A dream about fog.

There are so many levels here.  You don’t just go around things. You go over, and under and through. There are over-passes on over-passes. There are plus fifteens above plus fifteens. The heavy fog gives the illusion that they come out of nowhere and go in all directions. It clings to the glass-covered pathways. Grey and cold, like everything else here.  As I look out the train window at the cement city, I can’t guess how high up we are. Thick, solid buildings are the only things that promise any ground under all of this. They’re massive and heavy and rise up out of the depths below. But I’m only half convinced they rise up out of anything at all. Maybe there’s only fog. I don’t know where we’re going. I can’t see any destination on the horizon. I can’t see a horizon.

When the storm hits, it comes from nowhere. Just like the city.  The air begins to violently rotate. The fog swirls and thickens. It funnels as it reaches downward. In the distance several more tornadoes are visible, tearing through the city. A train is derailed and falls into oblivion.

I peel my eyes from my window to glance around the cart, expecting to see my fellow passengers tense and startled. They sit just as they have since we first boarded, quiet and composed, their eyes listless.

The tornado rips into an apartment building, shredding storeys of homes, tossing crumbled cement and evidence of a once-lived life aside.  A lamp, maybe a chair, I can hardly make out exactly what makes up the waterfall of debris plummeting out of my sight. Next a mattress.  Then a child.  The ground, somewhere beneath the rolling fog, calls them home at an ever-increasing pace.

I hear my own screaming and pleading, but not clearly. I hear it as if my head was submerged in water. My hearing is dampened.  I am pounding on the window, trying desperately to get through. As if there was something I could do. 

“There’s no one in those buildings, dear.”  The voice is calm and forgiving.  

I continue pounding and screaming, as if I could somehow get through to the people  around me. But I am horrified.  
 

And they are not.