Hiroshima My August Apology by The Atom

Recently I watched a documentary about Hiroshima, not in preparation for the 70th anniversary of the World War II bombing but because I like documentaries and as an amateur chemist and physicist, I have a keen interest in nuclear fission. I am especially fascinated by the phenomenal energy inherent in our universe, inherent in the fabric of space-time, inherent essentially as a kind of cosmic and very deadly fire.

I don't know who could watch this BBC documentary and not be touched by the devastation. This morning as I read the news online I came across this thread in the New York Times, where people can submit their own theory as to whether the bombs needed to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I certainly am no military buff and could not, in the 200 words allotted by the Times, persuade as to why the bombings were not necessary. But I had already, after watching the BBC documentary and then a trailer for Hiroshima Mon Amour, decided to write a short story from the perspective of the underlying power inherent in the atom. Why not ask it how it feels about what it did, I thought.

This story comes in the way of an apology as told by the atom that did the dirty work at Hiroshima. It is written down by an interpreter, an entity- let's call it an alien sentience -who is charged with writing a history of planet Earth for its people. The only information this intelligent being has about our world is a radio transmission of the trailer Hiroshima Mon Amour.

I have watched the trailer and not the movie, and I thought it would be interesting to posit someone trying to understand Homo sapiens through this fragment of our culture. One key thing this being would share with us is the elemental universe, meaning the periodic table of elements. And since quantum physics in many ways posits the underlying, and rather intelligent union, of the subatomic, I thought why not have this alien talk to the atom itself that first split inside Little Boy through the movie trailer? In fact, why not talk to the atom through a bouquet of bottle caps as imaged in the trailer?

And so, I titled my short story 

A Bouquet of Bottlecaps

It starts like this:

My name is Uranium. Also pitchblende. Darkly lustrous, daggery in gemstone, I inherit the virile awakening of energy. I am the blackberry-like, electrical tongue of the swallowing serpent binding what makes us all and destroys into a nothingness that cannot go away. I am the atom, the dark mother, and I apologize. I apologize for the ecstatic topology inherent in my nucleus, and I apologize for the T-shaped bridge, which made it so easy to find you. I apologize for the bouquet of bottle caps. Hiroshima, I am the black rain you drank, and this is my August Apology.

Meriot reviewed the journal entry he had just written on behalf of the atom speaking to him. He was the historian assigned to the planet Earth, with which he was only familiar through radio signals that had been netted by his world’s radio vacuum system. These had been designed to enfold the radioactive waves that undulated through his solar system from the angry black flares of his native sun. But they had begun picking up informed transmissions in the past years, and he was one of many who took it upon themselves to catalog the information and make sense of it.

Meriot was, in the terrestrial human language, an animist, as was common in his culture. His people had cracked the code of nature’s language some epochs prior and discerned that the fabric of space and time, like a conscious chiffon, was speaking to them in static whispers, hushing consonance and even in the lukewarm froth of pop culture's voices. Earth’s transmissions were collected and collated like leaves wrapped around a woody stem, except in this case the leaves were melted, metallic bottle caps. In this fashion he carried with him a “book” about Hiroshima. And this book, he understood, wanted to apologize.

Hiroshima, I am the soda pop you did not drink from the bottles that were never capped, and this is my August Apology.

Thanks for stopping by Salemwire. Find out more about my writings at www.metapulp.com.