SHARDS
KISKIDEE
Only my Grandmother called me KisKidee, and that was because our real names were the same.
She never spoke of the part she played in the end – only of those earlier blasts that had shattered the place to begin with. She had heard about things Before – before the f lash, the thunder and breaking apart, the f loating cinders of paper as shelves and even whole libraries gushed f lame then shrivelled and curled away into ash. Before, she said, people seemed to have lived together without seeing each other at all.
“Why they couldn’t see?” I grappled with it. “People were small- small? Like a ants?”
“An ant?” She stroked my cheek. No, no, she said. Normal size, but they only saw differences – between temples and hair and bank accounts. “As if they lived in separate worlds,” she said. And when the country came falling apart around them very few cared whether the rest lived or died. They never even noticed those around – just looked right through them.
I shivered. “Like ghosts?” I whispered. Sometimes these slivers of information were sharp-edged.
“Right.” She nodded. “So, they arrived at this uncomfortable thought: perhaps they were all – all of them – spectres.”
What happened next was not to be found in any official record, for who was there to write it down and what was there to write on? Versions of the story passed down mainly from mouth to mouth. But, mostly, it was just as if those who survived had never existed at all, Before.
Still, all around, the tortured countryside itself testified that fire did tear open the night sky and smoke blotted out the sun. People groped around, disoriented by ruins everywhere, before taking up various
haunts, coming and going as they found convenient, and making up accounts of how they had got to where they were – which was nowhere. And then the cruiters came, slashing their way through the bush and whoever stood up to them, and snatching up whom they pleased. There was nothing left to do but hide.
As for the f lotsam – those other children – no one paid them any mind, for they never lasted long.