Music from another place, I wonder what it means.

Today it is exactly eight hundred and eight metres to the edge of The Zone. Well, that is to say, for now. 

The perimeter flexes. Eating up ground like a hungry mouth.

I know it, because I’ve measured it. With my stepper. A small and yellow egg-shaped device that clips to my belt. On the screen, an infamously electrified creature bounds along happ’ly with each of my wet, viscous and squelching steps. 

The ground is sodden and tries to escape and capture my heavy boots both, a juxtaposition that smells like dead and decayed wild flowers, as I plant my feet cautiously, each tentative placement chasing down those eight hundred and eight metres in an uneasy slow motion that of which those poor darling sea birds covered in wretched oil might know.

As I think about those birds and watch as my feet suck and slurry at the bog earth I can taste it - sour grit with a clutching hand on my satchel and I press on, swallowing painfully and looking forward instead of down.

There’s a domed luminescent glow that shimmers, like an impossibly large tent reaching up several miles into the sky. It marks the area claimed, the footprint within which I think constantly about stepping. My dreams consumed by it, I wonder if such a glow exists inside me now, staked and claimed just like the land.

Joan Tiptree