Читать книгу Fat Man and Little Boy - Mike Meginnis - Страница 7

HOW LITTLE BOY

WAS BORN

Little Boy woke alone, lying naked on his side, curled inward. It was quiet. The ground was hot. He was afraid. Pink and pale.

Soft.

He pushed himself up on his feet. Faltered. Tipped forward and back. There were no people there. He called out for help. The wind was gentle but he lost his voice in it. His throat felt dry. Inside his body, a strand of whisper that couldn’t get out.

There were crooked trees in the distance, black and pulled apart. There were ruined buildings far away. Everything close was rubble and dust. There were bits of wood and glass, and concrete powder on the air.

There was no one to see him standing there. No mommy. No daddy. He held himself and shivered.

He stood on a bald white depression.

Dozens of small fires burned in the wreckage. He walked forward. He needed away.

There was a cart wheel, there was a yoke.

There was a leveled home. There was the floor of the home.

Thin black smoke rose like a solid climbing thing, gnarled as the trees.

As he walked past the ruined home, bits of glass and wood and rubble pierced his feet. He left red footprints in the ash. It hurt badly. He didn’t know what to do. He was breathing ash. He was caked with ash. His lungs burned. There was no good air to breathe. A body burned black was on the ground. Its skin had all peeled off and lay in rags around it. Its sex was burnt away, leaving only a lump or a crease between the legs. The fingers were the same. They were nubs. Its teeth had all been shaken from its head. They were scattered in the dirt like seeds. He shivered. He held himself.

Stone walls spilled broken on the ground.

There was a woman in the dirt, shielded by the wall that crushed her head. He could see her through the cracks in the wall where it was broken, where it fell. Her blood ran downhill, the hill on which he stood. She gave more and more. He stumbled on through more bodies. He walked over a stone bridge, across a stream that was white from the dust. There was a baby smeared across the ground.

There were papers from a painter’s home, torn and weighted down by rocks, lumber, and dirt.

He came to a sapling. Stripped and blackened like the rest, with several broken branches hanging from its bough. It stood at a sad, sloping angle, pointing at the sun. It looked like a hair. A loose branch fell to land among the roots.

Behind the tree a standing wall. Ten feet high, not one foot more.

Only a section, the rest fallen and scattered.

Its edges rough, uneven like an old saw.

The window blown out, the glass all gone, the drapes thrown forty feet away.

It was a square window, four feet up, two feet wide, two feet tall.

There was a thin tree shadow on the wall. A black silhouette. This was the sapling as it was before. There were seven long branches, seven delicate arms, seven reaching tendrils. They searched the wall. One shadow branch reached into the window. The leaves were small faint smudges of gray, the wall was flecked with them. He sat down beneath the tree to rest his legs and aching feet. He coughed dust and blood into his hands. He watched the shadow on the wall. The tree behind him moved, swayed slowly in the breeze, searching the sky like a finger. Its shadow was still.

“Now do you believe I am your brother?” asks Little Boy. They are resting up against a squat gray pedestal where a statue once stood. They are careful not to touch.

Fat Man says, “How long have you been born?”

“Only a few days before you.”

“So you’re supposed to be my big brother?”

“I’ll try to take care of you.”

Fat Man says he doesn’t think he can be taken care of by someone who can’t even find him any food. He says that maybe he should leave his older brother, that they should part ways. He stands and makes to leave.

“Wait,” yells Little Boy, who struggles to his feet and looks up at him with wide, pleading eyes. Little Boy steps close to Fat Man and wraps his arms around his leg. He squeezes him through the silken robe, presses his forehead to Fat Man’s rubbery hip. His little hands are warm, though also bony.

Fat Man feels how very small his new big brother is. He puts one hand on Little Boy’s back and his other on the crown of his head, which soothes the boy and relaxes his body. “Okay,” says Fat Man.

Little Boy’s eyes close. “Thank you.”

Fat Man asks his new big brother what they’re going to do.

“We’re going to take care of each other,” says Little Boy. “We’re going to find you something to eat. Then we’re going to find a way out of here.”

Fat Man says, “I don’t like it here at all.”

Nobody does.