Fat Man and Little Boy (33 page)

this is what it's like to explode

 

The flesh flower sways. It must be one thousand feet tall. It is also like a mushroom cloud. Its stem built from braided arms. The mushroom cap at the top the bloom of the arms—their uncoiling. At the base of the flower, the bloat of Fat Man's greatly expanded torso, dotted with nipples, toenails, and massive, spongy moles, from which sprout huge feet like stone sculptures. These stabilize the structure, though not very well—it leans as if it might fall. It groans as it sways.

Ash falls from it like dander.

Little Boy begins to cry.

Little Boy witnessed the explosion, was searching for his brother when it happened. He now stands at the pool's edge, between Test Able and Test Baker, who also maybe weep behind their hands.

“He was right,” says Test Able.

“He shouldn't explode,” says Test Baker.

They stumble backward, parting their fingers slowly, and as they better see they leave more quickly—shouting, “Don't you explode either!”

They are back in their house and they've locked the back door. They turn off all the lights, running through the rooms, random windows blinking out, until their house is a silent giant towering over Little Boy just as does his brother, but empty, a jumble of dark stone and dark glass, whereas his brother is full. His brother. Somewhere in that. There must be something left of him.

They have to leave. They will be found. There was a moment where Little Boy didn't know what he would do. This now is the moment he knows what he'll do.

Little Boy goes down into the pool by way of the staircase, following his brother's blood. He is among the roots of his brother, or a root-like tangle, and it writhes against his ankles, pulsing. They are only skin. Though blackened as if charred, the char flexes; there is flesh beneath it. He mounts one of his brother's giant feet. Its char skin is fever hot; burns him through his shoes. The blood flows underneath. He crawls up to the ankle, which is stood on by another massive foot. He hoists himself up on his brother's toe.

Little Boy looks up. There is an opening in the stem of giant braided arms a dozen yards beneath the swell. He'll have to get up there. He comes to the trunk. These arms wide as redwoods are grown with many grasping hands, each one black-palmed, not merely char but really truly black. Each one his brother's. He takes his brother's hands. The hands take hold of Little Boy's feet to support him. They take hold of his calves, his shoulders, beneath his arms. They touch his cheeks. They help him climb.

The wind batters him. A tiny figure up so high. Sweaty hands pulling him by his hair, pushing up from under his feet. Full arms of normal size, but oddly shaped, as if taffy, as if boneless, extend from the trunk, lifting the hands, helping him.

When the wind blows hard, and it whistles like a coming train, and the trunk leans, and he hangs from the side, sick with fear of falling, the hands hold him so tight. The arms wrap around him. They keep him there, tucked against the trunk's unbearable heat, until the wind softens and the explosion rights itself.

Little Boy climbs.

There are hands of all sizes. They grow larger as he nears the top, the bloom, the cap, the unwinding—hands like sofas, hands like Mt. Rushmore. Small ones as well, like baby fists, like strawberries.

 

He walks along a finger like a bridge. The tip shaking beneath him, mere feet away from the fingers beneath. He has to leap.

He leaps. The world swirls.

The fingers curl upward to catch him. They squeeze him crushingly tight, and for a moment he is smothered, rolled up in their grip. There is a long instant he thinks they will crush him. Where he thinks that if he's crushed then he deserves it. They don't crush him. They unfurl. He finds himself at their edge; he could roll over one more time and fall to his death.

Instead he crawls along the fingers, down, into the breach.

Where it is black and red. Where the underside of skin is raw. Muscles like curtains. Growths of bone. Here the hands are skeleton claws, cruel bones, their palms as black as ever. The heat is incredible. Little Boy takes off his clothing. He leaves it at the threshold.

He descends into his brother.

Into hot breath. Total darkness.

The bone hands helping him down.

He crawls blind through a narrow, pressing tunnel.

Body caverns.

“Brother!” he calls. Echoes and echoes.

“Brother!”

There is a pulsing sound somewhere beneath.

There is a faint light.

Here the walls trickle blood.

It paints Little Boy red. Paints him sticky. Paints him hot. He pushes his way through a curtain of nerves. They light up where he touches. They sting. Shadows of hands like shadows of a jungle canopy crawl across his body. They warp and waver with his curves and divots. There is a chamber with a thousand lungs hanging from the ceiling, pumping air. Turning blue blood into red. Or some are iron lungs—black, largely inert, humming darkly. The light grows.

He sees, just beneath the flesh, hints of wire: ridges, protrusions, blinking lights, blue.

