I can hear them coming through the walls now, gnawing wood, clawing iron, snapping and sizzling wires. They’re not far away. They haven’t stopped. A hundred promises spoken over the airwaves and over the radio waves and whispered in my ear are broken.

The fusebox above my head sparks and there’s a blackened hole at the knee of my pyjamas, the faint whiff of smoke.

They will find me, and they will find me soon. They are always hungry. There’s nowhere left to go.

‘Dear someone’, I write, with the blunted stub of a pencil on the back of a faded magazine ad.

Dear someone. My daughter’s name is Caroline and she lives at 842 Cherry Road, Innsville. Please see that she gets anything that remains. (Anything that won’t give her nightmares.) Tell her it all happened quickly. Be a good liar.

The nub wears down before I can write thank you. I can only hope it’s implied.

I leave the note inside John’s old steel toolbox, latched shut and kicked into a crack in the concrete.

I hope that they won’t eat it too.