threadbare light

This piece of flash fiction or micro fiction was first written in 2013.

Back in 2013, I spent the summer between two university courses at home. For some reason, during these sleepless summer nights, I rediscovered a passion for Linkin Park that I hadn’t known since they published that remix of their classic hit Numb featuring Jay-Z. I started listening to their album “A Thousand Suns” and soon became obsessed with the voice-over tracks mixed in at the beginning or over the music. One of my favourite tracks was the one (Wikipedia tells me it is calle the Radiance) that had an overlay track of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb reciting a line from the Bhagavad Gita. I kept listening to it on repeat and eventually wrote what I would imagine the inventors of the bomb felt when they saw the first test detonations. This is by no means historically accurate and the style is quite juvenile. I’ve edited it lightly to tone down the most cringey parts.

threadbare light

The proper decorum was dignified silence. A good deal away from the blast. They stood. They were the reason the world stepped into a different tomorrow. She thought about the run in her stocking, how she was the only woman on the team. How her mind had generated this weapon. This yellow burning diamond in the sky. A thousand yellow suns burst forth.

Some clapped, some cried. She wanted to do both, but instead she was silent. There was a sibilous space of silence. The kind of loud silence, littered with random sounds, scratching of the coat, a shifting of feet. It expanded to fill the space of their mind.

When the man stood, watching the cinders burst forth from the sky, a golden found of brilliance, incineration, he thought about a passage in the Bhagavad Gita, where a thousand suns burst into being instantaneously, consumed. He thought about many things that moment. His own impending death perhaps, the first time he had known a woman, the mornings when had woken up and been at peace with the world. He thought at his own power incinerating the world, atoms by atom, bursting worth a thousand suns. The eternal wheel spinning around and around.

He could well imagine the world ending like this. Was it imagination or a premonition of things to come?

Not everyone unplugged to see the last light, but she did.

The two of them watched the sun melt away. The last rays languished lazily on their patio. He touched her arm. The golden light was around her, in her.