Hiroshima

A lone B-29 rumbles high overhead, contrails trailing in its wake.  It’s August 1945.  The war in Europe is over.  The Japanese, despite being pushed to the limits of defeat, fight on for Emperor Hirohito, who is believed to be descended from the Sun God.  Only the homeland remains of the vast empire.  Many in Japan are near starvation, even though the government publicly contends they are winning the war.  The people are being asked to manufacture wooden bullets and bamboo knives, and many suspect why.  Few people notice the B-29 and those that do are comforted from experience that it represents only the usual military reconnaissance flight.  Afterall, flyovers have become quite commonplace over Hiroshima in the last few months.  It remains a city curiously untouched by aerial bombing during the war.  The insulated inhabitants have considered themselves lucky.  The citizens of Hiroshima are about to find out for what horrible fate they were being spared. 

The Bombay doors open and the gadget, known also as Little Boy, is released from the Enola Gay.  Two other B-29’s, Necessary Evil and Great Artiste, trail behind.  One with photographic equipment, the other with cylinders, dropped by parachute, and set to record scientific information beginning at exactly 8:15:15 AM.  A Japanese soldier on the ground, dressed in khakis and matching field hat with ear and neck flaps, tracks the plane’s progress through a pair of binoculars but more with bored interest than concern. 

The detonated burst occurs at 1900 feet above ground zero, a very distinct T-shaped landmark known as the Aioi Bridge spanning the Motoyasu River, and near what has become known as the Hiroshima Dome.  Every one of the Uranium-235 atoms in the bombs core, measuring less than a tablespoon, have been forged billions of years ago in a furnace known as a supernova which once exploded into the vacuum of space, only to be collected and reassembled now by Man eons later for a very specific purpose; to end World War 2 and usher in a new age of unparalleled destruction.

At one-hundred millionth of a second after detonation, the fission reactions have already begun to run down.  At one ten-millionth of a second, a plasma bubble begins to form that is hotter in temperature than the sun’s core.  At one-millionth of a second, the temperature is 1000 times above the boiling point of water, and the plasma bubble stretches 6 city blocks.  After two-tenths of a second, the plasma bubble touches the earth and the bubble implodes, scattering radioactive neutrons and gamma rays in a gigantic concussion blast, generating massive destruction, high winds, and enormous fireballs which flow outwards and upwards in the form of a monstrous, fire-stoked mushroom cloud consisting of exploded debris, vaporized human beings, and radioactive fallout. 

One moment the soldier was looking up at the plane, the next he ceased to exist.  In fact, there was nothing to point to that would confirm he had actually been there. The lens of his binoculars had magnified the white flash and not only burned through his retina, but the energy transmitted, like a laser, vaporized his brain tissue and exploded his skull into calcific dust.  The rest of his body followed suit as his blood came to a boil.

He was standing only 100 yards from the little girls’ house, a one-story wood frame dwelling in the Shoin-Zukuri style, with exposed beams, tatami mats, and fusuma sliding doors that glided on a track to separate rooms.  The shoji windows were lined with a diaphanous paper that served to keep the rooms on the lighter side, but now the house, like the soldier, had been vaporized.  In fact, the only object still standing was a small 3-foot cinderblock wall that separated the garden from the rest of the property.  It was here where the mother and daughter had been working, picking fresh vegetables for a breakfast of cold, salted fish and cucumbers that would never be served.  The little girl is 12 years old, and she is stunned and disoriented.  The last thing she remembers was a giant flash involving a blinding white light followed by what seemed like all the colors of the light spectrum.  She lay unmoving on the ground, her skin still smoldering.  The pain which is to come has not yet arrived. 

The last thing she can recall was her spade slipping from her grasp and bending over to pick it up.  The wall had shielded her from the concussive blast that followed.  For just an instant, less than a split second, she thought she may have seen her mother’s bones illuminate inside her body, as if she were wearing x-ray goggles like in her Japanese comic books. Then, there was no mother.  When she was able to stand, she peered over the wall and saw the outline of her mother’s body, a woman in a dress holding a shovel, baked onto the cinderblocks. 

The little girl, called Sakura, or Cherry Blossom, was unable to process the information her brain was being presented with.  The landscape had flattened; everything was rubble.  Prior to the blast, she had been wearing a dark colored dress with scattered white daffodils.  Now she was naked.  There was a faint but distinct odor of burning fat in the air, like untrimmed beef in a skillet over a fire.  Pain was now beginning to emerge in waves from large swathes of tissue where her skin had been denuded, contrasted with islands of untouched skin punctuated by the faint outlines of what looked like daffodils. 

