Two Envelopes And A Phone

“For many years the price of coal and every form of liquid fuel had been clambering to levels that made even the revival of the draft horse seem a practicable possibility, and now with the abrupt relaxation of this stringency, the change in appearance of the traffic upon the world's roads was instantaneous. in three years the frightful armoured monsters that had hooted and smoked and thundered about the world for four awful decades were swept away to the dealers in old metal, and the highways thronged with light and clean and shimmering shapes of silvered steel.”
― H. G. Wells, The World Set Free: Illustrated Edition

“On Aigburth Road, wind was doing its best to direct the shoppers, but failed to throw Rose under a car. Layer on layer of dark cloud piled up like sediment at the horizon. Against the sky trees glared, bunches of frayed rusty wire. Birds were scraps of light high overhead, in danger of being blown out. Above a church doorway a Virgin and Child were caged by wire netting, which rattled as though they were trying to escape.”
― Ramsey Campbell, The Parasite

“One looked at people in buses and trains, when their bodies were quiescent and their minds somewhere else, in a book or a newspaper, or behind them at the place they had left, or before them at the place they were going to, and they seemed harmless enough, and so they were while you were looking at them---but what hadn't those apparently tranquil bodies harboured? Souls that had been jealous and angry and afraid and envious, even murderous, and the bodies themselves had been passionate, intemperate, greedy, agonised. People you saw in the buses and trains weren't really themselves at all, only the quiescent ghosts of what they had been, and what they might still be again.”
― F. Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow

“But now the streets were not like the streets she knew. They were so silent: and so empty. On the doorsteps, little groups of milk bottles huddled with their dirty white collars, waiting for the roundsman to collect them next morning and take them off to be washed and spruced up and sent out on duty again… In the areas, the dustbins spilled forth unsightly contents, relentless reminders of man’s mortality: now and again the air still gave a tiny sigh, and a whiff of decay was borne away upon the breeze. The plane trees rustled, whispering a message from the dustbins: ‘All is rottenness, all is death…’, the high street lamps cast shadows in angled walls that seemed as black and bottomless as eternity. A couple reeling home late from a party were swallowed up by a dark doorway: already the glow and the rapture were fading—tomorrow there would be sick headaches and queasy tummies… Beauty vanishes—beauty passes…Only the cats were heedless and unafraid, darting across the patchwork shadows of the streets on plush-cushioned, soundless paws. What threat had death and decay and nothingness?—to a sleek, suave gentleman with nine lives before him and every one packed with adventure that had nothing to do with death—on the contrary!”
― Christianna Brand, Death of Jezebel