You Can’t Stop Thinking About the Bomb
Christopher Berardino
You can’t stop thinking about the bomb. You want to write an angry novel about the camps, but you know you can’t write an angry novel about the camps without thinking about the bomb. You’ve only ever been able to see the blast in black and white, like celluloid through a clicking projector. You see the mushroom cloud—immense, alien, impossible—curling over all that had been the city of Hiroshima, your ancestral home.
And you’ve always wondered, as you watch the coursing smoke and fire, what your grandparents thought when they heard the news. God, it must have been hot, you tell yourself. God, it must have been a hot day, August 6, 1945, with all that sun soaked deep into the Chicago concrete.
You imagine it was a family friend who came running to tell them. The woman Great Grandma had met when they were forced to live in horse stalls. Or maybe it was Great Uncle’s twenty-something best-buddy, the one who played third base with a left hand and slouching smile, the one whose father is still buried beneath desert stones and razor-wire.
You decide it doesn’t matter.
You see Family Friend run as fast as they can, weaving in-between the Monday throng on 55th, then Woodlawn, sweat beading across a sunburnt brow. You see the faces of the neighborhood Nihonjin in the shallow depths of golden windows, kneeling beside their radios like mourners at the bench. While they cover their mouths, and run hands through hair, and wipe tears from cheeks, their eyes follow Family Friend, anxious and slow, as they hurry towards the clan from Hiroshima.
Without warning or welcome, you watch Family Friend burst into the stale little Hyde Park home. Great Grandfather is startled and drops his tea. He demands to know what the fuss is about, why Family Friend is being so clumsy and loud. Your grandfather holds your grandmother tight. He is handsome and she is pretty. He pulls her close against his hip in the unbearable heat because Family Friend is wide-eyed and slack-jawed. He pulls her close, your handsome grandfather, because Family Friend cannot not hear their own name.
And here is where you are stuck.
You are stuck because in that moment you know your family could not have understood the extent of carnage. Could not have known that the blast would make skin melt like butter in warm hands, make tendons fray and fat bubble, erase flesh and bone into absent nothing against a pulsing neon sky.
You know they could not have seen Grandma’s newly married cousin, babe at her breast, crumble and dissolve in the nuclear wind. Their ashen particles, scattered for miles, steep the boiling sea. Outlines, shadowed black on pavement, are all that remain of their lives undone.
Silhouettes of loss.
You know they could not have seen Great Grand Aunt sitting in the smoldering house where your bloodline was drawn, begging for water, crying for help. She brushes settling flies away from empty sockets, the taste of citrus and metal choking her throat. The poison radiation, invisible and silent, floods her muscles and invades her cells and severs the delicate ribbons of her DNA. And doesn’t this DNA live in me, you ask yourself, isn’t this spiraled inheritance somewhere in sponge of my marrow?
Well, isn’t it?
This must have all come later, you presume, when the pictures are published, and the articles are written, and the historians deem it necessary. You learned this in school. Little ol’ you with black hair and slanted eyes. You learned that it was necessary and that it was forgiven and that it saved countless lives. You learned it won the war. After all, your teacher nodded her head and said so.
Your classmates nodded their heads and said so.
But for now, as the projector clicks, and the mushroom cloud rises, you wonder about your family from Hiroshima on that hot day in August. You wonder about that moment when Family Friend clears their throat, and speaks.
Christopher Berardino is a writer of Japanese-American descent from Orange County, CA. He received an MFA in Fiction from Cornell University in 2018. His work has previously appeared in Flash Fiction, Blind Corner Literary Magazine, The Copperfield Review, FLARE, Pilgrimage, Beyond Words, and others.