Pika Don

i have written a small short story. i liked it. so i am posting it.

feel free to skip reading this.
for those interested in plagiarism. feel free to it.

My name is Amaya. I’m afraid my telling you this will do you no good. Hearing history does nothing for preventing it happening again. To learn this we must only look at history. In this we can read of surprises some have had, and prepare for them ourselves.
I have no family now. Even if they'd survived I might not have family. My family was happy once, before the years of fear, before the years of death. I had two older sisters, and a younger brother. My father was called out to war. That was only the beginning of that time, the war took my father, but the end of the war took my family. My father never agreed with the war, he said he knew a general that visited America, and liked them. He went to fight with that general, and died with him and everyone else on Iwo Jima. He was an honorable man. My family had gathered together when he left, to live together in Nagasaki. grandma would talk about her days in this old fishing village. She would speak of our church, and pray to Mary with candles every day. Her smile was always so friendly to me, her face was kind and experienced, the gold tooth seemed to accent her worn out face, and it tried to hide the suffering she had seen in her life. She said she had seen much. She would tell me of her Christian friends, who were not allowed to live here, but these people who were too poor to leave, so they were killed. People she called her childhood friends. People who are now phantoms, phantoms like grandma now is.
"Tell me about your friends gramma," I would beg. I was ten years old, and didn't understand why it pained her to tell these stories. But she always did. "Tell me about hitomi" she first told me that story to warn me against the river. I was very young, and had never learned to swim. I did not know anyone that did. When she finally conceded, she would look to my sisters, to see if they wanted to hear. They always did. We slept in the same bed, my grandma never wanted to tell a story if someone else didn't want to hear it, my sisters loved her stories. Though of suffering, these stories were well told, and we loved to learn of her life.
"If you want to hear it, I will tell you then. Close your eyes, in case you want to sleep. When I was fourteen, my younger sister always wanted to play with us. She would beg us, and we would say yes, only when my mom made us, or when she had her friend hitomi with her. Hitomi was her age, twelve. We loved her because her eyes were always so innocent. Her face always would smile, and she would say to us "if you don't want us to play with you, you are welcome to play with us" and gave such an endearing smile, that we always had to say yes. One of these days we would be playing with her, we raced boats under the bridge in the river. She made the most beautiful boat. She drew all over it. It was the finest boat I had ever seen, she was proud of it, and her wonderful eyes shone when she first showed it to us. We went to the bridge, and raced these boats, from one side to the other." At this time she would pause, and examine us. Now I wonder if she was crying in herself, as she gazed at her granddaughters. When she was satisfied we were still awake, or when she was finished gathering what it took to finish, she started again, this time slower looking off, as if she were watching herself play with these boats again. "We would gather these boats up at the dock, because they would float right under it if we were lucky. And the first to retrieve the boat was the winner. Hitomi’s proud boat sailed beyond her reach, she tried, oh how she tried to grab it. She of course fell in, her beautiful eyes panicked as we shouted instructions to her. Who knows what she heard? No one could help her, because we didn't swim. She surfaced a number of times as we followed her down the river, shouting for help. And at the next dock, when we pulled her out, her beautiful eyes no longer shone" I always missed this ending. I would fall asleep, Grandma would sit in the dark for a while, remembering those years she lived. Soon, because life is too fast to think about, she would go to bed herself. She would cry, because an old woman who doesn’t cry has been foolish, and gets un deserved credit for living We were in school when it happened. When I lost my family it was almost noon. Maybe an hour before the siren had gone off earlier this day, but now we were in line outside. "Here comes a plane" I heard a classmate say. I looked up to see the plane and saw only white. I had begun to wonder why I didn't see blue, as I gazed there into the white, it began to be replaced by objects. A flaming tree, smoke, and I realized I was no longer standing in line. I realized I was on the ground, looking up into a tree. I had been thrown. How far? I don't know. I do not know why the realization was so slow to me, but I hadn't occurred to me for what seemed like minutes, that the Americans had dropped a bomb on us. I began to go for home. Everything was so hot. I remember that the most. The heat. My face, my body was all so hot. Every building I saw was on fire. A ten year old girl I was frightened. As I went I heard screaming in a house that was on fire. It was a boy and his mother. The boy was screaming to his mom "it's hot mamma, it's hot, and why is it so hot in here?" He just kept screaming. The mother was crying. She screamed for her son, trying to reassure him. He was lucky to have heard his mom's voice before he died. Even though it was gasping sobs, I remember she was screaming "I will die with you son. You will not die alone, but with your mother. Keep brave son, I love you, I will die with you." at the same time a neighbor man I think was pulling her from the fire. The man had no shirt on; his back was red and looked like meat. I didn't have the courage to help, I only had the courage to go home. I wanted my own mom.
