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Worse Games
To Play
voice he uses when he is trying not to be overheard. You ignore the
mask of ill-concealed worry on your mother’s face as you watch her
out of the corner of your eye, the harsh set of her lips and crossed
arms. Because right now, everything is perfect. The man on
television doesn’t say so. But here, safe in your Daddy’s arms, it is.
’
Today, when you skip down the cobblestone streets, something is
different. The usually lazy, amicable murmur is frantic and incessant.
Grown ups stand in tight-knit circles, faces pale and taut. People
stare at each other for moments too long, a million words conveyed
in a single glance. Newspaper sellers line the street and, not for the
first time, you are desperate to read. The letters jump out at you. You
see letters that forms words you don’t recognize, long, complicated
words that scream at you in bold fonts. You recognize the final word
and that is enough. Four letters. Bomb. You think of your little
games in the alleyway, of the broken metal can and you shiver. You
reach down to thumb through the pages of the newspaper and your
blood runs cold. Words are meaningless now. The pictures before
you speak for the volumes you could not read.
You see the twisted, burning red. The white of dead skin hanging
in sheets off bodies. Eyes fallen out of sockets. Limbs contorted, or
worse, gone entirely. Shoulders melting into arms. And
bodies. Piles and piles of them, lying lifeless in the streets, mere
shadows of the people they used to be. Elderly, children and
impossibly tiny infants.
You don’t want to play anymore. You walk home, your feet
trudging slowly down the cobblestones. You think of the families, of
lives ended mid-sentence. Of children walking to school, oblivious
and innocent. You cannot comprehend this atrocity, this catastrophe
that you cannot yet understand the justification for, that no one
bothers to tell you why. All you know is an endless number: lost
mothers and fathers and children, lying dead in the streets. Some,
obliterated entirely, a shadow the last trace of their existence.
Most of all, you think of the telegrams. You imagine a thousand
yellow pieces of paper, floating in the wind. A story cut short, a tale
of lost time, a bustling city of life turned hell. You wonder how a
single piece of paper can convey such heartbreak, such tragedy and
emotion, and you mourn for the lost souls. Tonight, they sleep with
the angels.
’
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