Lorna reached out with her hand, accompanied with a grunt of
pain. She could hear screams all around her, unrestrained sounds of terror and suffering.
Rocks had entrapped her and her arms ached with pain. Squirming her way through
a hole, she forced herself to press on. As her head emerged from the rubble,
pungent smells of burning flesh and fire and ash filled her hot nostrils.
Repulsed by the reeking odour, she squeezed shut her eyes in her final attempt
to escape her temporary tomb. “Ahh, my leg!” Lorna exclaimed as she rolled onto
her smashed bedroom floor she’d previously been walking on. Her leg catching a
serrated rock that gashed the side of her thigh. Moaning in agony, she opened
her eyes to be met with a living nightmare. All around her, chaos. Buildings
were flattened, homes destroyed and cars scattered around like fallen leaves in
autumn. Within this milieu of desolation and destruction, people were dying,
their screams reverberating throughout the remnants of the burning city. Lorna
summoned the energy left within her to prop herself up, the pain streaking up
her leg felt like the flames licking the trunks of charred trees all around
her. As she forced each step, the hopelessness of her situation arose. People,
dead or dying, lay everywhere. Some were burnt, others were mangled under
wreckage, and some were alive and screaming for help, most beyond rescue.
“Shikata ga nai,” she murmured, reminiscing about her friends. Ripping her eyes
away from the devastation, she looked upwards, to the cracking of thunder above
from where rain soon fell, to a place that a God may still exist.
With every step, she uncontrollably wept for the suffering of
other people, yet as the rains came down from the angry heavens, the cries
diminished like the darkening sky. The rain stung Lorna’s shoulders, seeping
through her clothes with an acid-like burn. Though the buildings had been
destroyed, Lorna instinctively navigated the strewn wreckage in the hopeful
direction of her spiritual home. “Tasukete! Tasukete!” victims cried as she
stumbled past them. Lorna’s tears flowed again, her mouth a quivering, gaping
hole of emptiness from which sounds would not come. She could help nobody, not
even herself. Along the broken path she steely resolved to hobble, she saw the
back of a woman kneeling over. As Lorna approached, she noticed the woman to be
silently cradling a lifeless boy of about three years old. Her arms were raw,
red and mangled as she wrapped her son in a pure white sheet. Turning away in
nausea, Lorna pressed on forward with her head bowed and arms crossed. Her body
shook uncontrollably due to the cold, so she narrowed her eyes, shutting out
the peripheral disaster of all that was around her.
With only a glimmer of hope pushing her on, Lorna progressed
through the God-forsaken city. Contemplating her situation, she reaffirmed that
the church would be a safe place. It was an old building, a matriarch of the
city, one of the only few sights that had not been modernised like the rest of
Hiroshima. Perhaps, just perhaps she may find solace there, in friends, in
family, in God? Answers too maybe. Like who … who could have done this? Nothing
… nothing had been known to mankind could cause the amount of devastation
around her. A Molotov flower basket? Now it had finally happened, a bomb on
Hiroshima, yet no one would have every guessed something to be as destructive
as this. The innocence, the INNOCENCE of the people. Who has the right, who …
why do such a thing, why? Looking up again, not far away now, Lorna managed to glimpse
the cross that rested on the precipice of the Jesuit Church of Our Lady’s
Assumption in Hiroshima. Like a beacon of hope, Lorna felt the repressed
feelings of misery and desolation slowly fade inside her, as she approached the
holy building; her salvation in this firestorm of fear was only a few hundred
metres ahead.
At the footsteps of her church, was a man lying on his back,
burnt and devoid of recognition, yet still a man. As she carefully navigated
her way up the steps, the man suddenly wailed, taking Lorna by surprise. “There
is no hope, nothing, only … death,” cried out the man, writhing in pain against
the concrete steps. Lorna was yet unimpeded by the man who spoke her English
language upon entering the mighty chapel, where the doors were smashed in and
lying in fragments along the scarlet-coloured floors. Formerly this church
stood as a place of peace and comfort for her. Now in a maelstrom of decay, the
church acted as a fortress of safety, amidst the obliteration of other
buildings. As Lorna knelt in front of the altar she prayed, “Father, I … I need
you now, more than ever before. I don’t understand. How has this happened, my
home, my friends, gone. The … the suffering out there, it’s … it can’t be real.
The … people outside, they don’t deserve this. Help them. Where are you? I need
a sign. Please. I need a sign. Something. Anything.” For a while Lorna sat
there in silence, trying to search for a sense of hope, a reason to go on, to
have faith. In a rumble of thunder, the clouds burst once more, raking the
roofing far above her with heavy drops of water. “I need a … I need a hero … a
saviour,” Lorna muttered as she collapsed face first into her hands. Crying for
the futility of her situation, absent hope or rescue, she turned her back on
the altar and distastefully walked away. As she removed herself from the
building, the one that offered her no consolation, she lifted her eyes to
another vessel of hope. In the distance ahead, not more than two miles away,
the Red Cross Hospital. Perhaps that would offer her the kind of tangible
deliverance she so desperately needed.
1001 words
No comments:
Post a Comment