The original note, as written at the time
This was actually a dream I had on Friday 13th August 2021 during the hot afternoon. The world appeared to be facing a threat of some mysterious mines. Countries were cut off from each other by some specialised rail. Between those rail lines were points where the mines were located. To cross the rail one had to first manually inspect the portion using a specialised roller that gave some time before the mine explodes.
Ongoing development
The roller is heavy and the roller is slow and the roller is the only thing standing between my family and a hole in the ground, so we do it properly.
You inspect the portion by hand. Not with a machine — with the roller, pushed, while a man walks behind you reading the marks. The instrument does not tell you whether there is a mine. It tells you how long you have before one decides to go. That is a different question and it took the world a long time to accept that it was the only question we could ask.
The rails came first and the mines came after, or perhaps it was the other way round; nobody agrees. What is agreed is that the country is now a set of islands, and the islands are joined at the rails, and every crossing has a fee and a wait and a roller and a boy with a flag who decides when the next group may attempt it.
I have crossed nine times. On the third crossing a woman behind me stepped half a metre off the plate and there was a sound like a door closing and then nothing, and the flag went up, and we waited four hours for the inspection team, and then we crossed over the place where she had been, and nobody in the group said anything, because there is nothing to say that is not a complaint about the queue.
What is strange is how normal it becomes. The children learn the roller as a game. My nephew can recite the intervals between the marks, and he is proud of it, and he does not yet know that reciting them is the same as counting the minutes you have.
The mines are not a war. That is the thing the faraway newspapers never understood. There is no enemy; there is an arrangement, and the arrangement is administered, and the administration has offices and a budget and a schedule of maintenance for the rails. Somebody is paid to keep the islands apart. I have never learned who, and I have stopped asking, because in nineteen years of asking I have only ever found people who take the fee and pass the roller and know exactly as much as I do.
We cross on Sundays to see my mother. That is what the rails are for, in the end. Not for the mines, and not for the countries, but for the fact that a family will still cross them, with a roller, for an afternoon.