Have you ever woken up and listened to voice the wind.

I have and it knows my name.

I lie and listen to it at night, as it creeps into my sweat filled dreams. It's accusing voice oozes into the crevices of my mind and seeps into my sub-consciousness.

Whispering to me over and over.

I wake, blanket tied in knots around my legs, to the sound of the rain. Pulling my pillow over my head doesn't shut it out.

Nothing will.

I get up and pad into the kitchen.

She sits silently, wordlessly, staring into the fire. Listening to the storm. Above, the Furies bang their fists on the roof and hurl spittle filled curses upon us. For a moment it stops, as if the eye of the storm has seen us and blinked its surprise away. Then it starts again, this time more violent than before.

"Did you hear it?" She asks hesitantly, then shivers and pulls her knees up under her jumper.

"What?" I know what.

Something in her glass has captured her attention, she swirls it around and for a moment lets it suck her into its vortex.

I kick the grate open with my foot and throw some wet coal on the fire and kick it shut with my heel. "What?" I say again.

"It's out there.... calling my name."

"What is?"

"The wind."

"I didn't hear anything. It's just the wind." I lie.

We sit and watch the fire until dawn.

Daylight is a thug, waiting to ambush us when we are at our weakest. We fight back wearily. Checking the stores, checking the spares. The garden under the glass, oxygen levels, CO2 levels, heat and light.

Then into the protective suits and outside to wade through the mud to the old generator and the patchwork of photoelectric cells. Outside looks like a hurriedly made charcoal sketch. A blackened forest of the corroded machinery that leads down to the acid lake that gleams like molten granite. And the endless swamp of sucking mud.

When daylight has finished kicking us, it leaves us to the night and its menaces.

She is sitting waiting for me, in her chair by the fire. She drags a broken comb through her matted hair and picks out the clumps from its teeth and piles them in her lap. A mountain of iron wool that sparkles in the firelight.

Her lips move in the faintest of whispers. "We killed everything, destroyed this whole planet."

"We didn't. Those before us did. It's nothing to do with us."

"It blames us." she says sullenly. She lifts the glass off the floor, her cracked fingernails trace the etching in the glass.

"Who does?"

"The planet. It wants revenge."

"The planet has no sentience, it's like, just dust and mud and earth and nothing..."

"Tell the wind that. I have and it doesn't listen." She drains her glass and refills it.

The wind howls and fills the eaves. The fire glows red.

I lie in bed and listen to the water dripping into the pans. I've patched the roof again and again and still it finds us. Sent by the wind to prove its case, it burns to the touch.

In the dark, the shadows from my candle fool around on the roof above me. Skeletons that bark insults in time to the rolls of thunder and chase each other into my nightmares. In my dreams her spectral face floats above me. Her ghostly, sallow skin covered in a weft of perspiration.

"I'm going out." she says.

I drift. Imagine if all things were connected. A greater consciousness that lies within everything. Perhaps long ago we were receptive to it, to the patterns of life, to the rhythms of the universe. To the feeling of the living and dying of things.

I lurch awake to the banging of a door. The frenzied pounding matches my heartbeat. Against a fugue of confusion, I stumble down the corridor and watch blankly the spirit of a hidden hand thrusting the door to and fro on its hinges. Her protective gear hangs comatose on its hook.

I suit up and race through the industrial woodland, through broken mining equipment and past shattered furnaces. Down to the water's edge.

She lies, half submerged, in the liquid marble lake. Pushed by the wind out of reach. A porcelain Ophelia, drained of life by the poisons leached up through the earth into the water. A shroud of rain approaches, turns to hail and flails relentlessly at the water's surface. I look around, through the cloak of rain. Everything here has withered and died, nothing lives.

Back in front of the fire I turn her glass in my hands and trace her memory in its shape with my fingers. I want to tell someone, anyone of her passing. Who would I tell? No one is left. The rain patters on the screens, singing its lament to the dead, willing me to join it.

Later, I lie in bed listening to the wind. Its breath swirls around me, its anger lifts the roof. It's calling my name.

It blames me.

I'm going out there to face it.