Hiroshima

NEWMAN 45 FELICE NEWMAN HIROSHIMA after the Japanese-American grocer's son When it comes I am ready. Running with arms out and mouth open. Behind me the schoolyard is already an absurd dot, and I don't look back. But running, heading home, the shrill whistle of the mine rattles me—I see bombs black as coal dust in the fruit bin, and by my bed, the talk of the grey miners drifts up to me: their hands quiet, deep inside their stiff pockets like machinery grinding to a halt. My father fills their baskets, sweeps out the mud from their boots. As he chains the door, I imagine the doors of the dying island blown open inside him, a frail man wrapped in a bloody apron. ...