Ruth heard the sharp whiz of the bomb twenty seconds before the blast. She and her brother, George, had matching wide eyes from across her kitchen table. No, they both agreed with their one look, George’s eyes hazy from the alcohol, Ruth’s bloodshot from barely sleeping the night before. After ten nights of bombings, it wasn’t going to hit them.
But that distinctive sound said otherwise, like a firework bursting from the ground and into the night sky. Except this time, it wasn’t rising away from them, but diving through thick clouds above London.
Ruth couldn’t remember what they had been doing before, why she decided to linger while the rest of the building hurried to the shelter many floors below their feet. Surely she hadn’t been furiously looking for her word-search book to stave off the eight hours of anxious boredom while they listened to the sounds of their city being destroyed. Surely, she hadn’t been that insolent.
The missile splintered through her ceiling, igniting such a brilliant light Ruth was almost blinded. Her worn furniture exploded in a cloud of wood chips. Sharp splinters flew around them in every direction as they tumbled into each other’s arms and then into the night sky. She felt the cuts on her neck, wrists, ankles–anywhere showing skin. She didn’t even have a coat on, but briefly caught sight of the maroon wool somewhere in the lightstorm.
She was aware of the blood on her face and all around her, the heavy smell of copper and the warm splatter on her skin. Was it her own? The world had gone silent after the initial pop of the explosion, her senses all but dead. Maybe her ears had blown off. She saw that once, already twenty years ago, in an old building turned hospital in France. Men were carried in day after day, looking worse and worse. She was endeavoring to bandage a puss-filled gunshot wound while half of her fellow nurses cowered from the smell. The man suddenly seized and fell dead onto the bloody mattress. She hadn’t even blinked before the dead man was pulled away and replaced by a soldier with blown off ears. He screamed unlike anything she’d heard before, shrill and hoarse from hours of being transported from the battlefield to the bed in front of her. She remembered the look on his face, bleeding and twisted from more than just pain. It was as if he was going to scream until he heard the sounds coming out of him.
A nurse beside her scurried to a nearby trashcan and retched a few times. Ruth set her jaw and got to work. It was the only thing she knew how to do. She still heard the man’s screams rattling around the inside of her brain as she tumbled through the space where her flat had been.
She heard her father’s voice as well, as he held her over the half-eaten corpse of her bunny, Rufus, that she had let wander in their garden the night before. She screamed and cried when she found it, her first instinct to run to her room and into the safety of her bed where she couldn’t smell rotting flesh or see the exposed pinky organs, slashed through with a fox’s razor-sharp claws. Her father snatched her arm as she pushed past him, pulling her back towards her beloved pet.
“What did I tell you, Ruth? You did this. Look at it,” her father said. When she wouldn’t, he shook her until she cried out. George watched from the back door, nearly sixteen and already six feet tall, hands balled into fists.
“Look at it, Ruth!” Her father said again, voice rising. She half opened her eyes, barely seeing through the watery film of her tears, and made out the shape of the tiny carcass that laid open in the grass. Later, her mind would fill in the gaps; she thrashed around in bed for many nights after, tormented by the bunny she had loved.
If her father had ever heard her nightmares he never said, nor did she tell him, and she certainly stopped crying. She received a lashing that afternoon for the mess she had become, her frock smeared with tears and snot and then later blood. It had taken her wounds weeks to heal, the scabs splitting open any time she reached a little too far or bent a little too low. Ruth still had a crescent shaped scar on her shoulder blade, so small and white now it was almost invisible. But it was there, all the same.
That day she forced her eyes open while her father tore into her flesh with the spindly branches of the willow tree. George stood red-faced watching them, their mother holding him back, her hand tight around his arm, the points of her fingernails digging further into his skin with his every half step towards the garden. “Your father is a tough man, but he’s fair,” her mother would say. “You’ll come to thank him for these lessons.”
George left the house before her father’s punishment was through, unable to take the sound of the small boughs whipping through the air. Ruth heard the front door slam as she felt the sharp sting of the makeshift whip. Their father stopped when she mustered all her strength, gritted her teeth, and forced herself to keep quiet. When George got home that night, he stopped by her bedroom, peering in through a crack in the door frame, his eyes shining. Ruth jerked away when she saw him, not wanting his pity or his sympathy. Deep down, she wanted her brother to march into their father’s bedroom and shake the life from him. He hovered in the dark hallway like a ghost. She knew he would’ve done it had she asked, but she couldn’t; she wouldn’t. George walked a precarious line in their parents’ household already. After a minute or two, she left him to the silence and got into bed.
How sad it must be for George, who had survived the trenches of the Great War, just to be caught in her kitchen as a German bomber dropped the lethal piece of metal exploding at their backs.
Could this compare to the horrors he had seen already? The dust and mustard gas, the blood of soldier after soldier marring the legs of his trousers as he knelt beside them. She saw his old uniform when he returned home, the deep brown stains in odd patterns about his knees. They were identical to the ones she sported on her nurse uniform, soiled day after day with the blood of the brave.
