Death Rained from the Sky

They don’t like to talk about it, the older generation. I can understand why, it must have been a frightening, dangerous time. Still, I have questions. They say death rained from the sky, yet I wonder what it looked like. The sketches in the history books seem insufficient. How could such devastation be captured in a little two by four rectangle on a page? How can we teenagers grasp a devastation which laid waste to cities, leaving them uninhabitable for more than twice as long as we have been alive? Can we even grasp what this nation was before? It is hard for us who have always lived after it, to imagine a weather report without radiation levels attached to the wind. If it blows from the wrong direction, it is best to stay inside. Better yet, have your walls lined with lead. The roof too. Don’t forget about the roof.

My science teacher has us calculating the half-lives of different radioisotopes. It seems silly to review things we learned in junior high, when we are nearing graduation. I suppose it is merely to adhere to some government standard. All those calculations have drawn me to a decision.

It is no so far to one of the nuclear zones, no man’s lands, as they call them. I could borrow my mom’s car and be there, at the edge, anyway, in less than three hours. I have a Geiger counter stored away in my pack. They are easy to borrow from school. Nobody asks questions. I think the government wants people to use them, to keep checking, to reassure themselves.

I considered inviting one of my friends to come along, Maddie, but I would hate to see her get arrested, not that I expect to get caught. From what I hear, the border is not watched anymore. The boys sometimes go out there. I am not sure what they do there. Test each other’s manhood, I suppose. I have overheard them saying the fences have been broken down in most places and even the signs have been bleached by the sun. If you get caught, you can claim to be lost and unable to read the signs.

Time has moved on, passed those places frozen in time and those obliterated in the blink of an eye. The world has other problems now. It is too late to waste daylight mourning our losses of 40 years ago. We have moved on as well. Total annihilation might have been the fear then but it looks like foolishness to us now, as most fears do when you look back on them years later. They did not know we humans are much like cockroaches. Some of us will always survive in the cracks and crevices and the spaces between the walls. We find a way to go on.

Somehow knowing this much is not enough for me. I can’t shake it, like there is something or someone out there calling for me.

“Forget about the past,” my mother is always telling me. “Let it go. Move on.”

She was only a little girl then, younger than I am now. She can’t really understand.

My grandmother jokes that perhaps some of the radiation got into the water supply when I was young and it is fueling my obsession. Of course, that idea is preposterous. I know how thoroughly they check such things.

I am dogged by the feeling they, the history books, the politicians, our parents, are not telling me, us, our generation, the entire story, the whole truth. I am going out there, to seek the answers. I have to see it with my own eyes. I don’t know what I’ll find but I know I will never accept the reality of this world we’re living in until I have some answers.

Death rained from the sky, might explain it to a child but it isn’t good enough for me, not anymore.