Secondary: Destruction (Modification of a text)

It was an ordinary day with an ordinary blue sky. The familiar scent of blossoms tinctured the morning air as the sunlight shone through the paper windows, lighting up the faces of Hiro and Sakura. The two young children were sipping from their lacquered bowls delicately, the warmth of the very thin miso soup comforting their small stomachs in the brisk morning chill.

“Haha (mother), when is Chichi (father) coming home?” the little Hiro asked, his little freckles illuminated by the morning light.

“Shh!” the older sister gave a terse reply and gave him a nudge in his stomach. “Don't make Haha sad!”

Haha, a thin and slender woman, gave a weak smile to hide her sadness as she served the rationed pickles and sandy rice. Her husband had gone for war despite her pleas. He had always told the children that as dutiful citizens, they should feel proud and honoured to serve the country and even sacrifice their lives if necessary. News had arrived to inform her that he had died in the war but the children did not know it for she had kept them in the dark.

“Eat your food,” Haha spoke, stroking the children's heads as she coaxed them to take their meagre breakfast.

All of a sudden, a siren sounded and the family stiffened. The spell was instantly broken and Haha immediately wrapped her arms around the children and hurried them towards their makeshift bomb shelter. Desperation and urgency gripped the air as she stumbled a little in her sandals, making her trip as she descended the unwieldy stairs into their hole in the ground.

“Don't worry! Everything would be just fine,” she assured her kids whose bright eyes shone brightly in the dim candle light. The children nodded and stopped whimpering. The trio held one another tightly as they braced themselves for the blast, feeling the rumbling in the air getting closer and closer. They had withstood the bombings before and they would survive this as well – so Haha thought.

Then, there was a pause and a blip in time. A flash and the family reeled from a blinding white light. It was as if God took a photograph of them from above. Their eyes and skin felt seared with a hellish heat and they were overcome with a sensation so vast and alien beyond what they had ever experienced before. It was a blast of such a magnitude that their house above it vanished as if it was never ever built there before. Almost immediately, a whirlwind blew, raining shards of glass in a terrifying velocity that pressed upon them oppressively. The family shrieked in fear, agony and confusion. This unnatural storm went on for the longest ten seconds they ever had which felt like the eternity. Finally, the bomb lost its breath and only silence remained.

Haha gradually stirred and realised the three-year-old Hiro in her lanky arms was no longer crying. Instead, she was hugging a blood-soaked shape lacerated by fragments of glass. Her mind reeled in denial as she made out the horror that had transpired.

“Hiro, Hiro! Wake up! Answer me, my son!” she shook his frail frame vigorously but there was no reply. A few feet away, Sakura, her five-year-old daughter was on the ground, too still and silent. “Sakura! Sakura!” she yelled but there was no response too.

“My children! My children!” she sobbed, and let out a heart-wrenching cry. It was so full of despair that her entire body shuddered with emotion. Though her tears, she saw nothing but a ruined world, razed to the ground and reduced to a monochromatic black and white. Haha lifted her children into her arms and heaved her way out of the rubble. The world outside was a scene beyond comprehension. She could only manage a strangled moan as she saw the wrecked, disintegrated buildings and human carnage everywhere. It was then she felt the pain. She looked in bewilderment at her arms. The heat of the blast had emblazoned the delicate bamboo patterns of her kimono onto her arms.

How could the human body and spirit bear such pain and agaony? Her husband was gone and now, her children too. She was left all by herself. The agony was too deep and unfathomable that it had no synonym at all. She looked upwards for an answer but saw only a mushroom cloud billowing in the damned sky over her city – Hiroshima.