The Atomic Bomb

The end of the world will be at eight fifteen in the morning, on August sixth. That’s the long and short of it. The air won’t taste differently, the sky will be blue—or overcast, or cloud-strewn, the weather will be no different than ever before. Alarm clocks will go off, children will go to school early and play in the gardens. Doctors will be administering their doctoring, a child weak with fever—skin smelling strongly of sweat, bedding damp around them—or a nurse sterilizing knives one by one by one by one. Her hat is at a cocky, flirty angle because she was alone when she put it on in front of her mother’s mirror. Women will sit by their husbands, watching them read the newspaper as their children play at their side. Paddy cake, paddy cake, baker’s rye. The newspaper is folded over itself, but still thin because he has been giving her the sections he’s finished with. Bank tellers will just be counting the money out for the day and brewing the complimentary stale, weak coffee and setting out the stale, dried out cookies. Napkins, cream, one kind of sugar substitute, red plastic stir-sticks. Outside on the street, a bus driver will be stopped briefly—looking left to safely make a right turn.

And then the world will end. 

Immediately and completely, all humanity will go out of the world. A bright, Godly light will come over the hill. So bright that turned away with your eyes shut, it comes through the back of your head and you can still see it. You see God. You see God and He is terrible. The light is hot, so hot that the sweat that jumps to your skin will evaporate immediately. Your flesh will start to burn, and with that you finally turn to meet your Unmaker. This is not a creator God, because no one ever sees their Creator when they die. 

They see their destroyer, a God of Death. You realize slowly as the cloud goes up that the world has ended. Not just for you, you realize as that cloud goes up faster than your eyes can track as you get used to the heat. This is the end of all things. No person will ever live in the innocence of a drawn-out death, no one will go to sleep in one of the bunkers knowing they may die in a bomb-blast. As a black, roiling cloud follows that bright, beautiful light, and before it buildings, trees, cars, and people explode as they fall. 

You don’t close your eyes. 

To close them would be to hope. The prayer to meet a Creator demands to be made, but to close your eyes would be to hope for that. Nothing will survive this wave, the world is ending. There would be nothing to create with after that black cloud hits you. Perhaps not everyone saw that light in their bones, and perhaps not everyone will be shredded before that inky line. But the world has ended, so you don’t ask those questions too hard. 

The doctor and the bus driver and the nurse die instantly. You have become a god of death yourself, you realize, for only one such as that would know of and understand their deaths. They are your elder fellows because their eyes were turned toward that light the moment it struck the earth—they knew far more intimately and simply the fate of the world. That it was over. The bank tellers die slower. The shrapnel in the black destruction came from their suffering as the wooden paneling on the brick walls came apart—peeling away from the walls slowly, splinters careening towards them at the inexorable speed of adrenaline. The splinters move just slow enough for their eyes to widen, whites visible the whole way ‘round—and screams curdle in throats while sluggish hearts endeavor to pull reluctant muscles in frozen arms to protest such a sudden, horrific death. 

And then the bodies are gone, and they join you after their death-throes. 

The slowest to die are the children and the family. The family’s house is entirely collapsed above them, the whirlwind of black death shoveling more debris above them. They slowly suffocate, their awful cries to each other—of comfort, remorse, and love—strengthening the effect they will have over the world as it ends. Their bodies will be found unrotted, corpses preserved in that airless and cold cavity of their home. The children in the gardens are swept, still alive—still breathing, still fighting, still half-heartedly wondering if this is a continuation of their game—and are never seen again. 

Their world, your world, the entire world. It all ended. It ended on August the Sixth, at eight fifteen in the morning.