1986:
I saw the girl on the bus today. Standing in the wasteland by the burnt-out shell of the reactor. Posing, with a dirty old tyre, on shiny carbon grit surrounded by the irradiated windswept scrub. Much of the green was a wash of blended mirages, an oasis of decayed life roasting in the heat-haze of the scalding midday sun.
She stood with her waxen face craned away from me, held aloft by an outstretched pipe of neck like a naked skull impaled upon a shaming spike. Her hazel-streaked hair was swept behind an elfin ear blown free by the hot summer breeze. I couldn’t see her face: eyes, nose, or mouth. Only the bony ridge of her jaw. Set hard. As if her face were still glued to the window, watching the event that would taint a generation.
She draped a dark pigtail over her shoulder, her tassel of teak. In striking contrast to the frilled salmon-pink bustier that clung to her like moulded sticking plaster, reminding me of the terrible wounds she suffered that fateful day. Her slim midriff was bare, showing navel.
One of her arms stretched as far as her bended knee, the wrist painfully bent back in a flap onto her thigh, her fingers folded. I noticed that her middle finger was missing, severed by shards of flying metal at the time of impact. The left arm, her artificial limb, was poorly-fitted, a mis-matched dark beige prosthetic, her seam showing where it was welded to her ball socket joint, restricting motion. Still, she had managed to grow some new hairs under her armpit. I thought of her painful restoration. The thin silver bracelet around her left wrist momentarily distracted me from her lost forefinger.
The girl’s sawn-off denim shorts accentuated her slender thighs; both legs thankfully survived the trauma of the accident intact. She held her right leg taut, and bent her knee, pressing down hard on the tyre with the sole of her holly-green stiletto, arching her bared foot inside the shoe as she tensed her calf muscle so tightly that the veins stood out, like a tumour on her ankle. The other natural leg stood erect, her supporting pillar: lean, sinewy and rather bandy, the open-toe of her sandal smiling at me like the rubbery gape of a catfish mouth.
The sun beat down from its highest point in the cloudless blue sky, casting a skeletal shadow of the girl and her tyre over the parched earth. For the first time, I saw the specks of red forming on the front of her bustier, the bloom of wet blood spreading over her sawn-off denim shorts. I wondered if she would cry blood, bleed from her ears, mouth and nostrils. As she bled after the blast.
I couldn’t see her face. Hadn’t seen her face since the overheated reactor exploded, blasting the staff bus to smithereens, firing her body, like a human bullet out of a gun, through the window.
Killing Her.
Maiming the Innocent.
Creating a Nuclear Wasteland for Generations.
The girl on the bus turned her head to face me.
She had no face.
Creepy. It seems her ghost has returned not fully intact. Perhaps she’s roaming the earth looking for answers.
Nice one, Harriet.
She has every right to demand answers – albeit in the afterlife – I based the story on the Chernobyl reactor explosion. Thanks!