He counted ten (10) bodies in the morning though he maybe missed one when their stupid neighbour came round talking mindless BS about changes in the government and Michael was mad that he gave up his spot at the window where he looked down ten (10) storeys to the street and the kind of home-made improvised stretcher things that they were bringing the bodies out on and taking them up the path of broken paving-slabs by the dead trees in the rain and into the waiting trucks.

In the afternoon he counted five (5) more and then it was a pause like maybe the blokes down there sent someone out to get Starbucks or maybe they called prostitutes from the corner and had them come into the excavations to give them all blow jobs – that was a stupid suggestion of Jo, and Michael fired back at him that he didn’t know what a blow job WAS which started up the whole youTubes thing again cos Jo went online and found that self-tape movie of Jade Inspectra sucking the cock of Kurt Frapton or Frinton or whatever and Frapton/Frinton is moaning so hard that at the end you think he might actually die, which let’s face it, would be great. And Michael just said ‘Yeah ok Jo – I know – but you NEVER saw that shit in real – you don’t KNOW it – that’s just pixels and everything that’s all’.

Anyway. Concerning the pause in the number of bodies coming out of the building you couldn’t really tell why. We don’t know said Michael, though Jo wasn’t listening. It is a mystery all what goes on down there, just like the whole city. He was watching two of the guys who had slipped in the mud of the rain and had half overturned one of the trolley or gurney things and he could see that one of the guys now had his white overalls all covered in dirt and the other was shouting and spiting mud and rain. We don’t know because we cannot see what they are doing and no one would tell us a Truth-Full answer anyway all we can do is SPECULATE. And then, because Michael acted like he was in charge of Jo’s education and because this was like A New Word for the Day he wrote it big in the condensation where his breath had steamed the whole window.

SPECULATE.

If you looked at the walls of the room in many different places you could see other words that he wrote there for Jo, over three previous years since they stopped really leaving the apartment anymore on account of how mum and the news said it was not safe to do so. VERTEBRATE it said in one place. And INVERTEBRATE. EXODUS. COALITION. FULCRUM. WORSHIP. INDENTURE. There was lots of other words but they didn’t make sense out of context.