She stumbled her way drunkenly out of her crumbled tomb hoping to find fresher air and help. She found none. Her dark eyes watered as her heart brimmed with fear. But she gritted her teeth and stood back up, her subtle brown hair flowing over her shoulders as she realised her situation. She was going to die. She could feel it, her head was throbbing with the effort to stay awake, and alive. But she wasn’t thinking of this for more than a second, she was thinking more of blue, of blue skies, about a dove in a deep never ending blue.
She looked up at the white moon and its scarred face. For the first time in her life she felt her god. She didn’t know it was him, but her subconscious drove her. She began to walk on, her torn dress flowing over the rocky ground and enveloping her feet. Her path wasn’t clear to her, yet she never stumbled.
‘Don’t wanna wait,.. till tomorrow,.. why put it off, another day,… one by one new problems,… till nothing can stand in our way,….fuzz… Now you gotta run, … to get even, come on turn,.. turn this thing around, .fuzz. right now…….’ The radio crackled out and stopped as its last energy burned away. Silence now embraced the room, like a cold chill, seeping through the windowless walls. The ceiling was cracked and fragments had fallen from it littering the floor and leaving a layer of dust on the table and the now dead radio. It’s last listener cried in his hopelessness. The irrelevance of its last message churned inside him. He knew he could do nothing, he couldn’t see.
The sun was rising in the east, in front of the harbour, the light awakening the faces of the dead. It had been easier to walk in the darkness for the lone girl. She was almost to the edge of the city. The charred faces still stared at her, yet there were less here than in the centre of the city, they still disturbed her, like a mad voice pulling her to join them. She was almost crying while she was walking. Ahead of her lay flattened crops, now unusable with lone huts scattered throughout the plain, the whole place was throbbing with radiation. 2 miles was between her and the mountain ridge that swept out to sea. Making one side of the bay of Hiroshima. She was heading for the other side of them; maybe if she got there her slowing mind would clear.
She trudged through the shallow water, with the mud clinging to her feet like wet cement. At 11, by her own reckoning, the girl reached the last hut just before the incline got rocky. The ridge top was 900meters away and tipped in low mist. Small angled trees bloomed out of the old giant, in specks across its rocky face, their leaves were burnt and their branches arched back. A boulder rested half buried in the side of the mountain, with a skeletal tree rooted under its shade, the girl joined it and started to scrape the mud off her shoes, almost collapsing with the minimal physical effort. The door of the hut creaked open an inch. Any sound other than her own feet and throbbing head was foreign to her. She lolled her head to it, confused, her dark eyes squinting with curiosity. Her almost zombic state contemplating over the unfamiliar sound.
Chiang blindly fondled the air towards the sound of movement outside. His hand clipping the door. His attempt to stay quiet failed and he panicked over his own patheticness. He had stared in the face of horror and been blinded by it. Its image permanently imbedded in his mind, he was scared. He had had no contact with anyone for hours and feared that those that had bombed his city would come and finish off the survivors. He froze in his fear, like a shot of liquid nitrogen was stabbed to his heart. After a moment that felt like an hour, he remembered to breathe. He stepped back, shivering….
The silence made him nervous, his blind mind playing tricks on him, without sound there was nothing for him. He felt thrown into a void, with no entrance or exit, just darkness. Raw terror quaked his bones, he couldn’t move, this unfamiliar blackness eating away at him. Deathly silence encased him like a shell, closing in on him. He felt hopeless, doubting even the afterlife’s sanctity. He didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. The stagnant wind finally decided to move, through the hut door and brushed the blind man’s senses. His shell was lifted and replaced with curiosity. He tapped, still cautiously towards the wall, and followed it out the door. His first blind steps were timid he followed the incline upwards towards the nearby tree. He paced timidly and reached an unfamiliar shape, he thought it was a root of the tree and wondered if his remembered image was accurate, he knelt down and felt, his hands travelling over the cold body.
Paul Jefferyes 11E
