Writers Without Borders

‘I HAVE NO BORDERS,’ shouted Tom in anger at the burly policeman who was blocking the path and preventing him having access to the hospital. Tom was dripping with blood from his broken, bent nose and trying to pass the impassable policeman.

‘You have no right to treatment,’ said the policeman in a robotic voice. ‘NO right, your borders are red, and here, all of the borders need to be in thick black lines, like mine.’

‘I HAVE NO BORDERS,’ shouted Tom again. Through the blood dripping in his eyes from the huge gash on his forehead, he could see the black, firm outline of the man in front of him. He turned away from the hospital doors to look at the sea of carnage ahead of him. Broken bodies, and broken bits of building, and people outlined in fuzzy red, trying to get into the hospital. The policeman that had blocked Tom’s way had grown to the size of the hospital, and was shouting about red and black borders.

Tom turned from the scene and walked through the city that had been kicked about like bits of lego. He didn’t know what he was looking for but it was something that was not outlined in red. The red borders had appeared overnight, surrounding everybody and everything. The first Tom had known of it was when his cat had taken on a strange appearance that morning, before he looked in the mirror and noticed the fuzzy lines surrounding his entire body and face. It had happened to everyone, and the giant black-lined policemen were trying to herd them together. The city had rose in fierce resistance.

‘I HAVE NO BORDERS,’ he heard men and women screaming in the distance.

‘I HAVE NO BORDERS,’ shouted Tom and the men and women. Tom tripped over a dazed cat and almost didn’t see the one thing in the whole city that was not outlined in red hidden in the rubble and debris. A notebook. Outlined in heavy black. He stumbled towards it and it grew from the rubble and swallowed him whole. He was tumbling through the lines shouting about borders and redness and blackness. The notebook said firmly, ‘write it better.’

‘I can’t,’ said Tom. He felt himself falling as the notebook shook and began to write huge, wobbly words on the straight lines. He stretched up to trace each huge letter to spell it out. ‘Write what you would like to happen.’

‘Not this,’ screamed Tom, ‘I need this to be normal again.'

The notebook wrote in big letters ‘NORMAL’ and a door swung open. The notebook said, ‘you could have this reality if you like.’ Tom peeped through the papery door and saw a normal street on a normal day with normal street lamps and normal people through normal windows having a normal evening. Something struck Tom about the scene as being more monstrous than everything that had happened so far. Everyone through this doorway was more hemmed in and more contained than the strange events of today. From the distance he could hear the people shouting ‘WE HAVE NO BORDERS.’

‘NO BORDERS,’ he shouted and the notebook door swung shut.

'Write it better,' the notebook reminded him. Tom squeezed his eyes shut and began to tell a story. As words fell from his tongue, the notebook scribbled it down. The notebook and Tom wrote of a better world, a world with no borders, a world where people were people before they were anything else. A world without walls, without barriers, borders, boundaries, where all could move freely and were welcomed.

And words once again changed the world.