Sheared straight down the middle. A middle. The dividing line cut perpendicular across streets and buildings. It bisected tenement rows and separated the branches of the birches from their peeling trunks. I was told it had started far to the west, in the suburbs, and finished a little way out from the harbour, the water draining obediently into it like a spillway.
I say gone. I do not mean that half of the city disappeared. It was not scooped out from the earth or planed like molten glass. Everything was accounted for on the other side of the divide, which was so fine it was suspect to be atomic in level. No, by gone – I mean all matter on that half of the city took on a new and unpredictable countenance. A perverse and phantasmal vitality gripped the stones and the metal, which learned to catch and distribute the morning light in immense, shifting patterns across the faces of the towerblocks and the intersections. Tarmac crawled away from our footsteps on our side of the cut. Birds flew across and bent into silver arrows, winding like eels across the smoky clouds.
The people and animals on that other side appeared as transposed ghosts to us, smears of faintly twitching movement, buzzing and leaping from one spot to another. They were aware of us – once the fracture reformed, some of them were willing to talk of their experiences, although most had no memories or had buried them far too deep to ever reach again, except in the darkest of deathbed dreams. The unlucky few who remembered said at first they felt fine, and it was only upon attempting to move that an awful stretching took place. They didn’t break their limbs or tear their skin, but the word was used by them all without prompting. Upon asking for further clarification they could only shake their heads and say again: ‘Stretching. Stretched far too thin.’
Alexander James 