Short Story
The bombs fell splatteringly, like rain. They were tiny little raindrops at first, slipping out and down from the dark and ominous clouds of the unfeeling metal planes. Then they fell more jarringly, like a downpour, a downpour that beat down on the earth weakly, like a tempestuous child beats down at a grave and silent adult.
The shells, which were actually bullets from rotating muzzles of machine guns, smote the tiny town in angst, were converted into compressions and rarefactions in the vibrating air, and travelled far and wide through air and metal and bitumen, refracting and diffracting, and finally passing through the frail brick walls of a certain underground cellar and transmitted as demonous sounds to the little kid cowering all alone under his favorite wooden table.
He hoped the table would save him; he was sure in his belief that it could.
The bombs fell like rain because that was the only way it had been described to him by others.
Like rain, they had said, like fire and brimstone being poured from hell, and so on.
But he had never seen or experienced a real air raid before, and so had no idea of the magnitude of it, and hence had no idea that the machine guns rattling and tattling away were not shells or bombs but plain old gunfire. And he also had no idea that that was weird. That it was weird to have the air raid sirens go off and be met with, not hellish rain, but with cold nozzles and coppery death.
In the evening, the cats had slept so peacefully, snuggled in their ignorance, oblivious of the war. Now, they burned. And that was weird as well, for gunfire to burn. But it was not gunfire that burned, but shells and bombs from planes and bombers.
The first shell struck in a fountain of angry red, exploded on impact, and sent a fireball of fire and balls of earth careening outwards in an accelerating expansion much like the universe’s.
Metal and fire, fire and metal. Metal crashed down in a stupendous rain and smote innocent houses and the innocent lives they housed; came flying down amidst the blaze and inferno on paved streets and unpaved, mud ones, and on the forests and yards and gardens and churches and bell towers. They fell thunderingly, crashing down in their cold, reflective, inertia-bound manner, and as they crashed, they sent earth and sound showering outwards throughout the village and beyond.
And the bombs. The bombs fell and fell, they impacted and exploded, and impacted and exploded, and impacted and exploded. And the village burned and burned.
The boy in the cellar saw nothing but felt it all. Felt the reverberations of the unworldly explosions go through him, wave after jittering wave, felt them ebb and intensify, felt them from all directions, overtaking one another, going over one another, meeting and coalescing into superpositions until he felt as though he were one vibrating uncomprehending standing wave of incomprehensible fear.
The bombs fell and rattled, and rattled and fell, and the trees and houses and people around burned. They burned, and burned, and burned.
The kid crouched deeper under the table, clutching at his chest, yelling into himself so that the resonance inside his heart would stop. He clutched at his heart and mind, clutched at the image of war he had created for himself, one that was both adult and immature, both romanticized and uncannily insightful, and found nothing.
The bombs burst in his yard and in the yards of everyone in the universe. Each moment, his understanding of the situation grew, and with it, so did his fear. He looked, wide-eyed, above his head for God, and found the underside of the table, and took comfort from it.
The maelstrom of metal and metal bombs was first in his mind a splattering rain, then a stormy one, and then it was a culmination of all the evil he had known in his little, young world. The planes were Satan, and the wings of the planes were seething red, and the fire they dropped was steel rulers, bullies with steel rulers, bullies giving wedgies, fire, hunger, red-eyed rats, and all that was bad and evil in all the cartoons that had ever made an impression on him.
A streak of shrapnel hurtled out of a nearby explosion and stabbed deep and irreparably into the house, depositing nearly all its energy into a shockwave that tossed the little boy under the table and sent him screaming.
All at once, the world around him changed, and he saw the rain of bombs no longer as all things evil. All things evil could be fixed, whether by superheroes, or by intervening teachers or priests or exterminators; the world around him could not be.
The boy screamed and screamed at the village around him that was now all things terrible. It was all things that could not be fixed. It was death, it was demons. The planes were now ugly crows that cawed and dropped from their talons ghosts and demons and the goblins inside his closet and the thieves that stalked his rooms while he slept and they fell with thundering bangs that were the thunder of violent lightning storms that left in their wake precipitous heights and holes he could not climb out of. The explosions of the bombs were the shrieks of his dog as it lay dying, twitching and mangled on the road, and the thuds of the metal and trees where the shouts of his parents fighting and the condemnations of his teachers and principals.
