When the Nukes flew, you were alone. Now, your knees bend to sit, hardly aware of the cushion catching your weight. Your subconscious elevates alarms like acid reflux for the mind. The flash is imminent.
Your body inhales October’s aromatic evening air flowing into your home. People were fixing dinner, they were happy before the emergency warning. Your pulse presses your temples thinking of them. The breeze brings a chilling fall wind in as if the sun were being eclipsed.
A nation of men, women and children has released their nuclear payload to act as arbiter against a nation of the same composition. Missiles inbound, seek safety. You make the screen go dark.
No more faces with explanations and prayers to fight unstoppable steel casings ripping through the sky with systematic precision. Indiscriminate hostility launched on so many lives.
Your last relationship will be to a phalanx of phallic strikes in opposition to life itself. Muscles cringe, fingers grip your armrest. You are helpless to the perverse subversion others assured held peace through preparedness for war.
Fools, they would expose their artery to a vampire’s teeth. Where is their deterrence now? At the flash, battlefields and playgrounds, past and present, all will be radiated to oblivion.
Outside your pair of windows, October’s saturated sunset bows behind black silhouetted trees. When the white and silver streak of missile contrails scream into focus, their second sunrise will shutter the fertile surface of the earth.
Your final stimulations have you searching frantically for sights you cannot take with you; family photos, fabrics, facades, the familiar, but you will blindingly cease to be as they will. Bombs fell before, they will fall until we do, because history is not collective.
You submit to compulsive thought. You didn’t know it would be like this. The fatalist was right and his clocks will tick seconds beyond doom.
Earth’s sacrifice sustained for so long. She did without ever having agency to protect her element. Same hands that science’d Fat Man and Little Boy brought you defaced landscapes. They promised energy, they promised autonomy, they said have children, the world is safe again.
They cannot erase the natural world, but they would willfully threaten it. Earth will reign and remain in ashes and fire from whence she came forth without you.
Her sunset leaves no doubt, better to close her celestial eye. Who needs friends when you have hosted an infestation of enemies like these.
Succinctly, anger flows, sure as the waning sun-fall beaming on you. Their game’s function of finality has finally been activated. Your scorn compresses you as if to project beyond your face. You cannot alter MAD.
Hanging there, your mind impales on the idea that you have never felt so much at once. You separate your tongue from the roof of your mouth. You sip sparkling water with no flavor. For a moment after you think this might not happen. You recall the occurrences on your screen.
Transfixed on falling autumn leaves of so many ember colors your eyes pull to pieces. Sincere in who you are, secure enough to vanish, tears saturate you cheek and run. Facing the bombs is your last act of power.
You stand, determined. The flash penetrates through all corporeal surface. The fallout of sharp light. Your shadow fixes to the wall as instant soot. Behold mushroom orange burnt atmosphere rising up. On your last breath you suck searing oxygen into sinew of the final expansion.
You bask in the heat human made horror. You do it without skin. Your skull serves its last as a bomb shelter. Its cranial vessel wafts to dust. Your strains for physical sovereignty subside.
In the shockwave, you are dispersed into the distance between atoms split and remains fall.
Pedro Palacios was born and raised in southern New Mexico. This is his graduating semester with the New Mexico State University English Department.
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