There had been no warning. It all started off innocently enough. There was mild embarrassment when men started walking into the ladies and ladies started walking into the gents. It helped to stick to bars you knew already. Because the swaps were intermittent, you never quite knew whether you’d be backing up and apologising as soon as you peered around the door. Everyone thought it was a joke at first, some flash-prank orchestrated on the QT online.
Then it spread. Folk started bumping into each other all over the place. Enclosed public spaces were the worst; you’d even see people going against escalators and moving walkways. The airlines made a fortune out of it for a while.
When it went sour, it all happened at once. Hands were being put places they shouldn’t: toasters, machinery, anything with a door that slammed. Legs fell through ceilings, the wings of light aircraft; asbestos was disturbed. The whole chemical labelling scheme fell to pieces: there were burns and carcinogenic exposures all over the place. The hospitals couldn’t cope, especially as visitors kept walking into theatres during surgeries and apologising. Pedestrians were stepping out in front of traffic, incautious leaners fell from upper-story windows, passengers disappeared during ferry crossings. Nothing was off limits. The illiterate were worst hit; they went in their thousands along with all those who couldn’t bring themselves to look up from their smartphones.
There was a groundswell of resentment. You’d expect that: people were angry. They’d seen friends scalded in cafes, relatives drive enthusiastically onto train crossings. The signs’d got brash, moving out from back alleys and basements until they were walking their crapulent westies in broad daylight – and did they clean up after them? Did they hell: the streets were littered with tiny symbolic turds. The thing is, how could a ring-leader be identified? None of them had an identity. They were all anonymous; describe one and you describe all of them, bar the distinguishing features of gender or age or colour. That was their downfall; none were spared. They were corralled by lynch-mobs, scraped off walls. The police weren’t interested. The vengeant took off their limbs with Stanley knives, rolled them up and bundled their bodies into makeshift chemical baths – filled with acid if someone’d somehow managed to identify it. There was a lot of improvisation. It went on until all the walls were bare, depersonalised. The illiterate were still screwed, but most of them had gone by then anyway.
Words reigned: in decals and brush-strokes, everywhere a symbol had fallen, letters took its place. They had bided their time: now they multiplied in bold caps and subversive subscripts. We saw them as our saviours, helped them. At night, we heard their letters shuffling. They occupied the vacant spaces, accepted their inheritance unobstructed. This had been their plan all along. The writing was on the wall; we should have seen it coming.
Postscript: looking for an image to go with this, I stumbled across this news article: http://www.traffictechnologytoday.com/news.php?NewsID=5639
from apathy to poetry 