Fat Man and Little Boy

by Mike Meginnis

  “You’re lucky I don’t eat you. I’m still hungry. I need meat.”

  “There isn’t any meat,” says Little Boy. Fat Man says of course there’s meat. Little Boy says, “If you find it, that’ll be the first I’ve seen. It’s been rice and vegetables for me from the beginning.”

  Fat Man says, “I see a home.”

  The home he indicates is largely intact. It was sheltered by a stone structure, much of which stands, though the function of the building is unclear. It may have been a bank. The roof has been swept away. The home’s walls are torn, but they stand. Fat Man and Little Boy pick their way through the surrounding wreckage.

  Inside there is a man on his back studded with all manner of shrapnel. Not only shards of glass, but blades of grass, which were blasted through the walls and his flank. They hang long and brown from his body. A bamboo pen protrudes from his gut. Slivers of wood bristle in his back and chest. His legs look fine but they don’t work. He looks like a father. If he is a father, his wife and children are dead, or he is abandoned. His mouth is white and scabbed from days of thirst. There is an empty flask by his side that let him live this long.

  The man croaks. Fat Man is afraid.

  “I don’t understand you,” says Little Boy.

  “Maybe he’s thirsty,” says Fat Man. He paces the home, searching for water. There is an overturned pail in what might have been the kitchen. If there was ever water there, it is vaporized now. Fat Man goes back to the shrapnel man. Little Boy is trying to pull the grass from his arm. Instead, the blades break, and what threaded his flesh stays. The man watches Little Boy’s hands working without alarm. Fat Man says there is no water.

  The man on the floor says, “I don’t know what happened.”

  They don’t understand.

  Little Boy asks him if there are any canned goods. Fat Man makes a motion like operating a can opener, pretends to lift the lid, mimes delight at the treats inside. Little Boy tells him not to be stupid.

  The man says, “If you want, you can have my other clothing.”

  Fat Man ransacks the kitchen or a room like a kitchen. There is a wooden container like a tall bucket with a thick lid. This, like the pail, has been overturned by the blast, and the lid is knocked loose. There is not enough rice to spill from the mouth. Fat Man has to reach in with his whole arm to pull a dry white moon of clotted rice from the bottom, where it huddles up against the inner wall. He eats the rice in seven bites. Little Boy comes in time to see the sixth. “No fair,” he shouts. “We’re supposed to share.”

  Fat Man finishes the rice and licks his fingers. “You didn’t want the toothpaste,” he says, defiant, “or the cricket. How was I to know you’d want the rice?”

  “Well,” says Little Boy, reminding himself that he’s supposed to be the big brother, “I guess you’ll let me have what’s in that bowl then.” There are two ceramic bowls on the low, wide table, with lids of the same material. One of them is shattered. Little Boy opens the one that remains intact and finds the cold dregs of a dish left unfinished, a salty fish broth with transparent peels of skin at the bottom. Fat Man seizes the bowl. As Little Boy calls his brother selfish, Fat Man takes the bowl to their host. He cradles the dying man’s head and presses the rim to his painful-dry lips. He thanks the fat man; Fat Man can tell. One of his eyes is more open than the other. He has long eyelashes. They move the way the cricket did not move. He drinks the broth.

  From the dying man’s perspective: the looming face of Fat Man, half-sorrowful, half-blank, as if he has forgotten to finish his face; coming over the behemoth’s shoulder, Little Boy, outraged but also very tired, with eyes half-lidded—eyes that want sleep.

  The dying man says, “You can take anything you find.”

  He dies a moment later, or ceases moving, pretending to die to make everything simple, to let the brothers do what they will. Fat Man feels the life leave his body or pretend to leave his body. They do not know they are permitted to search the home, but they search anyway. Fat Man finds a can of beans and works on it with a sharp rock for a while, first sucking the juices through the puncture and then levering it wider with what looks to be a metal drinking straw. Little Boy doesn’t ask for what he likely wouldn’t get. Instead he rifles through the household’s clothes, finding nothing that might fit his tremendous little brother.

