all so busy all the time.” I said yes, not wanting to insult him. Twisted the cord. Much later I would read that the dust covered the waves, too, capping them in pink, and that only specialized low-wage workers were sent to handle the worst of it. They couldn’t stop asking questions afterwards, even up til they died. Much later, between waves of worsening PSI, I would open up a car’s hood and realize what the rosy flecks on the dipstick meant. We were running on people far away, throwing money and tutting at their monster hunt kills. Only nowadays more killing would spill back to us. Much later, I would turn my head sharply if I heard a dog bark a little too quizzically. Or rub my eyes when a traffic light’s red man went interrobang. On my multi-monitor stock trading rig I never saw any issues, but it’s speculative anyway. I’m trading in the greenest stuff out there, like biodegradable leather armour and paper swords, but I still think about what Ed said. Nobody wants to put down the weapons and stop hunting out there. Nobody can dream of not trading stocks in new and more efficient ways to exhaust the lairs, even though less basilisks are hatching from chickens’ eggs and the hydras are all too dried out to grow new heads. Call it what you want: Red Queen theory, a financial arms race, a slow dance of mutually assured deduction. Bail out the banks as fast as you can to keep your currency, your people, your gunboats afloat. In the mirror there’s no red dust in my throat.

 

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