Dear Villains of all Nations,
Greetings from the frontline of the floods. I still can’t get that damp stench out of the carpet but I have muscles like She-Ra from lugging those sandbags about. But before I update you on our shared matters I need to inform you of my security breach, though I dread X hearing. I had no choice though, due to two unavoidable matters.
The first is that stupid cancer is back, and this time it’s terminal. What terrible timing! I have been given six months to a year, but as you know, these are such ballpark figures as to be meaningless. My dear sister succumbed within weeks of her two-year prognosis, yet her husband is – annoyingly – still going years after his. So all I can tell you is I am dying at some point sooner rather than later.
Which is quite a blow to our operations, now that our core group has shrunk to just us (damn you death and damn you cops). From my window now I can see teenagers sauntering back from school, coat free despite the relentless, pissing rain. They have no idea their survival relies on three old ladies with good farming contacts and some mercenary traffickers that could turn on a dime.
I can imagine you, Z, right now—scribbling down that lentil soup recipe you made me when I was young and pregnant. As for X; once you forgive me the security breach, you’ll be downing neat vodka and announcing “death does not take the old but the ripe”. X, you told me this over that crackly line, phone box to phone box, when my Dad died 20-years ago. Oh, it was a great comfort.
There are no working phone boxes now to securely communicate. We just have this… this encrypted messaging chat thing we are on. Which brings me to my second point: I could not at all follow X’s instructions, sent over riseup accounts, so I have had to ask my Granddaughter. Do not shout at me, X! She is a safe head and a safe hand, and can carry on when I am dead.
Woah, writing that I nearly dropped my phone in my tea. Yorkshire Gold, naturally. In my favourite bird mug, chipped though it is.
My granddaughter is A. Which is beautiful when you think about it. We will return to the beginning of the alphabet when I am not compos mentis. Which you two may say I never was. A has access to this phone, and these messages. She has all my passwords. She is, reluctantly, all that is left of the resistance movement in Britain with everyone else imprisoned or disappeared.
PS “Villains of all nations” is what pirates used to call themselves. Isn’t that fun?
Until every seed is growing,
Y
Dear Y and Z,
All I can see of my cowering old cat is his ginger tipped tail. He is sheltering under the tipped table. My grumpy neighbour has been hammering at the wall for me to be quiet.
You will not want me to share the distress I am in at Y’s news. But Goddamit and Blast (which once you told me were two proper swear words, Camden market, 1994, before samosas and beer for lunch), I wish to God you weren’t dying. Not just because of operational matters.
X
PS “the encrypted messaging chat” is Telegram.
PPS not all alphabets begin with A
Dear Y and X,
I am not in the least afraid of grieving. I wailed upon reading, took myself to the baobab tree to sing my sorrow song. When I sang I pictured A, who I met when she was a baby, the last time I was in the UK. Even then she had your face Y, which means I trust her with everything. I will pray for you Y, and as you do not like my God I will pray all the harder. My faith will be enough for all of us.
My tears landed on the arid soil by the baobab’s roots. Between me and the tree we are this region’s richest water source. When I hear your desperate stories of floods, Y, I salivate and sympathise all at once. What I would give for a flooded front room, even as I see the photos of your devastated home. How unfair that you need my dry and I need your wet and the actions of the super rich and their government minions have driven these ever further apart?
Our rainy season was the shortest yet this year. My great nieces and nephews are shrivelled like the cracked land, lined like something from that awful Live Aid record when we were kids—what was that song called again?
My garden I’m typing this from is pitiful. I am even more jealous of your stories, X! A longer growing season in your milder winters! But I have siphoned off some seeds from our sanctuary to grow for myself and the first shoots of these are percolating just under the sandy earth. Our resistance is still the secret of joy! I have 300 indigenous varieties of seed ready for transporting, but I cannot tell you exactly what they are from here. I have no signal at the secret sanctuary where they are listed, old fashioned, with paper and pen. But beneath my sandals are a few of the 40 yam species which may taste boringly similar but their diversity is their optimum chance of survival.
And ours.
I need to get these flown out to you ASAP my comrades. Only yesterday there were rumours of paramilitaries spotted to the West of here. I have a bag packed if I need to flee; my young neighbours already have. Y, has your holding container been temperature regulated since the incident? Z, can you still access yours across the unpredictable melting ice?
Until every seed is growing,
In solidarity and God,
Z
Dear Villains of all Nations,
I am disappointed you have not fulfilled a dying woman’s wish of using a special name. Go on, please.
Anyway, to the matters.