  “You’re going to be cold,” says Little Boy. “You could wrap some of their pants around your waist.”

  Fat Man says they should leave. Little Boy says they should spend the night. There are mats to sleep on in the other room. Fat Man says they can’t sleep here or anywhere nearby.

  “Why not?” says Little Boy.

  “The tall soldier,” says Fat Man. “He might not be dead. He might blame me for his friend.”

  “He won’t find us,” says Little Boy. “You can hide under a blanket.”

  “Are you sure that’ll work?”

  Little Boy says no soldier has ever found him while he was sleeping.

  Fat Man yawns and stretches. “First thing tomorrow we have to get far away, though. We have to find more food. We have to get meat.”

  Little Boy says they can do these things. He leads his brother to the mats and lays him down, covers him with a blanket, making a soft hillock, from which protrudes a pair of dirty feet. As he tucks in Fat Man, Little Boy sees what’s wrong with his brother’s palms.

  “They’re black,” says Little Boy. He lays other blankets on his brother’s body—it takes three more to cover him.

  “I know they are,” says Fat Man, the mound beneath the blankets.

  “Not like mine,” says Little Boy. “Mine are white.”

  “I know they are.”

  Little Boy crawls underneath the blankets with his brother. He says this is what big brothers do when their little brothers are cold or afraid, or when they need comfort. He snuggles up against his brother, nestles his head into the doughy vastness of his brother’s side and breast.

  Little Boy asks Fat Man how he was born.

  Fat Man woke inflamed, and though his body caught he did not burn. The fire coated him like a gelatin. He was naked and alone. He was on his side, inward-curled. Soft. He felt himself, and felt his skin was hot, and felt the sweat seep. The sweat evaporated, it became steam. What a smell. He was a torch. He was a fat candle. With some effort, he stood. He was ankle-deep in the orange-white-black fuel of the fire—the city, the ruins. The heat an awful pressure. He could feel his eyes boiling in their sockets, his tongue becoming thick and dry like something dead. He began to walk. The coal that was a city crumbled beneath him, fell to ash and ember, sizzled his skin. He wandered through the fire, grasping with his steaming hands. What he wanted was a way out. What he wanted was a meal. He was already hungry.

  There was a deafening wind converging on the center: on him. It made the blazes bow before the fat man: he saw the extent of the fire, squat buildings like toys, a library or cathedral with a dome’s blasted skeleton, burnt trees and some still burning, an Oriental arch of stone, upright, rigid. A corpse’s clutching, upward-reaching hand.

  The roaring wind cooled and burnt his body, its crevices and extremities. His hair stood up from his head and danced and burned away. The wind became a vortex, then seemed to rise, and then was gone. The flames sprung up as tall as rearing bears. He tripped over his feet and rolled in the charcoal, screaming, though his throat was swollen shut. A sound like a kettle came out. He rolled down a hill. He hit his side on a black, burning tree stump. It collapsed, exposing bright orange coal, which hissed up against his back. Orange sparks like fireflies.

  His insides pulsed and pressed against themselves. His lungs inflated like two blue balloons. His heart was like a dying dog curled up inside his chest. He struggled to his feet. There was a car, its wheels melted, lights blown out, roof destroyed, windshield broken, hood gone, mirrors gone, engine pieces melted. Se
ated inside, two bodies, cooked, perhaps a young couple, their heads forced to impossible angles, facing each other. Twisted this way, they seemed to look at one another. They seemed to watch. Their jaws broken, hanging loose inside their mouths like decorations.

