“What are they doing alive?”
“Mostly they seem to be sleeping.” Little Boy tells what he’s seen so far: Bodies that from a distance seemed done with life, but, more closely observed, revealed themselves as dreaming, bleeding, faintly breathing, on a bed of any given thing, or dirt. Some also clutched knives, or bowls with jagged broken edges, or horseshoes, or broomsticks, or other improvised weapons. They warned him off. Some reached for him with shaking, open hands. When he offered his hand in return this was not what they wanted; they must have wanted food; his warmth stuck slightly to their cold skin as they tugged free.
One woman did not let him go. She pulled Little Boy close, so that he lay down beside her, huddled up into her core. Her legs were pinned beneath a heavy bookshelf. Her blood had soaked into the books. It tarred and clotted their pages, scabbed them over. She wrapped her working arm around him. Some time later that day, he couldn’t say when, she died. He stayed a little while after he knew. Then he left her, taking nothing with him from her home, though there were canned goods piled in another room. He would regret this later, and regrets it now. He could have fed his brother. He does not know the way back.
Fat Man asks him how he came to open the door.
“It was unlocked,” says Little Boy.
Fat Man tries on another expression—it seems to be surprise. He feels his face to know what he’s made. By hand he adjusts certain features. Now he seems surprised and saddened. Now he shifts them again, this time without his hands. He looks afraid. “We should go,” he says. “They could still come back.”
Little Boy says, “How do you think two brothers travel?”
“In this country?”
“Anywhere. Do they hold hands?”
“They might hold hands.”
“Do they go side by side, or does one lead the other?”
“Side by side, I would imagine,” says Fat Man.
“Do they speak or are they quiet?”
“I should think it depends on their mood.”
“May I walk by your side?” says Little Boy. “May I hold your hand? May we speak to each other?”
“I will not hold your hand yet,” says Fat Man. “I am not sure you are my brother.”
They walk side by side into the waste.
The sun is falling. The clouds are frayed like Fat Man’s sleeves. A black bird settles on a lamppost knocked askew. Ash lifts on a breeze, lilts this way and that, returns to the earth. Every building’s shadow is injured. They have holes in them, or walls are missing. Fat Man finds an empty can of food. Only a sweet brown smell remains. Little Boy finds three dry grains of rice.
They find two bodies knocked dead by impacts to their heads. Their faces are crushed beyond recognition. Their bodies slim and sexless. They lay side by side. One body’s arm flung carelessly across the other body. One body’s wearing sandals while the other’s feet are bare, and curled inward, as if the toes are reaching for their matching heels. If these bodies are brothers then this is how brothers die together.
Little Boy crouches to study them more closely. From inside them maggots come up and out for air—white studs in their skin become stunted worms. First six, then a dozen, then many seething. They eat through the bodies’ faces, they fall from their ears. Little Boy startles, cries out, jumps back. The maggots calm. Some lie still on the bodies like white cashews. Others die and shrivel. Others burrow back into the flesh.
There are no flies here.
The brothers leave those bodies. They leave that place. Little Boy imagines worms inside him. How it would be to see them bursting through his skin.
Fat Man asks him when they’ll find food. Little Boy says he doesn’t know. He says Fat Man needs to be calm. Fat Man says it’s been days since he’s eaten. He says, “If you were my brother you would feed me.”
The sun goes down. Things turn blue, gray, black. The brothers find a shadow on a wall. An image of a painter on a folding ladder. He has a bucket of paint in one hand, and in his other hand a brush. He reaches for the wall to apply the paint. The folding ladder is angled sideways so that Little Boy can see the gaps between the ladder’s steps like spokes in a wheel. The painter’s posture is stiff. The painter’s body is gone. The ladder is broken in half, there, on the ground.
Little Boy touches the shadow. Cold, like the rest of the wall. He can feel Fat Man’s eyes on him. There is a surge of heat through his body. He tries to rub it away but it won’t go away. He thinks how it would be to reach out with that brush but never touch the wall. He tries to rub it away but it won’t go away. Fat Man says he should leave it alone.
“We need to leave this place,” says Little Boy.
He means Japan.
They walk together side by side in the way that brothers might do.
Fat Man asks Little Boy how he was born. Little Boy says he will tell it.
HOW LITTLE BOY
WAS BORN
Little Boy woke alone, lying naked on his side, curled inward. It was quiet. The ground was hot. He was afraid. Pink and pale.
Soft.
He pushed himself up on his feet. Faltered. Tipped forward and back. There were no people there. He called out for help. The wind was gentle but he lost his voice in it. His throat felt dry. Inside his body, a strand of whisper that couldn’t get out.
There were crooked trees in the distance, black and pulled apart. There were ruined buildings far away. Everything close was rubble and dust. There were bits of wood and glass, and concrete powder on the air.
There was no one to see him standing there. No mommy. No daddy. He held himself and shivered.
He stood on a bald white depression.
Dozens of small fires burned in the wreckage. He walked forward. He needed away.
There was a cart wheel, there was a yoke.
There was a leveled home. There was the floor of the home.
Thin black smoke rose like a solid climbing thing, gnarled as the trees.
As he walked past the ruined home, bits of glass and wood and rubble pierced his feet. He left red footprints in the ash. It hurt badly. He didn’t know what to do. He was breathing ash. He was caked with ash. His lungs burned. There was no good air to breathe. A body burned black was on the ground. Its skin had all peeled off and lay in rags around it. Its sex was burnt away, leaving only a lump or a crease between the legs. The fingers were the same. They were nubs. Its teeth had all been shaken from its head. They were scattered in the dirt like seeds. He shivered. He held himself.
Stone walls spilled broken on the ground.
There was a woman in the dirt, shielded by the wall that crushed her head. He could see her through the cracks in the wall where it was broken, where it fell. Her blood ran downhill, the hill on which he stood. She gave more and more. He stumbled on through more bodies. He walked over a stone bridge, across a stream that was white from the dust. There was a baby smeared across the ground.
There were papers from a painter’s home, torn and weighted down by rocks, lumber, and dirt.
He came to a sapling. Stripped and blackened like the rest, with several broken branches hanging from its bough. It stood at a sad, sloping angle, pointing at the sun. It looked like a hair. A loose branch fell to land among the roots.
Behind the tree a standing wall. Ten feet high, not one foot more.
Only a section, the rest fallen and scattered.
Its edges rough, uneven like an old saw.
The window blown out, the glass