Fat Man and Little Boy by Mike Meginnis Page A

sex. Little bullet gets shot at a uranium egg. Egg bursts open and all hell breaks loose. Something big comes out of something so little. It sounds like a baby.”
    Little Boy picks up the fish bit with his fingers and drops it down his gullet. “I do feel like a baby,” he says.
    â€œBabies can’t speak at first. They can’t eat solid foods. And they don’t know what we know,” says Fat Man.
    When he was born Little Boy remembered it all. He knew what the scientists said to him as they stroked his shell, thinking no one could hear them. He remembered what it was to live as potential. Now he doesn’t know. He only feels he used to. Here everything is strange. He can’t absorb it. Japan is another kind of absence.
    â€œWhere can we go?” says Fat Man.
    One of the soldiers, one with thin bristles of black hair and a forehead etched with many lines though he is young, calls Charlene to his side of the table. She comes. He’s got a ten-dollar bill in his hand, ragged and half-torn down its middle, pale as new grass and leaf stems. He waves it underneath her nose as if scenting a bloodhound. The soldier presses the money to his cheek and smells it himself. He drags it down the side of his face, across his neck, over his collar bone, his uniform. He drags it over his left nipple, down his stomach, across his left hip, and down, to the center, between his legs. He hangs it from his open zipper, half exposed, half obscured. This looks like something he has practiced, a routine.
    Charlene shakes her head slowly. She goes into the kitchen and does not come out until the soldiers have overturned the table and left. Little Boy leaves what he thinks the food was worth. No one here says what anything will cost.
    Outside, after their meal, Fat Man begins to walk home, crunching fallen yellow leaves beneath his leather shoes; Little Boy stands still just beyond the closed door, bending in on himself and rubbing his knees forlornly, watching his brother’s back. This is the third time this has happened today. The last two times, Fat Man has gone on walking and Little Boy has scurried belatedly to catch up. This time the boy shows more resolve. There are twenty feet between them now and he is still rubbing his knees. Twenty-five feet, then thirty.
    Fat Man turns around and asks him what’s wrong.
    â€œMy legs hurt,” whines Little Boy. “My feet still hurt. They’re still healing from the glass.”
    â€œWhat do you want me to do about it?”
    Little Boy reaches up with open arms as if the fat man were close enough to touch. “Carry me?”
    Fat Man says he doesn’t want to carry Little Boy.
    â€œThis is what good little brothers do. They carry their big brothers when they hurt.”
    Fat Man relents. He takes his little older brother on his back and carries him down the paved road, which becomes a dirt road shaded by trees. Little Boy clings to him around his neck, sometimes strangling him to the point where Fat Man makes a coughing sound that means “loosen up,” which Little Boy does, until his arms draw closed again. He breathes hot and loud on Fat Man’s neck and ear, his legs dangling and kicking at the air and sometimes Fat Man.
    â€œWhat do you think we’re here for?” says Fat Man.
    Little Boy doesn’t answer. He is listening to the air. Crickets sing in the trees.
    They come to a farm. Night is falling. There is a man in a pigpen tending to the grunting things. They are like tumors of the landscape, soft and gray and pink. They move but not often. Fat Man and Little Boy watch them. Fat Man says, “I feel for the pigs.”
    Little Boy says, “I feel for the one who cleans up after them.”
    A woman comes out of the home and leans against the pen’s fence to speak to her husband. Her hair is a thick black strand. Her face is a slope; they cannot see her eyes. She’s younger than she looks.
    Little Boy