  He was coming to the edge of the fire, which crept over trails of shredded paper, wooden beams, and fallen trees like a tightrope walker. There was a man at the edge of the fire standing in what was left of his home, calling out. He was inaudible, his mouth was open. The walls were collapsed to knee-level heaps; there was a metal bowl fused to his chin. Other kitchen items littered the ground around him, and there was a table overturned. He wrung his hands in front of him, pleading. His skin fell off his body in sheets. It hung from his fingertips and swung like streamers as he moved his hands. There were other bodies in the waste, twisted by a cruel hand, riddled with grass and wood pieces. There was a dead cat at the foot of a lamp. There were two bicycles lying on their sides, dismantled, their tires pooled and steaming round the spokes. There were lead soldiers. There were ceramic dishes shattered. There was a spoon. There was half a public bench. There were someone’s keys. Having eaten the walls of his home and traveled the wooden table, the fire found the man whose skin bloomed from his body. It licked his feet and ate his ankles. He sunk to his knees. He watched himself sinking, looked down on the fire and saw where he would lay his head. Hands and arms in the flame, and the rest of him following inexorably as if tugged by his collar to bed.

  Fat Man walked a long time after that. Slowly, the fire burning on him died and he began to feel his body.

  He came to a tree. It was a tall, black tree. He put his hands on it. There was a pulsing heat inside. The hands sung pain. He pulled them back blackened, still singing. The three remaining branches—strong, solid limbs, which seemed to pour from the trunk—were aflame. They offered fire in outstretched hands. The trunk was split. Was burst open. Inside the cleavage, orange, scaly charcoal pulsed with life. A glow cancer, a barrier reef—it looked almost soft, as if it wanted him inside.

  It spit sparks.

  It groaned and sighed.

  The heat of the tree pulled him in even as he tried to think of other things. He needed to climb inside.

  He felt his face glowing orange in the tree’s light. His body calmed as he breathed as he breathed as he breathed. He ran his blackened hands over the bark, which pulsed white where it was thin—which flaked off, revealing the orange, the heat, inside.

  “And before all that?” says Little Boy.

  “I exploded,” says Fat Man.

  Little Boy asks him how it was to explode.

  “Like staring up into the night sky, not at the stars, but at the space between them.”

  “It was,” says Little Boy, “like rubbing your hands together to make them warm.”

  “It was like breathing in and in and in.”

  “It was like drowning.”

  “It was like my hunger.”

  “It was peaceful.”

  “It was deafening.”

  “It was blinding.”

  “It was being light.”

  “It was pushing on a home as if to move it.”

  “It was being a mountain.”

  “It was being a moon.”

  “It was coming back from the dead.”

  “It was forgetting.”

  “It was perfect, awful memory.”

  “It was like having no brother, and being nobody.”

  LITTLE BOY’S NURSE

  Little Boy dreams of the nurse who found him beneath the wavering sapling. He did not know she was a nurse then but would find out about it later. She was dressed in Western clothing: a checkered black and white turtleneck sweater and a long blue skirt, both stained with blood. She had yellow slippers.

  She wiped her puffy red nose with the back of her hand and sniffled to win his attention.

  He looked up at her, opened his mouth as if to speak. There was nothing to say. She was talking Japanese. She talked to him like he was a baby. Bending forward slightly, pressing her knees together, resting her palms on her thighs. It made him feel safe and he didn’t want her to stop. He reached up for her as if his legs were broken.

  For a second she looked very tired, and he thought he must not be the first to reach for her this way. He grunted like a baby, he moved his lips as if to suckle. Her face smoothed. Something in her posture hardened. She stooped to lift. He wrapped his arms around her neck and sighed. Her turtleneck collar hung a little loose. There was a black mark on the pale soft skin of her neck like a big thumbprint.

  She made her way, bouncing him on her hip and humming a song. They passed through wreckage. She walked around two bodies. He hid his face in her shoulder so he wouldn’t have to see. They met a man, not a nurse, who seemed to know her. He wore an undershirt with orange-red blots down its middle. His nose was red and puffy too. He sneezed. He wiped it with the back of his hand.

  He made an empty-handed gesture and talked an apology. Yet he had brought her shoes. He let them hang from his hand by their laces. She looked away and then nodded, agreeing. The man came close. He wrapped his arms around Little Boy’s chest beneath his armpits. Little Boy dug in with his fingers, he scratched and pinched her skin, but he was not strong enough to keep his grip. The nurse pried his legs from her hips. He left a boy-shaped stain on her clothing. The man whispered something in Little Boy’s ear. Little Boy wanted to know how to say, Give her back.

