Writing Exercise 066

My dear writing buddy Sam from the Dead Pete Society is responsible for this week's writing exercise. She posted a prompt, and I instantly took it and did with it what you are about to read. You will see, this little story is greatly influenced by one of our day trips while we were in Japan.
So here goes:

 

2017/03/16 – "They thought I would forget. But I remembered. Everything."

Sitting in a rocking chair on the porch she enjoyed the soothing warmth of the late summer sun, sipping on some iced tea and fanning herself with yesterday's newspaper with her good hand. The old radio beside her on the small table played a happy tune. The grass had turned brown due to the lack of rain and the leaves stirred in the light breeze. She peered at the cloudless sky as the weather forecast promised a summer rain in the evening.

The afterthought of a smile faded in the many wrinkles around her mouth. Rain. She remembered the feel of the rain on her skin; even decades later she saw every tiny detail before her mind's eye. Her life had changed so much, but still the image, the noises and smells of this one incident were so very vivid as if engraved in stone or captured in a black and white photo or family stories told for generations.

But photos turned so easily to ashes when set aflame, stone crumbled to rubble in the face of a destructive force beyond comparison, generations of people were winked out in a single blinding flash that made earth the embodiment of hell. Distinctive clouds heralding nothing but death in their wake, an explosion with a destructive force never seen before, the stench of charred black flesh, fatal damage done on a cellular level, a whole city of buildings blasted to dust, the wails of agony of those who survived the blast. And hours later came the rain – the black rain.

She had been but a child back then, innocent, never understood what hit her when it did. She lost everything on that day – everything but her raw life. Surprisingly she had sustained the mother of all explosions, the black rain, the long-term aftermath of radiation, and she continued to do so.

But she would always walk the Earth with her eyes turned skyward, her mind tuned to the many gods in the hope one might hear her prayers for peace to remain and the black rain to stay away. For, even if younger generations became oblivious to the inhumanity and destructive force of war, she still remembered. Everything.