1. Hope in a Bottle

... Or a message perhaps. I send this from the North Northumberland coastline out into the cold North Sea. The tide is flowing out, I have pursued it across the causeway to Lindisfarne. Perhaps I am a fool to waste the valuable glass, but no matter. What need do I have of it now?

To the Reader, Beachcomber or Child who has recovered this green glass container of my last words, welcome. And thank you, of course, for picking this bottle from the sand. How optimistic I am... Will this fragile thing, which still smells faintly of every liquid I ever preserved in it, avoid the reefs, rocks and archipelagos of rubbish in the oceans to wash up on some other shore? Optimistic or foolish, it is all one. Perhaps this bottle is fated to smash long before it reaches Norway or the Netherlands and these scrawled words will have dissolved in the briny, before I take that final step.

What is Europe like now? I wonder if anyone speaks English, now that there is no need? Should these scratchings survive will they mystify like Sumerian glyphs? Perhaps some scholar will find his way to this paper and mouth the words with no clue as to their pronunciation or meaning, as I did with Latin in school.

The Colony is finished. There are only a few of us left now. Doctor Abercrombie gave most of the residents other, smaller bottles and they used them long ago. I don't blame them. Do not be alarmed, the paper and the bottle were safe when you picked them up on your faraway beach. The contagion was just that. It required contact. We – I – think something went wrong at Porton Down. They thought the Americans had something. It is possible that they did not. You could not believe anything in the first days. My hope is that the contagion did not come in the back of a slave-filled wagon. My hope is that there is someone, somewhere to read this.

John Livingston
Lindisfarne
Year 60 After Contagion.