  The man shifted his weight from heel to heel and watched the nurse. She knelt to take off her slippers and put on the shoes. They fit her well enough. She kissed the man on his cheek because these shoes were better than the slippers.

  They walked together. The nurse’s new shoes clomped with each step. She sneezed into her sleeve. She wiped the snot from her cheek. The man kept looking at her. The man, like Little Boy, was very thin. Their bones touched through their skins. They were joined by a middle-aged man leading an old blind woman by her arm. He spoke to her in a constant, calming whisper, maybe describing the scenery or telling where her feet should go. All her clothes had burnt away from her body and her skin had fallen off her back in long, narrow strips. Little Boy looked away from her before he could see too much.

  Here was the school. The walls were fallen down. Here was an overturned vegetable cart and here were the vegetables, pulped. Here a dead man.

  They were joined by two women carrying a boy on a stretcher. He was sleeping. He was naked, and his face and chest were all burned and looked like wet tree bark.

  Little Boy was passed off again to the nurse. She bore him cheerfully as she could.

  They came to an improvised clinic, a small concert hall or a playhouse. The main room was large and littered with wooden folding chairs. There were bodies all over the floor on thin mats and blankets, some of them moving, some of them still. An old man lay spooning his adult son and sung to him, quietly, while the young man bled on the floor. Everyone was quiet, except for a woman Little Boy couldn’t see, who made an awful sort of braying, until she stopped, until she started up again. A little girl prodded her big sister, who would not respond. A man and his wife lay facing each other. They watched each other’s eyes and touched their noses. They were burned all over. They had been rubbed with white cream. Little Boy floated over the scene in his nurse’s arms. She bounced him on her hip, which made the world stutter.

  A doctor knelt by a policeman and pulled glass from his leg. After each piece was removed, he daubed the wound with a cotton ball. When the cotton ball was used up he pulled another from a bag and held it, overturning a bottle of alcohol in his palm, soaking the ball. The policeman gritted his teeth. He thanked the doctor for each piece that was pulled.

  The nurse called someone’s name. An older woman came and took Little Boy away from the nurse. The old woman placed Little Boy down on the floor beside the wounded policeman. T
he doctor was pulling three inches of glass from the policeman’s calf; he was pulling the long, thin shard quick as he could without its breaking. Little Boy’s nurse and the old woman left. The old woman came back with a pair of tweezers and a small tin pan. She made Little Boy lie down. She took his left foot by the ankle and lifted it until she could see what was inside. Thick, partly-clotted blood fell out of him. She put the tweezers to his skin. They were cold.

  The policeman took Little Boy’s hand and squeezed as if to say, Now squeeze me back.

  The hidden woman brayed.

  The old woman put the tweezers in his foot. She pulled something loose and set it in the pan, where it glistened wetly. She reached in—he squeezed the policeman’s hand—and pulled something else free. It made a scraping sound as it left him, as if it didn’t want to go. The policeman screamed.

  They made Little Boy wait for clothes until they could find something Western. When they did it was a little gangster costume; a blue suit, cheaper than it looked, with matching fedora. They watched him dress. They asked him questions that he couldn’t answer, so he didn’t. He sulked until they left him alone. He laid around on the floor.

  He thought about how it was to explode.

  They brought a little boy to the empty space beside him. The boy was pulling out the hairs from his own head one at a time. He set them in a pile on the floor. He was burnt all over but did not seem to notice. Little Boy wanted to trace the weird patterns with his fingers. He wanted to reach under the other boy’s skin and see what he could find.

  He wanted his nurse.

  She was busy among the bodies, checking temperatures with the back of her hand, finding pulses with her fingertips. She wouldn’t look at Little Boy. When the father holding his bleeding adult son cried out, it was his nurse that came running. She watched his chest and touched his temple. He was dead. One of the other nurses found the energy to say something gentle, to touch the old man’s head. They left. The father held his dead son as before and was quiet.