Some say the way into Polemarsh is haunted. It feels like slipping into a dream space as you

exit the tunnel that cuts through a tin-filled mountain into the grey murk beyond. The cities

and roads unwinding like a length of rope before you enter the cut earth feels too vivid to be

real; all those pornographic skies rendered in vast stratas of colour seem like fairy-tale

hallucinations when juxtaposed to the cold reality of the city. 

The first thing you notice on the other side is the smell; something like the sea, mixed

with chemical smog from the factories encircling the city in a carcinogenic crown. It’s a salt-

grey place, where the smokestacks loom like charred fingers from the gloom.

And so it was, I found myself driving along the main drag of Polemarsh, ghostly wisps

of fog trailing behind. Folded instructions from the lawyer flutter on the dash.

It’s a decrepit place with decrepit buildings that seem to shift like the fog itself: thrown

together and leaning on one another, into one another; the ragged survivors of some

unending storm, creating new forms and seemingly supernatural spaces. It is an unsettling

utilitarian sprawl of interlocking factories, and libraries, and apartment buildings all spilling

out from the somniferous grey and ringing each other’s necks.

         At the centre of the city, Glory’s apartment building appears like a sudden madness:

two joyless, crooked concrete fingers, broken at the knuckles and twisted, wrapping around

and into each other like a pair of ancient, ochre-boned skeletons smashed together to make

something new. Something aberrant. 

The cores of both buildings are collapsed together, forming the erratic and mangled

stairway. I am headed to the seventh floor. Through gaping holes in the structure, I see the

chequerboard of the floors below my feet, or snatches of the mutant skyline flexing against

the weight of a poorly drawn horizon. Fingers of mist claw their way inside, trying to claim the

space for itself.

“What did she do?” the old lady down the hall asks when questioned.

“A crime was committed,” I reply. “In Ms Thespis’ apartment, and I’ve been asked to

speak to people such as yourself.”

“What crime?” she asks, then adds. “She always went to church. I saw her there.”

“What about the commotion,” I say. “Tuesday, the fifth. A witness heard a window break.”

“Is it illegal to break a window?” she asks. “I broke a mirror once, I still have two more

years of bad luck to serve before I can finally get out of here. Look, I don’t want any trouble.”

“Do you remember hearing it?” I ask.

“Windows break all the time here. It’s the building, it’s slowly coming down, making

everything new,” she says, and leans against the flaking door frame. The building creaks,

grumbles in a voice as old as the stones. “Everything is going back to the sea. Back to the

beginning. I often think we weren’t meant to walk on the earth because it’s all going back into

the ocean, isn’t it? There is nothing new in the ocean. Only old things, ancient things.” She

sighs, rocks back on her heels as if she might faint. “Glass breaking here sounds like a

mouth full of teeth being ground. A slow snap of a shark’s mouth. Have you ever heard a

shark? Silent as the grave they are, except for that wet snapping sound.”

There is a bullet-riddled plastic shark hanging from the sign outside the city that read

Welcome to Polemarsh, but now seems like the wrong time to ask about it.

The old lady’s answers fill me with some nebulous dread. Perhaps it is the hypnotic

music in her voice, or the way she, rolled one unconnected point into another, treacle-slow. It

makes me feel lightheaded. Maybe it’s the chemical tang at the back of my throat. The

migraine that begins to bloom behind my eyes. It snags and blurs the edges of my vision.  

I ask the same questions to the rest of the tenants on the floor, and receive the same

answers. Windows break here. Is that against the law? I start to wonder, was the shattered

window the crime itself now--or the victim? I thought I knew. I thought I understood.

It feels abhorrent to break something that is already in slow decay.

I stagger to the door of Glory Thespis’ apartment where yellow police tape pulled into

tight ribbons snap in the dank air. I stagger-stumble across the threshold. The crime is so

obvious to me now: glass, like crystalline teeth, spreads out on the faded carpet. Water

stains beneath like old blood.

I have to look away, clutching my stomach to keep from vomiting.

There are pictures on the wall: an obscene gallery of brightly coloured faces. All

witnesses. All complicit in the violence Glory wrought.

Co-conspirators.

Sick now, and so dizzy, the tilting floor rising up to meet me like a rogue wave, I lay

on the sea-green sofa. I sleep and dream of ancient sharks silently hunting in the deep,

parasites haunting their rotted eyes.

When I wake, I call the office and I tell them that she must be guilty. The evidence is

everywhere.  

She is ruin made flesh to commit such a terrible crime against the city.    

In my wallet is a picture I have kept with me my whole life. My father and I, the sun

cresting the crenulated edge of a mountain range, burning our expressions into shadows.

There is another picture that my mother has that was taken just before and shows the detail

of our faces, but she will not relinquish it.    

I pin the picture next to the others on the wall.       

It has been said that those who worked in the mine disinterred the fog that now

enshrouds the city. The old-timers out on their boats hauling in bloodied sharks from the

choppy iron waters say that it is Féth fíada, a veil to stop men from returning home.