The dying man says, “You can take anything you find.”
He dies a moment later, or ceases moving, pretending to die to make everything simple, to let the brothers do what they will. Fat Man feels the life leave his body or pretend to leave his body. They do not know they are permitted to search the home, but they search anyway. Fat Man finds a can of beans and works on it with a sharp rock for a while, first sucking the juices through the puncture and then levering it wider with what looks to be a metal drinking straw. Little Boy doesn’t ask for what he likely wouldn’t get. Instead he rifles through the household’s clothes, finding nothing that might fit his tremendous little brother.
“You’re going to be cold,” says Little Boy. “You could wrap some of their pants around your waist.”
Fat Man says they should leave. Little Boy says they should spend the night. There are mats to sleep on in the other room. Fat Man says they can’t sleep here or anywhere nearby.
“Why not?” says Little Boy.
“The tall soldier,” says Fat Man. “He might not be dead. He might blame me for his friend.”
“He won’t find us,” says Little Boy. “You can hide under a blanket.”
“Are you sure that’ll work?”
Little Boy says no soldier has ever found him while he was sleeping.
Fat Man yawns and stretches. “First thing tomorrow we have to get far away, though. We have to find more food. We have to get meat.”
Little Boy says they can do these things. He leads his brother to the mats and lays him down, covers him with a blanket, making a soft hillock, from which protrudes a pair of dirty feet. As he tucks in Fat Man, Little Boy sees what’s wrong with his brother’s palms.
“They’re black,” says Little Boy. He lays other blankets on his brother’s body—it takes three more to cover him.
“I know they are,” says Fat Man, the mound beneath the blankets.
“Not like mine,” says Little Boy. “Mine are white.”
“I know they are.”
Little Boy crawls underneath the blankets with his brother. He says this is what big brothers do when their little brothers are cold or afraid, or when they need comfort. He snuggles up against his brother, nestles his head into the doughy vastness of his brother’s side and breast.
Little Boy asks Fat Man how he was born.
Fat Man woke inflamed, and though his body caught he did not burn. The fire coated him like a gelatin. He was naked and alone. He was on his side, inward-curled. Soft. He felt himself, and felt his skin was hot, and felt the sweat seep. The sweat evaporated, it became steam. What a smell. He was a torch. He was a fat candle. With some effort, he stood. He was ankle-deep in the orange-white-black fuel of the fire—the city, the ruins. The heat an awful pressure. He could feel his eyes boiling in their sockets, his tongue becoming thick and dry like something dead. He began to walk. The coal that was a city crumbled beneath him, fell to ash and ember, sizzled his skin. He wandered through the fire, grasping with his steaming hands. What he wanted was a way out. What he wanted was a meal. He was already hungry.
There was a deafening wind converging on the center: on him. It made the blazes bow before the fat man: he saw the extent of the fire, squat buildings like toys, a library or cathedral with a dome’s blasted skeleton, burnt trees and some still burning, an Oriental arch of stone, upright, rigid. A corpse’s clutching, upward-reaching hand.
The roaring wind cooled and burnt his body, its crevices and extremities. His hair stood up from his head and danced and burned away. The wind became a vortex, then seemed to rise, and then was gone. The flames sprung up as tall as rearing bears. He tripped over his feet and rolled in the charcoal, screaming, though his throat was swollen shut. A sound like a kettle came out. He rolled down a hill. He hit his side on a black, burning tree stump. It collapsed, exposing bright orange coal, which hissed up against his back. Orange sparks like fireflies.
His insides pulsed and pressed against themselves. His lungs inflated like two blue balloons. His heart was like a dying dog curled up inside his chest. He struggled to his feet. There was a car, its wheels melted, lights blown out, roof destroyed, windshield broken, hood gone, mirrors gone, engine pieces melted. Seated inside, two bodies, cooked, perhaps a young couple, their heads forced to impossible angles, facing each other. Twisted this way, they seemed to look at one another. They seemed to watch. Their jaws broken, hanging loose inside their mouths like decorations.
He was coming to the edge of the fire, which crept over trails of shredded paper, wooden beams, and fallen trees like a tightrope walker. There was a man at the edge of the fire standing in what was left of his home, calling out. He was inaudible, his mouth was open. The walls were collapsed to knee-level heaps; there was a metal bowl fused to his chin. Other kitchen items littered the ground around him, and there was a table overturned. He wrung his hands in front of him, pleading. His skin fell off his body in sheets. It hung from his fingertips and swung like streamers as he moved his hands. There were other bodies in the waste, twisted by a cruel hand, riddled with grass and wood pieces. There was a dead cat at the foot of a lamp. There were two bicycles lying on their sides, dismantled, their tires pooled and steaming round the spokes. There were lead soldiers. There were ceramic dishes shattered. There was a spoon. There was half a public bench. There were someone’s keys. Having eaten the walls of his home and traveled the wooden table, the fire found the man whose skin bloomed from his body. It licked his feet and ate his ankles. He sunk to his knees. He watched himself sinking, looked down on the fire and saw where he would lay his head. Hands and arms in the flame, and the rest of him following inexorably as if tugged by his collar to bed.
Fat Man walked a long time after that. Slowly, the fire burning on him died and he began to feel his body.
He came to a tree. It was a tall, black tree. He put his hands on it. There was a pulsing heat inside. The hands sung pain. He pulled them back blackened, still singing. The three remaining branches—strong, solid limbs, which seemed to pour from the trunk—were aflame. They offered fire in outstretched hands. The trunk was split. Was burst open. Inside the cleavage, orange, scaly charcoal pulsed with life. A glow cancer, a barrier reef—it looked almost soft, as if it wanted him inside.
It spit sparks.
It groaned and sighed.
The heat of the tree pulled him in even as he tried to think of other things. He needed to climb inside.
He felt his face glowing orange in the tree’s light. His body calmed as he breathed as he breathed as he breathed. He ran his blackened hands over the bark, which pulsed white where it was thin—which flaked off, revealing the orange, the heat, inside.
“And before all that?” says Little Boy.
“I exploded,” says Fat Man.
Little Boy asks him how it was to explode.
“Like staring up into the night sky, not at the stars, but at the space between them.”
“It was,” says Little Boy, “like rubbing your hands together to make them warm.”
“It was like breathing in and in and in.”
“It was like drowning.”
“It was like my hunger.”
“It was peaceful.”
“It was deafening.”
“It was blinding.”
“It was being light.”
“It was pushing on a home as if to move it.”
“It was being a mountain.”
“It