Cheers to retro turntables. As always, there’re new rappers daily, somebody somewhere, in some social housing block, is always trying their luck at becoming a grime star. This movement turned business. That’s had its rage sapped and replaced with Gucci. Never have so many people tried to make art as now, with the basic income making everything possible. That’s what had been predicted, that people finally freed from the drudgery of work in the digital era could pursue their creative urges. Now they’re all sitting around, building ships out of matchsticks or shooting pornos. Speaking of which, there are no more birds. Either they’ve all died of boredom. Or they’ve all left the island because they wanted to have a look at other places. “What would you guys think of me contaminating the groundwater with a virus?” asks Karen. The children try to play dead. They’re worried about getting a lecture from Karen. It’s no use. Karen starts to speak. Only a few disconnected sentences make their way into the brains of those present. “… obviously you have to do it again, if pregnant mothers drank uninfected water during their pregnancy, you have to redo it,” Karen is saying now. The effect is irreversible because the virus stays in the brain cells and they cannot reproduce.

Don pretends to doze off and accidentally

touches

Hannah’s

Leg.

Hannah carefully pulls her leg away, because she doesn’t want to be touched by Don’s extremities. That became clear to her last night.

When they made a young-persons’ outing into the city. A grime party in Wimbledon. Too flimsily dressed so that the youthful flesh looks good, too well lit, bad music from the sound system, paper cups on the floor, disappointment and too many freezing youths waiting so hopefully for a miracle. The same since all eternity. Young people with hormones that cloud their thinking, who today nervously show pictures to other young people in dating apps even though the other young people are ten meters away. The great hope that the answer to all questions would emerge and they could escape their awkward bodies to heaven, where something wonderful would await them. “Fuck, she’s too close,” Hannah had thought when Don stood too close to her, and it was suddenly clear what that meant. What all the looks and touches from Don meant. Then it got dark and loud, and finally the moment arrived, the moment of that “we’re young and love life in a perfect fusion of body, youth, and lust” feeling. People kissed in the hallways, they groped each other in the crowd, the music was the way they themselves wished to be. Fearsome. Quick and dangerous. And there stood Peter. He stood there like a lighthouse. Sex. Popped into Hannah’s mind for no apparent reason. An embarrassing word, because sex was