Shadow People

• Evie Shipway, Grade 6, South Hobart Primary School
• Short Story
• 2015

2nd in the 'Read Write Repeat 2015' competition

Don’t talk to me about regret. You wouldn’t know what regret is.
Every day I reminisce about the cloud, the atrocity of it all. I recall the shadows, dark and haunting, that live only behind my eyes whenever I blink. I reminisce the event. I am taken back to the instant in which it all happened. All in a single flash. All those lives...
I seem to remember distinctively that very morning. Curiously, it happened to be a morning much like all others. I awoke to see rice paddies and brilliantly coloured birds of all hues. The sun in all its splendour, rose above the low plateaus and cast a dim, azure light through the fields and paddocks and raced across the sky.
But it was the bomb, not the lighting that was the horror of my life. It was dropped during school, at break. We were all escorted out in single file under the watchful eye of our teacher. I remember Lee pointing up to the sky at a small aircraft. It was war, and we were quite accustomed to the constant droning of aeroplanes above us. “A plane!” he would shout, ‘l wonder where it’s heading...” We barely ignored it. I remember looking up at the sky and the ever-growing plane, ever-getting larger, ever-getting nearer. Nearer to Hiroshima.
This particular aircraft was unlike others. For one, it was larger and blacker, with dark khaki spots and patches.
For a second, it disappeared behind a cloud. When it reappeared, it slowly and gradually moved away, leaving only a black speck, which fell through the sky, rapidly descending.
Only did the fact become apparent. It was a bomb, and no ordinary bomb. It was massive, metal and as we later found, full of uranium. An Atomic Bomb.
People began to point and stare. Some ran, myself included, into the school building where we hoped to be safe. We were aware of the force and damage that an atomic bomb could emit, but not one of us was aware of the ferocity this bomb was capable of.
BOOM! It was the loudest sound ever to enter my ears, but the silence that followed was far, far worse.
Light flooded from every direction as I covered my eyes and screamed. Buildings shook and collapsed. Roads over-heated. But the most severe damage done was that inflicted on us humans.
The radiation affects us even now. Every week, more witnesses to the horror of the bombing die from mutations and cancers. All for the better, I’d say.
In an instant, every person exposed to the light was vaporized from the heat. Turned to shadows that still remain indented and engraved onto the streets of Hiroshima. Shadow people.