Now Little Boy jogs backward, the better to see the swarm, which lilts as one fly lilts, now several feet lower, now several higher, now right, now left, some stragglers and some who go ahead, and here and there colliding—a tipsy weave. A seethe. Always angled so their eyes are on the brothers—compound eyes, like black jewels. Specks on specks.
Little Boy trips on something unseen, some piece of rubble, and tumbles. Fat Man stops to yank him up. The buzz of the flies is momentarily damped by a whistling gust of wind. Everything is quiet. The ground is covered in a fine gray powder, some smashed statue or wall. The powder, kicked up by the gust, enters their nostrils, burns in their throats.
Fat Man tries to catch his breath. Little Boy watches, helpless, as the swarm descends on his brother. They crowd his eyes and ears, his mouth—some seem to fly, quite intentionally, inside him—and crawl on his hands, his neck, under his collar, beneath his robe. He flaps his arms like useless wings.
“Brother!” calls Little Boy.
He picks up a road sign—something yellow, he doesn’t know what it means—and uses it to crush the flies on Fat Man, flogging his brother. Fat Man might tell him to stop if he could speak through the flies. Now the flies remember Little Boy and crawl over him also. He can barely see his brother’s shadow through the swarm. Reaches in, finds his brother’s wrist, and yanks. “Run!” he screams, tasting a fly. Fat Man struggles out again.
The flies have gotten old. They’re going gray. As the brothers flee, the swarm begins to fall. Landing in small puddles, in cups and bowls (some broken, some intact among the ruins of what were once homes), on cars with melted tires, on roads. Each fall punctuated by a sound, a small brittle dry snap, like the crackle of a fire: for every fly, the sound of one spark. Some pelt their backs and bounce away. Some land beneath their feet just as they’re stepping.
They slow again as the flies die all around them.
They breathe.
Fat Man chews what they left in his cheeks without seeming to know that he chews. Little Boy ignores the crunching sound.
There were families here once. The brothers can tell from the books that lie here and there in the streets, like bodies.
They can tell from the bodies.
HOW FAT MAN
WAS BORN
They don’t find anything. They can’t. They try to sleep but Fat Man’s rumbling keeps them up. They search the wastes. Fat Man takes a tube of flavorless toothpaste off the ground, rubs off ash with his fingers. The packaging is plain and white. The tube is half-empty, squeezed flat from bottom to middle. It curls in on itself like a rolled-up tongue. This is all that remains of somebody’s home. Fat Man looks to Little Boy. He says, “Do you think it’s safe?”
Little Boy says he’s not sure. He says, “I don’t think it’s food.”
Fat Man says he knows it isn’t food. “What I’m asking,” he says, “is whether I can eat it.”
Little Boy says toothpaste can’t be poison if you’re supposed to put it in your mouth. It might, however, be very bad for you, and it can’t taste good at all. Fat Man twists off the cap and drops it. He squeezes out the white paste along the length of his thumb. He sniffs the paste—smells nothing, nothing different from the taste of teeth and spit. He tips back his head and squeezes out the whole tube into his mouth. It fills his cheeks and throat, he nearly retches, but does not retch; he chokes it down. He drops the tube when it’s all gone. He wipes his mouth.
“That’s disgusting,” says Little Boy.
“It’s. Been. Days,” Fat Man says, glaring down at Little Boy. “Wait. I see a cricket.”
He runs away, kicking up ash and pebbles, heedless of his feet and the flapping of his robe. There is indeed a cricket poised perfectly still on the end of a curling iron pipe embedded in the dirt. He sinks to his knees and crawls toward the insect. He gets up close. It is still quite still. He opens his hands and prepares to clap, to clamp the little fiddler, which does not twitch, does not leap, sing, flutter. He squeals in triumph as he closes his fingers around this morsel and corks the cage with his thumbs.
The cricket does not struggle. Fat Man does not feel the expected frantic searching of his hands for exits. In fact he feels nothing. He opens his hands. The cricket stands unmoved at the curling pipe’s end. He pinches the dead thing and drops it down his gullet.
Little Boy asks if there is anything Fat Man doesn’t plan on eating tonight.
“You’re lucky I don’t eat you. I’m still hungry. I need meat.”
“There isn’t any meat,” says Little Boy. Fat Man says of course there’s meat. Little Boy says, “If you find it, that’ll be the first I’ve seen. It’s been rice and vegetables for me from the beginning.”
Fat Man says, “I see a home.”
The home he indicates is largely intact. It was sheltered by a stone structure, much of which stands, though the function of the building is unclear. It may have been a bank. The roof has been swept away. The home’s walls are torn, but they stand. Fat Man and Little Boy pick their way through the surrounding wreckage.
Inside there is a man on his back studded with all manner of shrapnel. Not only shards of glass, but blades of grass, which were blasted through the walls and his flank. They hang long and brown from his body. A bamboo pen protrudes from his gut. Slivers of wood bristle in his back and chest. His legs look fine but they don’t work. He looks like a father. If he is a father, his wife and children are dead, or he is abandoned. His mouth is white and scabbed from days of thirst. There is an empty flask by his side that let him live this long.
The man croaks. Fat Man is afraid.
“I don’t understand you,” says Little Boy.
“Maybe he’s thirsty,” says Fat Man. He paces the home, searching for water. There is an overturned pail in what might have been the kitchen. If there was ever water there, it is vaporized now. Fat Man goes back to the shrapnel man. Little Boy is trying to pull the grass from his arm. Instead, the blades break, and what threaded his flesh stays. The man watches Little Boy’s hands working without alarm. Fat Man says there is no water.
The man on the floor says, “I don’t know what happened.”
They don’t understand.
Little Boy asks him if there are any canned goods. Fat Man makes a motion like operating a can opener, pretends to lift the lid, mimes delight at the treats inside. Little Boy tells him not to be stupid.
The man says, “If you want, you can have my other clothing.”
Fat Man ransacks the kitchen or a room like a kitchen. There is a wooden container like a tall bucket with a thick lid. This, like the pail, has been overturned by the blast, and the lid is knocked loose. There is not enough rice to spill from the mouth. Fat Man has to reach in with his whole arm to pull a dry white moon of clotted rice from the bottom, where it huddles up against the inner wall. He eats the rice in seven bites. Little Boy comes in time to see the sixth. “No fair,” he shouts. “We’re supposed to share.”
Fat Man finishes the rice and licks his fingers. “You didn’t want the toothpaste,” he says, defiant, “or the cricket. How was I to know you’d want the rice?”
“Well,” says Little Boy, reminding himself that he’s supposed to be the big brother, “I guess you’ll let me have what’s in that bowl then.” There are two ceramic bowls on the low, wide table, with lids of the same material. One of them is shattered. Little Boy opens the one that remains intact and finds the cold dregs of a dish left unfinished, a salty fish broth with transparent peels of skin at the bottom. Fat Man seizes the bowl. As Little Boy calls his brother selfish, Fat Man takes the bowl to their host. He cradles the dying man’s head and presses the rim to his painful-dry lips. He thanks the fat man; Fat Man can tell. One of his eyes is