Letter from the Static Front, 1894

Fiction

October 14, 1894. Claire, The air here tastes of pennies and ozone. It does not stop. My skin feels too tight for my bones; the hair on my arms has been standing straight up for three days. We are stationed in a gully where the mud glows with that pale blue luminescence the officers call "the shimmer." It is not poetic. It is a nuisance. It makes it impossible to sleep because the light pulses in time with the capacitors. I have developed the copper-lung. It is a heavy, metallic cough that leaves a grit in the back of the throat. The medics say it is merely the ionization of the atmosphere. They have no cure other than to tell us to breathe through dampened wool, which only makes the air smell of wet sheep and electricity. Writing this is a struggle. The ink is behaving erratically. Every time I dip the pen, the droplets arc toward the primary battery bank ten feet away. I have to press the nib hard into the paper to keep the words from leaping off the page. The paper itself is humming against my palm. I miss the silence of the garden. I miss the way the air felt when it did not want to bite me. Yours, Arthur.