The smaller galleries and museums were taken with their
contents barely saved. Entire movements and historical finds never to be seen
or known again. An architectural flourish that never left a certain façade of a
certain building of a certain street in that gone city.
The peri-urban bleed, suburbia and greenbelt suddenly met
with all those who leave, their myriad accent, a pace and lifestyle born of
those stack bricks and panes of glass, those canal pathways and cobble stone
old town.
Some never come to know and are taken too. A full teacup on
the side table as they wonder why the estate is so quiet now. Pigeons and
robins and foxes and squirrels and rats wonder at the emptiness, where the
usual torrent of street-feed has gone, before sensing that impending oneness
and making haste.
A vague Pompeii, a quiet Hiroshima, a cold Dresden, a dark
Pripyat, it is just gone. A new blank spot on a map. Tags and graffitoes with
street in-joke remain in scant few memories.
For a few days the roads busy heading out, and then it was
just those vehicles that couldn’t start or had been anonymous a while that
remained. An entire neighbourhood of terraces with just one turquoise Robin
Reliant to count. A dilapidated van on an industrial road ending in a dockyard.
A people carrier raised off the workshop floor with no wheels in a garage with
the shutter down.
It all had to be left there.
And then.
