In Progress: Chornobyl, 1986

In Progress 2025

In Progress
Chornobyl, 1986

(C. 01)
In April 1986, a young firefighter named V— drives out to the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. He finds one building of the plant destroyed, in ruins known by none to be highly radioactive. He quickly becomes ill, the first onset of the symptoms of acute radiation sickness. In dire condition, he is flown to a secure military hospital in Moscow. His father, Doctor A—, follows.

Twenty years before, Doctor A—’s wife, S—, fled their home in a village near the power plant, leaving behind V—, then two years old. Two weeks after that, she was dead. Though recorded officially as an overdose, doubts remained eternally in the mind of Doctor A—, only a meeting with a policeman, there on that night, begins to reveal to him the truth of that fatal night.

In Progress
Chornobyl, 1986

(C. 02)
Night. Sleep. The jettisoning of body, the transport into mind. The scenes unnumbered, in no order, both real, superimposed from memory through associations tenuous in waking or purely at random, the mind’s own volition, or not real at all, the caprice of thought unencumbered by consciousness, running wild and free in a body unattended.

All daytime sense and feeling twisted, transmuted, thrown together to make substance for dreams, no longer living sensations but a ghostly realm comprised of their shadows, a pastiche of the rigours of the world in awakeness, rearisen in reflection by some hermetic will, an inner and inward-facing self, to play back and distort for its own amusement.

In Progress
Chornobyl, 1986

(C. 03)
The loss of control. The awareness, on some level, that all this is not real, that half is memory misguided, warped, and the other entirely imagined, and though there is some autonomy, organic motion, it is within parameters not set by you, the dreamer. The end of a dream is beyond reach, one shutter closes and the next opens, a scene ends and another begins, the new actors running in and taking their places unseen with abject arbitrariness, the old consigned to oblivion – over and over and then only from the worst nightmares can you compel, finally, your errant body to rescue you into startling, ill-impressioned wakefulness. That is the end of a dream; the beginning of a dream is as intangible, as illusory, as God or heaven or the human soul. You can know that they exist, but they are forever beyond conscious experience.

In Progress
Chornobyl, 1986

(C. 04)
And so the torment, the tumult of days cannot but contaminate the landscape of dreams. The intensity of feeling, the worry, the stress, the heartache, promontories all which can be forced under in the superficial day-to-day, the attendance to the world, those constant and manifold menial diversions incumbent on all of us to live, only to rearise, never gone, hidden only, as you depart that same world for sleep – and out goes the tide.

The dream was of Chornobyl.

ii.

Published Work: Death’s Kingdom (Soyos Books, 2023)

Published 2023

Published
Death’s Kingdom
Soyos Books, 2023

(DK. 01)
There exists a town between fields of war and murder on one side and a vast expanse on the other; a great and featureless plain. The town is dilapidated, driven through by an endless convoy of military vehicles. Dogs skulk the town's edges; worse monsters live out in the fields. The town has its inhabitants. Those few who persist for some short time amidst the eternal conveyance. There is the drunk, with the emptiness in his soul. The child who sees prophecies behind its eyes of the end of humanity. The leaver, departing this life, and the left, who remains. And there is the boy who is surrendered to his addiction. Who when he sleeps, dreams of nothing.

Published
Death’s Kingdom
Soyos Books, 2023

(DK. 02)
'And then a reverie, a stirring, heartfelt moment which arises unsought from memory with the cruelty of dreams – that you fool your own feelings into believing they are real – and you laugh, you cry, you’re hysterical either way; your heart is full of love even as it is rent, mutilated by grief; your smile at the memory is as powerful as your mourning of its passing, and the voices say grief is a process, loss comes in stages, bipolar can be learned to be lived with, and I say melt down my body, dismember it, crack the involucre and pour me out, amalgamate my essence into the greater body of loss where my grief can become anonymised, plural, my wail can join the everlasting chorus – let me die.'

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Benedict Sangster is a Norwich-based writer and avid reader of literary and historical fiction. His work focuses on the darker side of the human experience, exploring the interaction between the living world, memory, dreams, and the extremities of human feeling.

In 2023, Soyos Books published his bleak, misanthropic collection of short stories, Death’s Kingdom. He is currently working on a novel about the Chornobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.

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William Faulkner
Toni Morrison
Virginia Woolf
Joseph Conrad
Svetlana Alexievich
Vasily Grossman
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Anna Akhmatova

In Progress

Chornobyl 1986

Chornobyl
1986