Short Story: The Expeditionary From Hiroshima
This short story has been entered in theSprout Short Story Competition.
Upon a February day I lay like a vulture upon the bitter winter wind that had bitten the ground; torn leaves from the trees, stripped them naked and dying and still. A winter wind had transfigured the forest into a mass grave of vertical, twisting corpses, splattered with the brown of wet mud. The Sun was sad and crying for its distance from the Earth and, like an abandoned bride, placed its fingers of despaired white upon my back. Far off in the wilderness, animals slept: bears, foxes, rabbits. But the dead creatures walk among their sleeping bodies, building upon them.
The night was dark for I was alone. The hustle of those men and women on lone trajectories painted the lights of street-lamps with the ever-changing ribbons of ants and I muddied up a moonlit sky. A dog screeched in pain. A car barked in anger at another. Twin headlamps ushered cones of light to their destinations. People were inside them and the radio (“For better car insurance”, “For better sex”, “For a fun night out”) made them hungry.
Rising greys and the ranks of windows made the wind a rushing nuisance in the valleys that ran between the buildings. People were inside them and their walls made them perhaps a bit more hungry. I remained stationary upon these homes.
When you reach the right part of a city you will find the masses. Grains of sand milled about the assorted dance-halls and castaways threw themselves into taxi-cabs. Sometimes the grains would change shape and become elongated, spread out on the city-floor and passed out from their own pleasures. Eventually the blue lights would arrive to haul the elongated ones into their midst and regular grains would resume their ordered chaos while sounds tumbled into the sky. Trees creaked right and left in the runaway wind while those frustrated men, who could not find anything in this world, beat their fists upon bark, howling so everyone could hear, sometimes crying. I cried too. I spilled my tears downwards, tipping the scales and ending the night prematurely.
The masses went inside any way they could. They had glasses of water before they went to bed and smiled at their own comfort or ignored it. Broad boards of plastic and wood, emblazoned with colourful images and letters, gave them more reasons to smile, more things to ignore. Probably they got a bit hungry too.
The lonely Sun had long departed this place as the light-shows ceased. It was now possible to track individual lights slowly creeping along the cemented tracks. I found the time to wonder what could be found underneath these roads that could bear such intense loads of a routine such as this. If there was once forest here it had been murdered for the purpose of supporting this ever-growing population of suffocating sand. Not only them, but their behemoth dwellings that rose high like impossible monsters. Inside these monsters were persons dreaming of their ambitions, their fears and their wants and getting so unbelievably hungry that they couldn’t bear it. The horns of the cars roared into the night but the only answer that came was another roar. Then a bird sounded out and a battle between day and night began on the horizon.
Among the battlements of night was a rectangular space, a place abandoned by lights, instead decorated with rows of trees in the nude.
Down in the park it was not a specified time on the clock, but a moment that could not be captured in any dimension. They were not aware that I was watching them but that was fine for I had now changed colour in the light to become splendidly magenta.
On a bench designed to fulfil a quota, there were two people sitting there, their hands in each other’s. I could just make out the slipping and sliding of fingers around the fingers of another. There were no lights flashing, no impossible attainments, just the light of the morning Sun. The digits of two human beings seemed to be the fully expressed, the exquisitely detailed. A morning star too far to spot, too far to track against the black.
Why, why was there no sense of the limit, no time, no reason. The couple rested in the midst of a screaming city, dead centre, exempt from the notion that they were the sum and combination of a world where more means more, yet doesn’t mean more (if you follow me). There was no sense of impending bad upon good, there was just a sense of one person with their hand on another person. Their touch made them people.
In the dramatic defeat of night, at the hands of daylight, a boy and a girl stood up from their seat among the battered and defeated ranks of wood and plastic alike and they touched their blood red lips to each other’s, while the bridal Sun peeked out from under the world and asked “Is it over?” I smiled and returned to the sky, engulfed in her light. I had no choice, the wind blew upwards. The wind sometimes blows upwards, you have to deal with that.
The air changed and I felt a strange sense upon me as my body surrendered its ties and drifted apart. Droplets of what had once been me drifted further and further away, I suppose the conditions weren’t right, this was a cycle and it had happened before. This however did not change anything and as I hurtled down into the city that I had observed, I watched my brethren slam headfirst, gasping, into the brickwork and mortar, pretending that they were all dead when in reality I knew that this was just the nature of things and they were alive.
I drained into the sewers among the filth and waste of the world where I saw those same worshipped logos of culture from up above, here among the run-off. I wondered why human beings did not just satisfy their hunger in the sewers. I was deposited into the ocean when the pipes ran out. I drifted in the ocean like some piece of wood. Then I was picked up again, a redemption. I evaporated into the sky. The cycle from ground to sky had repeated many times over the many years that had separated me from my first time. The day of my creation.
They wrote of it as an indiscriminate killing of men and women; my birth. A bright light, brighter than anything man-made before it. It burned human-kind. Melted their eyeballs right out of their skulls and blinded them. Burned them alive. My birth razed the walls and cars and all that sand off the ground and uncovered what lay underneath as people died painfully and slowly. Years later I recalled an instinct built into me by engineers and heard whispers in my ear about what had happened. I was no great decision. I was born of just another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. A beautiful cloud.
IMAGE: old town drafting
