A City of the Dead

I never saw it drop. I never saw the flash. I never experienced that moment of inexplicable terror. I was lucky that way. I often wonder if they saw it. If my little brother stared with wide eyes as the wave engulfed him, if my father had enough time to think of us before he died, if my mother felt the grief for what was to come for all of us. Yes, I was lucky that way.

If having your entire world ripped away from you isn't cruel enough, its being told it's going to happen before it does that's even crueler. You see, at the time of Hiroshima, I was asleep.

Some survivors of the bomb could accredit their survival to a split second decision to dive behind one shelter or another, or they could at least look back on a series of events that led to them surviving. But I can say with absolute and complete certainty that I survived because of sheer, dumb luck.

At 8:12 in the morning, I was sound asleep in my bed. My house was approximately 15,280 yards from the center of the blast, which meant that had I been awake, I would have had a few precious seconds to bask in the horror of the bomb. At 8:15 the bomb dropped. Seconds later, I was violently jarred awake by the huge sound wave that tore through my one-story home and sent the roof crashing down on me. It all happened faster than my sleep addled brain could process. To be honest, I probably thought it was a dream at first.

Or maybe, a nightmare.

It took my brain a few minutes to figure out that I should have been lying comfortably in my bed and not on the hard concrete in front of my house. I remember staring at the clouds, trying to figure out why I couldn't get up. A few minutes later, or maybe it was longer, enough perception and sense returned to my body that I was able to turn my head side to side. It wasn't until I was staring at the burning rubble of my destroyed neighborhood that I actually understood what had happened. We had been bombed while I was asleep. As soon as this thought crossed my mind the fog that had been clouding it suddenly cleared.

The first thing that came to mind was my family. I had to figure out if they were okay.

I went to stand up, but to my utter astonishment nothing happened. I remember lifting my head up and staring down at my prone form, waiting for it to respond to my commands but little did I know, it never would again. Even a year later, I wouldn't be able to so much as twitch my smallest toe.

I remember starting to cry angry tears when I realized I couldn't move. I didn't know then that I had been paralyzed from the shoulders down, but I knew that something had to be horribly wrong, as if my surroundings weren't enough of an indication.

"Ido! Ido! Move!" I yelled at my own body. I remember vividly the anger, frustration and desperation pooling into a hard, knotted ball in my gut. I didn't understand how my own body could betray me like that. How was I supposed to do anything if all I could move was move my head? What if no one found me? What if I just laid here until I died? The questions overwhelmed me then and my angry tears turned into sobs. 

As I cried, I tried to crane my neck around so I could see all around me, but it was hard. The air was thick with soot and dust from all the collapsed buildings and I knew that smoke from wildfires would join soon. Eventually, a distorted figure stumbled across my vision. They were cloaked by a thick layer of smoke and things burnt.

"Hei! Tasukete! Hey! Help me!" I yelled to the figure. The smoky form stumbled forward a few steps but it didn't head towards me. Instead it went towards a pile of rubble a few meters away. "Please," I plead again, "Tasukete!" But the person must have been deaf or in shock because they ignored my cries for help, and in a moment they were gone.

Over the next few hours I screamed my throat raw. Countless groups of injured and dazed people moved past me, but no matter how loudly I yelled my voice always seemed to fall on deaf ears. At one point I wondered if perhaps no one could hear me. What if the blast wave had blown out everyone's ears except mine? The thought was absurd, but at the time it had seemed perfectly logical to me. No one knew anything about the bomb that had just been dropped. Only that it was powerful. Only that it destroyed.