Radiation Children

5

The Ancestor Song begins like this: 

Ancestors of great and old, 

We ask for your kindness to come and behold 

Us with open arms and gleeful grace. 

Ancestors of peace and love, 

We ask that you guide us from above. 

It's a cheesy, watered-down version of a more eloquent Iroquois lullaby that's been passed down from my Dad's great-great-great-grandmother. The words themselves were drowned out by the skull-cracking explosions and Lucia's fearful shrieks, but my lips were on Lucia's ear and I made sure that she could feel the shape of each word of the Ancestor Song as my mouth formed them. 

The light went out. 

The darkness was concrete, tangible. Everything was black, and darkness this thick has a murderous, monstrous feeling that my body recoiled against. I could feel little fingers coming out of this darkness, inching into my socks, seeping through my jeans and shirt, trying to pry apart my jaws. I told Lucia to close her eyes, told her that we would go to sleep and in the morning we would wake up and there would be light. It was a stupid lie, but it felt good to say.   

It took her a long, long time to fall asleep. I held her hand, felt her sobs ebbing, sang her the Ancestor Song over and over again. The explosions above decreased to muffled crackles, like distant thunder. Lucia's breaths evened out. In the darkness, with her hand stowed safely in mine and her little body curled up into my torso like a cat's, I cried myself. I cried for Markus, for Mom and Dad. For Luka, for the world. My sobs were quiet—the darkness sucked them up—but I cried myself to sleep, too.

The world was changing, breaking, shattering. 

***

I promised Lucia light. 

I woke up before her sometime later. I slid out from beneath her, laid her head gently against the foul-smelling sofa cushions, and fumbled through the darkness for the box of matches that had been on the table earlier.

 The world was quiet, quiet.

Before, nothing was ever truly silent; there was always the hum of a refrigerator, the giggle of the next-door neighbor's six-year-old son, the constant intertwined song of summer birds and insects, the rumble of cars on the street—but now everything was silent. And this silence was not just quiescence, but absence. There was nothing...not above, not below, not in this small space. No cars rumbling down the highway. No giggling children or talking adults. No ever-present frequency of the electromagnetic pulse. The air was like a vacuum that sucked in noise and left the rest of the world gasping—it was infuriating, numbing. 

My fingers found the matchsticks scattered across the floor. A moment later, my hands closed around the matchbox. I struck one of the matches against the box, and a dim yellow glow burst into existence. I lit the nearest candle, and used that light to light the remaining candles on the far side of the room. By the time I'd finished, the entire shelter was aglow and warm. The candles flung wicked constellations of shadow-light patterns across the floor, and I sat with my knees up against my chest, my back to the crooked row of candles, and watched those shadows waltz up and down the sloping concrete walls.

I pulled out Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and read until I fell asleep.  

***

Time is a strange, strange thing when you have no watch and you rely on candles for your source of light twelve hours a day. 

Both watches and candles turned out to be a large problem during the time Lucia and I were in the storm shelter.