It was uncomfortable to breathe.  There was smoke everywhere and soot caked her nose and mouth.  She was only vaguely aware she was standing in her garden.  There was no even vague resemblance or familiarity to it, only memories of what must have once been.  The garden had been her favorite place, fussing over the plants and reading peacefully on the stone bench placed under a shade tree in one corner.  The garden was life.  Now the garden, and everything around it, was ash and death.  She climbed what was left of the garden wall and wandered out into the street.  She kept her arms stretched forward, like a zombie child, as even the slightest brush of her arms swinging against her torso brought excruciating pain and further sloughing of what little skin remained. 

A tall, churning cloud with fiery center continued its ascent toward the heavens overhead, with pulses of thunder and lightning.  The wind whipped up and a blackish rain began to fall.  An intense thirst plagued her, and she headed for the river.  Water.  Her only thought was to have a tall glass of water.  She stuck out her tongue and lifted her head to the sky. Blue and red fire-devils, propelled by the wind, performed a macabre dance all around her, like signal fires at the gates to Hell.

Before long, her bare feet were torn up, leaving a bloody wake behind her.  Intense nausea almost felled her, and she squatted and vomited into the gutter, fingers gently splayed over a charred scalp as bare as the landscape.  What had once been silky smooth black hair, and long eyelashes, had been singed off.  The nearer she came to the river, the more thirst tugged at her.  She stopped to drink at a thin pool of brackish water seeping from a fractured pipe, but the nausea prevented her from even sipping at it.  She dabbed at her raw lips with a moistened hand and moved on, tortured by the opposing forces, the yin and yang, of both thirst and nausea.   Blotches of hemorrhage began to appear on her skin and blood trickled from her nose. The river was another half mile away.  She trudged on through flattened neighborhoods, some of which had once been among the prettiest in all of Hiroshima.  She could see the Aioi Bridge in the distance, and next to it, the only building still standing, the Hiroshima Dome, minus the dome.  It remained the sole piece on the chessboard, miraculously spared by the cover given from its nearest neighbor, the hulking Hiroshima Castle, which had managed to withstand mankind and mother nature for almost three centuries.  Now its remains, and the City of Hiroshima, were being spit out of the churning mushroom cloud high overhead. 

Others were moving toward the river now, too, many following the defined trail of the rail line.  They were also stumbling and naked.  In a fleeting moment of human connection, Sakura found herself feeling sorry for them. They were a pitiful sight, she could see, and she was glad not to be among them.  One woman was trying to feed her baby, whose arms dangled limply at its side.  She put the lifeless baby to her breast, or where she remembered her breasts had been, but were no longer.  The mother shook the baby in frustration and tried to get it to suckle.  Sakura took it all in without really seeing, listened to the cries of the group without really hearing.  Then her mind was blank again, focused only on the incessant triad of pain, nausea, and thirst; oh, the thirst.  She had only one goal, to reach the river and drink. She moved on, keeping her eyes on the T-bridge as a landmark, her progress slowing.

The wind brought fresh oxygen to reignite the fires and she moved through a haze of smoke.  A dog was standing in her path, sniffing at the ground.  Her heart opened and she reached down to pet it, but its carbonized tissue disintegrated at her touch and collapsed into a heaping pile on the ground.  A horrid sound escaped her lips.  Any morsel of fighting spirit, of hope, was now gone.  The wind immediately whisked the atomic ash of the dog skyward, toward the swirling mushroom cloud, which was drawing everything in flight towards its rotating center.  The river was upon her now and she could see the others draw down the bank and be instantly swept away in the strong current.  She saw the drowned bodies stacking up downstream like a beaver dam of human flesh.

She crawled up onto the safety of the T-bridge, ground zero, ignorant of neutron bursts and gamma rays and radioactive decay. Somehow, the bridge had remained miraculously intact.  She collapsed next to the shadow of a woman leading a horse, now burned into the structure, and laid down next to them, staring up at the darkened, moving sky.  She vomited blood.  The bridge started to swirl, or she was swirling, she couldn’t tell which, and she began to cry and shiver. The thirst was unbearable, but she had no strength to move down to the river below.  Her last thought was of the little dog that had turned to powder under what could only have been her venomous touch.