Now, past a loose internal sphincter, there is a chamber full of flesh sculptures, which resemble a painter on a ladder, but the painter's missing half his body, the half that held the can of paint, and which resemble a man lying on the ground, and the man's skewered with nerves and bone and other, and which resemble bodies flying backward from a force, arms and legs trailing, these suspended by wires, arms and legs dissolving, cold black spheres hanging also amid the bodies, only black spheres, only hanging, and there are bodies resembling a herd of pigs of increasing deformity, and resembling a family at a low dinner table, but the family's all bone, and resembling some hundred pairs of men holding hands, or fused there, which men are grown more thickly from the walls and floor and ceiling as the chamber becomes a passage, and Little Boy must crawl through them, between their legs or arms, and he is slicked with the gore that they seep at their surfaces, and there are more and more of these so that he has to climb through them, and they press on his body.

Until he is in a tight tunnel lined with large, sharp filaments of hair as wide around as his fingers. These make him bleed. His blood mingles with his brother's blood. The light grows more intense though it is narrowed to a distant, blinding point, circumference of a peephole, intensity of the sun. He feels its pinprick heat on his forehead.

“Fat Man!” he shouts. “It's Little Boy!”

“It's your big brother!”

His voice echoes as a voice might in a drum.

He shouts, “I'm coming for you!”

“We have to go!”

The sharp hairs retract into the flesh tunnel almost completely, so they are little studs, and do not pierce him too badly.

He comes to the tight pucker at the tunnel's end. Reaches through, both arms pushing to spread it open. To leverage against the flesh wall on the other side. To push his head through, and his shoulders.

He slides gore-slick through the hole, down the wall's gentle slope, onto the warm floor and into the light, which is cast by some soft blue harsh-glowing crystal, like a heart become quartz. The walls of the cavern—massive, more an amphitheater—are thickly bejeweled with some million open hands, blue in the blue crystal's light, with black palms made bruise-blue by selfsame light. They are here and there shelled with metal—black metal, silver metal—and it hangs from the ceiling, rotating slowly, reflecting the blue crystal's light. Pieces of bomb shell. There, in the far wall, a large hole in the shape of a mouth. Through the hole, Fat Man's face, speckled blue and red and yellow as if with some child's paints.

On closer examination, the hole is not a hole but a cell. The cell is set low in the wall, its floor several feet beneath the floor. Little Boy kneels to better see inside. Though lined with small white teeth, the cell's opening is barred by long arms, which extend from above and below, where lips should be, and clasp each other's hands. Fat Man is pushing his face through the bars. He puts his arm out through another gap. He reaches for his brother. Little Boy reaches for his brother's hand. There is no room for the fat man between the bars. Little Boy is looking for a weapon—a way to break the arms. He takes his brother's hand. The skin is soft like putty.

“I'm here,” says Little Boy.

The skin hangs loosely from his brother's arm like lichen. Little Boy perceives, beneath the skin, his brother's bones. His knuckles, wrist, and elbow. Inside the cell, Fat Man is huddled. Though the skin remains, the fat is gone. His stomach skin hangs around his hips like a skirt. The skin of his legs pools at his feet. The fat is gone. The hollows of his face are deep and darkest blue. The hollow lines between his ribs. The dimples in his knees. Only the excess skin suggests what he has been.

Fat Man no more.

Fat Man and Little Boy
is the inaugural recipient of The Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize, an annual award given to a previously-completed manuscript that comes with $5,000 and a Black Balloon Publishing book deal.

This contest has no reading fee and is open to anyone who has previously completed an unpublished original work of fiction of over 50,000 words.

We dedicate this prize to Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, a man who defied convention at every turn. A one-eyed, one armed lunatic genius who never gave up, he began his military career fully intact, but eventually lost his right eye (Corsica, 1793) and his right arm (the Canary Islands, 1797) in battle. He refused to wear an eye patch over the wound and used it to deliberately ignore a direct order from a superior officer during the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, coining the phrase “turning a blind eye.” When egomaniac and noted short stack Napoleon attempted to use our beloved balloons for evil during the 1798 Battle of Aboukir with a “military balloon corps,” Nelson immediately destroyed the approaching objects, putting a permanent stop to the short-lived European militarization of these symbols of wonder. Our hero.

Like Nelson, we believe in relentless creativity and perseverance against all odds.

Are you the next literary Horatio Nelson we're looking for?

Check
blackballoonpublishing.com
for your chance to enter.