Lights flashed before her eyes as brother and sister flew from their place on the hardwood floors. Paper, furniture pieces, scraps of towels and clothing, bottles of rum and whiskey George must have hidden behind the couch, gleaming bits of metal from the bomb itself, all exploded as one. Light bulbs shattered, walls gutted, and plumbing split from wood.
My kind brother, Ruth thought as she saw fragments of his face between strands of her ashen hair, lit up by the light show behind her. He was her hero and playmate despite the eight-year difference between them. She saw images of her and George in the old sunlit garden then, running until their lungs were sore, laughing at nothing and everything at the same time. Even after long days of school, before George dropped out, he would come home and ditch his book bag, asking for the rules of the game Ruth made up that day.
That was before Rufus had been killed. She stopped playing games after that, and George stopped asking.
When the pressure cracked in Ruth’s ears, pain finally shot everywhere, from her scalp to her back to her calves. She became part of the spectacle, part of all the debris as it ripped apart. She would’ve sworn the ripping was coming from inside her.
The only constant was the electric pain she felt everywhere, like a fire erupted on the surface of her skin and followed the path of every blood vessel. The blast forced them through the framing of the old building, out into the night, where the sounds were only worse. More lights, more pain. More bombs. She felt it all around her, like the air she was soaring through was breaking from the blasts.
A second before George slipped through her fingertips, Ruth felt the sensation of falling, although she couldn’t make sense of which direction was down or up. She thought of her mother then, after the war had ended but just as a horrible strain of flu shook England. She was lying still in bed as Ruth tried changing the sheets from under her for the third time.
“Look after Georgie,” she croaked. “Don’t let him turn hard like your father. He’s a good man.”
Ruth said nothing, only nodded. Got back to work. And as she fell through the night sky in downtown London, toward the hard pavement of First Street, she heard her mother’s words once more. Ruth reached through the air, past the scrambled bits of building and furniture trying to find him.
The memory of George showing up on her doorstep for the first time floated into Ruth’s mind next. It was the first time she had seen him in nearly seven years. Making time for each other couldn’t stay a priority, what with George’s five boys at home and Ruth’s expanding role at the hospital. Their parents’ deaths meant no more Christmases or Easters spent at their family’s country estate, meaning they saw each other even less.
George reeked of stale alcohol and cigarettes as he stooped in front of her doorway, a shadow of the young man he had been the night she had found Rufus.
“She kicked me out a few weeks ago. I guess she was tired of me being like this.” He motioned to his filthy clothes, stained with god knows what, looking like he hadn’t slept in days. “I knew she would be, eventually. She said it wasn’t good for the kids, you know with the twins still at home. She’s right, of course.”
Ruth hadn’t pried beyond that, hadn’t phoned his wife Mary or one of the boys. She let him sleep on her couch that night and anytime she heard his knock at her door, usually late. Usually, rip-roaring drunk. No questions asked. Ruth emptied dozens of bottles into the kitchen sink during the weeks he stayed with her, never saying a word. She would simply reach for his hiding places and pour them down the drain.
That first night he came to her was long before England had declared war on Germany for the second time, and yet they were still here, dancing the same dance they started when they were young, always around the truth and always farther away from each other.
Ruth fell through perpetual darkness until it all stopped, choking the air out of her lungs when she felt solid ground beneath her. The rush of a fainting spell slipped over her like a warm blanket on a winter’s day; this was it. She had seen it a hundred times at the hospital. A simple defense mechanism. The body could only take so much before it pulled the plug of consciousness, trying to save the brain from the pain that would come after. She fought the feeling anyway, hard, trying to scream or claw her way out of the destruction that was covering her. Nothing moved, not a finger, not a vocal cord, she swore even her heart had stopped beating.
The whizz of bombs still surrounded them, but far away. Everything felt miles away.
Just set your jaw, Ruth, she tried in the best impression of her father. Just set your jaw and get to work.
The dust settled as Ruth blinked away the flashes of blurry lights, and there in front of her–a hand! Sticking out of the rubble, barely noticeable but it was there.
When did George’s hands get so slender? And why were his fingernails so long?
Her eyesight shifted, and soon she saw a body ten feet beyond the disconnected limb. George’s eyes were open; she felt his piercing gaze. He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe. Just one slow stream of blood fell from his ear, down his cheek and across his crooked nose until it stained the dirt below him. She could see both his hands, limp on his chest, as if someone had placed him that way. Somehow, he looked peaceful. Rest, at last.
Ruth tried to let out a sob but her body wouldn’t let her, feeling like it was encased in ice. With a blink, she couldn’t see anything anymore – not George, not the night’s sky, not even her own hand resting in the wreckage beyond her.
She was tired of facing the horrors the universe threw at her, tired of pouring dirt over her mother’s grave without a single tear, of holding down a man as they tried to save his legs. Tired still, of seeing the one person she loved in this world lying just beyond her, out of reach.
Ruth closed her eyes. Rest, at last.