Thank you, Z! My batch of seeds has arrived! OMG – as the kids say – that was pretty hairy! I’m not sure if either of you have met The Man who was bringing them; he is more terrifying than the last. There were moments I was unsure the exchange would happen. He grabbed my shoulders so hard I thought I’d fall over and not just because of chemo last week.
Oh yes, I’m having chemo to extend all this living stuff as long as I possibly can. Turns out I still want to be the last girl on the dance floor; not bow out gracefully. Even if I’ve spent 3 days puking (just like me in the 90s). I could barely drag myself from the bathroom but The Man would only deliver to me so A drove me and my sick bucket up to meet him, stopping at services to tip out the bile. Z, you have to sort this out at your end. I need the troops to know A is the new me; that instead of this glamorous granny there will be a timid looking, gawky 21-year old. Scrap that. Tell them she has a massive gangster of a boyfriend and if they lay a finger on her he’ll machine gun them down. And I’ll come back and haunt them. Which, Jesus, the way I feel won’t be far off.
Until every seed is growing,
Y
Dear Y and Z,
We do not need new names to reinvent ourselves as if we are a pop band. We are revolutionaries. That is enough.
X
PS if anyone lays a finger on A I will axe them to death.
PPS I had the most uncanny dream that Y turned into a bear.
Dear Y and Z,
I am still trembling. Enough that I am breaking my essential communications only rule, and messaging from my little safe house near the vault.
Yesterday I went there straight from the city. I cannot give details that could be worked into coordinates but it is a lengthy trek. Only some of the journey is possible by vehicle. Yes, judgemental teetotaler Z, I did have a hip flask. I prefer its company to that of most people. My journey there was unremarkable. It was the way back that has left me reeling.
I was an uncomfortable distance from leaving the vault when I saw her. She was huge. At first I thought she was a Brown, common enough when I was a girl but rare now. It has been years since I’ve seen one, though I know from the hunters that they still roam here.
But she wasn’t a brown. She was a grizzly.
Y, many decades ago you told me nobody had ever seen me afraid. I still have a poem you wrote saying this on my over packed bookshelf. More floridly. It is the only love letter I’ve kept, though I’ve had many lovers who fancied themselves writers.
When I saw the grizzly I felt I was being torn in two, a medieval torture; the rip from my feet through my guts. She was beautiful and petrifying all at once, and above all that, real, despite the fact none have been seen in these parts since the permafrost began melting. Perhaps it is awe not resistance that is the secret of joy?
Also, I nearly shat myself with terror.
I dropped my silver hip flask in the snow, fingers quivering, no chance of outrunning her; some trees to my left I could possibly climb. But when I desperately whispered “Goodbye” she opened her mouth as if to howl an answer, then turned her enormous flanks and trotted away.
I picked up my flask, but it felt worthless, next to this farewell, this loss.
I am so raked with silly fear that it was Y come to say goodbye that I cannot fall asleep on this uncomfortable single bed, despite every muscle in my ageing, over walked legs aching.
Until bears rule the world again,
X
Dear Villains of all Nations,
My Grandmother has demanded I begin my message like this. I hope you do not find it confusing. This is A.
I read your messages to her during her final hours. She told me to tell you she choked to death laughing so it was your fault she died. But I thought that was mean of her and not true. She insisted you’d get it.
“They always got me.”
And then she passed.
I’m not sure if she meant you always got her humour, or you always caught her when she was falling. From the bits she confided in me, she meant both. She has made me promise I will carry on her work or she’d haunt me into an early grave. She always joked about her dying. I hated it but she took comfort in that gallows humour.
She told me some things – like seed saving – were more important to her than people. But I don’t think that’s true. She raged at the storms that meant we had no butterflies left, and the crop fails from the sodden fields, and when the long tailed tits died out I thought she would surrender to those first cancerous tumours. She had no fight. But it was you people and this project that got her out of bed again and making stupid gags.
So I got ten more years of her thanks to you. I’ve got the codes and coordinates to the vault, a science degree and a boyfriend I can trust (though he’s no gangster by any stretch). I’m not as brash or rude as my Grandmother but I have something of her spirit and I swear on her grave I’m committed to this for as long as we need it.
Until we plant every seed again,
A
Tabitha Bast lives in Bradford, and works as a therapist and writer. Inspired by nature, revolutionary struggle and love. Currently working on a tightly themed, dystopian short story collection “Tipping Point”. Writings range from political articles to short stories. Has had 15 short stories published, and delivers monthly writing retreats for Writers HQ.
Most recently published in 2025:”The Man Who Lied to His Wife” Bournemouth Writing Prize, “Four Tins “ Seize the Press, “Heat” CafeLit.
Writes a memoir/feminist blog on positive masculinity https://theboysarealright.substack.com/
Urban Pigs Press 
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