It wasn't my mom I ran into on the way home, but my sister. I could not recognize her, her face was black. She looked at me with horror, and begged for water. I didn't have water of course. So we walked together. I don’t' know how much time passed. It started to rain. We held our tongues out to catch it, but we couldn't catch enough. It was big rain; it hurt to be hit by it. It was then I realized my face must be so burnt. My body must be too. I started to look at myself. My clothes were rags. Skin was hanging off me everywhere. It was so hot. We were so thirsty. Walking we came upon a big bin full of water. They used it to put out fires when they would break out in the city. People were stuffing themselves in it, and there was no room for us. I thought of hitomi as we walked towards the river, towards the center of the blast.
My sister died at the river. We tried to get to the other side. The bridge was not there anymore. I used someone’s body as a raft. My sister did too. That was the last time I ever saw her. Floating across that river felt good. I put my face in there, and drank a little. The coolness on my face felt the best, I didn't even care that people were dead in there. I took some water with me, the air was so stifling. Everyone was calling for water. They would scream for it. This is how I killed three people, by giving them water. They would beg I would give them the can I had full of water, they would take long draws of water, then hold their stomachs, and cry in pain as they died. I didn’t know any better, and after the third one I started to call it the can of death, and threw it from me. I was very scared that I would die from it too.
I reached where my home was before this blast. Its fire was almost out; the whole thing was on the ground. I looked for my grandma. I looked through the bodies lying everywhere. It was hard to recognize anyone. None of them had any eyes; some had no head at all. I found one with a gold tooth. This was my grandma. What does a ten year old girl do? She held a smaller male with her. That must have been my brother. How I loved them dearly. Looking for a place to sit, I crossed many bodies. The babies stick in my mind the most. All black, All burnt, All looking into eternity with soulless eyes. Some of them were still on fire. I could see the screams still on people’s absent lips. And as I looked into the city of Nagasaki, I saw nothing. No cathedral, no buildings. Just smoke and fire, and nothing. How did everything disappear?
That was the first day. I wandered around for days, and found other survivors like me. Some didn’t last long. Some died quickly. Some got bruises, and very sick, then died. some died of starvation. We ate whatever we found. We only didn’t eat two things. People, because they were always rotten, and cats. They were to fast to catch. We were labeled pika don. We were shunned. A young boy told me some Americans were to come visit us. I made a plan to speak with an American. The young boy was another survivor of my school he was playing soccer, he chased the ball into a ditch, he bent down to pick up the ball, and when he stood up, everything was gone. Later he went to America to run a prison for them. He only returned at the end of his life to die. He took his own life with a sword.
I counted the days to when the Americans would come. Men came around and examined us. The Americans wanted women to bring back to America. They gave these women surgery to make them look ok again. But nothing can restore a hand. The Americans did come. I was there. My face hadn’t healed very well at all. I barely looked human. I walked up and told him very silently, “you killed my dear grandma. You killed all my school friends, and my brother. You made me look like this. I’m not human anymore. I’ve eaten rats. I’ve fought strangers to eat bugs. I want to know this: why? Why did you do this to me?”
The young blonde American soldier blinked at me. He didn’t speak Japanese. He smiled at me, at my ruined life, and offered me a piece of gum as payment for my family’s death.
I did not know what to do next. I could not imagine my life going until I was old. I wandered for days. I came upon a young woman standing on a set if train tracks. She was going to kill herself. But she didn’t. at the end she stepped out of the way, sobbing. I thought to ask her why.
“this is the place my sister killed herself yesterday. I decided I would come today and kill myself too. But I couldn’t. my dear sister had the courage to die. I have only the courage to live.” I took her to where I had been sleeping. We stayed there for some time, and one day I woke up, and she was dead.
I no longer have the courage to live. Tomorrow I will go to the train track.
A man told me when I was a child people are born crying, and when they are done crying, they die. I never knew what he was talking about. I was so young. It was such a short time ago. I might think about it for a while. But an old woman told me life is too short to think too much about.