He yelled. He yelled and yelled until he was hoarse and always he tried to yell louder and louder because he could not hear himself yelling and that scared him even further. He yelled for his parents and for God and for the bomber crows to fly away and leave him alone and for his elders to take him out of this hole and into level ground that was flat and solid and did not shake.
But yell as he may, the terrible things in the world and in his village would not stop. Until they did, momentarily.
With a last bang, the last bomb exploded, and the formations of planes flew whirring away from above the village, their ammo expended, and back into their territory.
For the little boy, the demons suddenly stopped shrieking, and he knew not whether they were gone or just waiting for him in a new, silent variety of hell.
So he waited under the study table in the sturdy cellar, weeping, stunned, and uncomprehending. Scared out of his wits, almost scared out of his skin, with the aftershocks of the bombing echoing inside him like a searing wound that has only recently been relieved.
In due time, the knob of the cellar door twisted, and the little boy turned to face it because that was the only thing in the world then that he found himself capable of doing. The knob turned because he had left it unlocked, and he had berated himself earlier for doing so because he had feared the demon bombs and ghost shrapnel could get at him more easily if there was no lock.
The door unlocked, and he screamed at the door because he had been screaming all the while, screaming through the bombing, screaming, even though he had stopped realizing it, after the bombing had ceased, and continued screaming, as soldiers burst into the cellar with their machine guns cocked and loaded and firing.
He screamed and went on screaming. Whether it was this screaming, we can never know, or whether it was the uniform that little boy wore, or because the soldiers were all hot-headed and stunned and untethered from reality.
The boy screamed and screamed without realizing what was happening, and the soldiers fired rounds from their machine guns without realizing what was happening. The screaming stopped and so did the gunfire, all at once; but it was not at once, not simultaneous. The gunfire only stopped half a second after the screaming, and the soldiers were too late in realizing what they had done, and they diverted the smoking barrels of their guns ineffectually, unable to prevent what had already transpired.
As the boy stopped screaming, he was simultaneously the little boy, almost still a baby, who wore his father’s old service uniform for the little games he played with his young mother, and simultaneously the little boy who had been drafted in the army unawares and given a uniform he didn’t know how to wear properly and a gun he hadn’t learn how to fire properly and sent to fight other little boys in different colored uniforms in various villages that all looked to him exactly like his own.
The soldiers who had killed him looked at him pitifully, and did not know which one of the two boys he was, and had no way to find out, because the wave function hadn’t collapsed even though Schrodinger’s box was open and bleeding before him.
But despite that, despite it all, the cat was now dead. It had been killed, shot dead for sleeping in the afternoon, snuggled comfortably in its ignorance of the terrible things around him. The people who had killed the cat regretted, but not for long, because it was not their job to regret, and because their blood vessels were still recoiling with the pressure of adrenaline, and their ears were ringing, and their senses muddled. The renewing pitter-patter of machine gun shells overhead screamed at them to move, so they did.
They moved and readied their guns again, readied them for firing, and fired at more little boys who fired back at them because the mutual firing compelled them to. They moved and fired, because apparently the total destruction wrought by the bombing was not enough, and they needed to sign the burnt blood streaking the village with their own fresh blood.
They moved and were propelled by hatred, not of their own, but of the central hatred of the few people who ordered such bombings and such armed raids, and sometimes ordered them together, simultaneously. And who then pass it off as an accident, a clerical error, and hide behind their offices.
An error, an error. An error that can be written in a report, and signed, and rewritten about in a warning, and signed over, and pushed to the side, and buried under a desk or in a drawer somewhere, and never talked about and opened. All the while, villages and trees and cities and children burn, and burn, and burn.
All the while little boys, and little girls, and little houses, and little dreams, and little lives all burn. All the while they burn, and burn, and burn.